09.01.16
Posted in Action, America, Debian, Europe, Patents at 3:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Valve of Steam OS (Debian GNU/Linux) fame
Summary: The latest target of BT’s patent bullying (shakedowns and lawsuits) is the company that has turned into somewhat of a Debian proponent (albeit with DRM)
BT is a patent aggressor whose activities in the court we haven't heard of in a while (it even targeted Android). BT shows no sign of relenting. This unpopular strategy carries on and the latest suggests that “British Telecommunications (BT) have filed a lawsuit against Valve claiming patent infringement. The action was brought “based on Valve’s continued willful infringement” of four patents (I’ll go into what they are in a moment) and was filed in Delaware on 28 July.”
“It resorts to patent aggression to make up for commercial issues, just like IBM (it too became a patent bully).”Notice the choice of Delaware. The British and US media wrote quite a lot about this lawsuit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]. So far we have found 22 articles about this lawsuit alone (that’s a lot for patent news) and it looks rather obvious that BT is just getting desperate. It resorts to patent aggression to make up for commercial issues, just like IBM (it too became a patent bully). █
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02.14.14
Posted in Action at 7:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A Slashdot boycott is happening this week because Dice is asked to stop messing about with Slashdot
The new owner of Slashdot has been treating the Slashdot community like an enemy. People hate what’s being done to the interface and some are disgusted by the editorial choices. While I no longer read Slashdot myself, several people in our IRC channels (and our IRC bots) are following Slashdot. They say that the FOSS-hostile bias is increasing (we wrote about that yesterday) and Microsoft lobbyists regularly get placements there. A site called Slashcott says that boycotts against the site began some days ago and will last for at least a week in order to demonstrate to Slashdot’s owner that a Slashdot without community is just another Web site on the Web. Some of our readers have said that they are running out of FOSS-friendly sites that they can visit. █
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01.31.14
Posted in Action at 5:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: This week’s news about torture, assassination, and endless wars of conquest
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By the fall of 2007, Italy was in a significant state of conflict with the US over the Bush administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition. Of specific note were Italian kidnapping charges against nearly two dozen CIA agents for the kidnapping of Muslim cleric Abu Omar, resulting in 23 convictions. The New York Times reported, “Judge Oscar Magi handed an eight-year sentence to Robert Seldon Lady, a former C.I.A. base chief in Milan, and five-year sentences to the 22 other Americans, including an Air Force colonel and 21 C.I.A. operatives.”
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It’s not clear if Amanda Knox will foot the bill for the 23 convicted CIA agents, but what is clear is that Italy and many other countries view America’s policy of rendition as indeed extraordinary, and they have a point to make.
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A decision by a court in Lithuania ruling that a Saudi Arabian national has a right to an investigation into his alleged torture in a secret CIA detention centre in the country is a breakthrough for justice, said Amnesty International.
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Vilnius Regional Court has ruled prosecutors unfoundedly refused to launch a pre-trial investigation into claims a Saudi Arabian citizen was kept in a secret CIA detention center in Lithuania in 2004-2006.
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Three senators pummeled CIA Director John Brennan at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, peppering him with tough questions on torture and domestic surveillance that he has refused to answer in public.
Brennan defended the CIA against accusations that it is double-dealing with the Intelligence committee about a report on agency torture, and he also received surprisingly pointed questions about whether the CIA spies on Americans. Such public hearings offer senators critical of the intelligence agencies the chance to telegraph their private concerns about classified programs — and these questions could suggest there is something the public isn’t being told about what the CIA does at home.
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The Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania is a short drive from the Black Sea and the port city of Constanta, a sprawling metropolis with beach resorts, museums, and nightclubs. It’s also about to become the main transit point for the tens of thousands of U.S. troops flowing out of Afghanistan. It won’t be the first time Washington has used the base for a sensitive mission, however: If human rights groups are correct, the facility also used to house one of the CIA’s notorious “black site” detention facilities.
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US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said in Warsaw that the US-Polish partnership can “withstand testing and questioning” over allegations of a secret CIA prison in Poland.
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Poland’s official stance of denying it hosted a secret CIA jail is harming its reputation and it needs to be frank about what really happened, a senior intelligence official at the time the alleged prison was operating told Reuters.
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Prosecutors leading Poland’s investigation into an alleged CIA prison where terrorist suspects were held and tortured have asked for another extension to the probe.
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David Petraeus, the chairman of the KKR Global Institute and former commander of the US Central Command, said that while the energy boom had extended to Canada and Mexico, the Arabian Gulf’s oil and gas still fuelled the US’s trade partners and would for the foreseeable future.
He was speaking at a lecture on the forthcoming North American decades at the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research last night.
“According to projections, the US is set to become a leading oil producer by 2020,” he said. “Crude oil production is expected to reach 9.5 million barrels a day by only 2016, and this situation is dramatically changed since 2008-2009, when many experts said oil production had peaked and wasn’t ready to climb. They couldn’t have been more wrong.”
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The subtitle of Gareth Porter’s new book, “The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” is well-chosen. Large parts of “A Manufactured Crisis” are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an “alternative narrative”.
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The Central Intelligence Agency should not be launching deadly military strikes. We would be better off if the C.I.A. returned to being an agency that collected and analyzed intelligence and stopped being a secretive paramilitary organization.
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Dozens of Wisconsin residents phoned or visited the district offices of our senators and representatives to call for an end to drone warfare. The visits and calls were timed for Jan. 15-21 when our nation commemorated its prophet of peace and nonviolence, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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In his State of the Union address, President Obama called on the United States to “move off a permanent war footing,” citing his recent limits on the use of drones, his withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, and his effort to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Obama also vowed to reform National Security Agency surveillance programs to ensure that “the privacy of ordinary people is not being violated.” Jeremy Scahill, whose Oscar-nominated film “Dirty Wars” tackles the U.S. drone war and targeted killings abroad, says Obama has been a “drone president” whose operations have killed large numbers of civilians. On NSA reform, Scahill says “the parameters of the debate in Washington are: Should we figure out a way to streamline this and sell it to the American people, or should we do more surveillance?”
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On issues from domestic inequality to foreign policy, President Obama delivered the fifth State of the Union with a vow to take action on his own should Congress stonewall progress on his agenda. But will Obama’s policies go far enough? We host a roundtable with three guests: Jeremy Scahill, producer and writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield;” and senior investigative reporter at First Look Media, which will launch in the coming months; Bob Herbert, Distinguished Senior Fellow with Demos; and Lorella Praeli, Director of Advocacy and Policy at the United We Dream Coalition.
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An Arizona lawmaker who wants to prohibit police departments, prosecutors and state courts from helping the National Security Agency with its data mining and surveillance plans on adding anti-drone language to the measure.
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Development of modern drone technologies will never eliminate civilian collateral damage in conflict deployment, Michael Raddie, antiwar activist told RT, arguing that investing in drones makes warfare more acceptable for general public.
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It is the fullest official record of the covert campaign yet to emerge, providing the dates, precise times and exact locations of drone strikes, as well as casualty estimates. The document abruptly stops routinely recording civilian casualties after the start of 2009, but overall casualty estimates continue to be comparable to independent estimates such as those compiled by the Bureau.
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I am not a lawyer but I am certain that the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, needs to take very seriously a legal opinion which was handed to Parliament this week.
It comes from Jemima Stratford QC. She has given a judgment on whether GCHQ can pass information onto the US, which is later used to facilitate drone strikes.
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It’s been over 10 years since the United States entered Iraq. Though the war in Iraq has officially been over since 2011, our involvement in the Middle East is stronger than ever. And from 9/11 until now, popular opinion in favor of or against the war in Afghanistan has ebbed and flowed.
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Undoubtedly, the role of the Saudi Arabia and its influence on the Middle East has long been under the discussion. Now with Iran and the West trying to reach an agreement on the nuclear matter, the monarchy is trying to amend the situation to their favor, with the Washington’s support, according to recent reports.
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Before the hearing began, activists from CODEPINK stood up holding signs reading ‘Stop – Killing, Lying, Spying’ and called for the firing of James Clapper, Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, Director of the CIA, and James Comey, Director of the FBI.
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01.28.14
Posted in Action, Law at 3:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from Monday and Tuesday, covering a range of development in the NSA saga and beyond
Corporate Servers
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British intelligence officials can infiltrate the very cables that transfer information across the internet, as well as monitor users in real time on sites like Facebook without the company’s consent, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The internal documents reveal that British analysts gave instruction to members of the National Security Agency in 2012, showing them how to spy on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in real time and collect the computer addresses of billions of the sites’ uploaders.
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Some of the world’s most popular smartphone applications are telling British and American intelligence agencies everything about you – from your location to your politics or whether you’re part of the swinging set.
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British and US spy agencies have gathered data from smartphone apps which leak personal data on to global networks, according to reports.
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EXILED AMERICAN WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden has revealed evidence that shows GCHQ is able to monitor web traffic without the knowledge of either the website or the user.
Operation Squeaky Dolphin is explained in the presentation “Psychology A New Kind of SIGDEV” (Signals Development) obtained by NBC from the Snowden files. It describes an operation to harvest Facebook Likes, Youtube URLs and Blogger visits
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Security expert and technologist Bruce Schneier has told the BBC that he believes the NSA and GCHQ have “betrayed the trust of the internet”.
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New information made public by Edward Snowden reveals that the governments of the United States and United Kingdom are trawling data from cellphone “apps” to accumulate dossiers on the “political alignments” of millions of smartphone users worldwide.
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Crimes Concealed
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In a weekend interview with German ARD public television network, Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. government uses its broad electronic surveillance capabilities to engage in industrial espionage. Snowden told ARD TV that, “I will say is there is no question that the U.S. is engaged in economic spying,” Snowden gave the example that, “If there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they’ll take it.” Snowden left hanging what exactly is done with such potentially useful economic intelligence, and he provided little additional information on this subject beyond indicated the news outlets holding copies of yet published NSA leaked documents could provide more specific information.
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At the same time that the Obama administration publicly mulls over how to end its controversial storage of millions of Americans’ phone records swept up by the National Security Agency, the government is also reportedly exploring ways to prevent other spies from seeing what it’s spying on.
Police/FBI (Domestic Spying)
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If you had any faith left in anonymous email services, now would be the time to let that go. New court documents show that in chasing down associates of Freedom Hosting, the FBI managed to download the entire email database of TorMail. And now it’s using that information to take on the Darknet.
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Police began tracking Aguilar’s phone and soon discovered it was at the mall.
US Political Reaction
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A group of six Congressmen have asked President Barack Obama to remove James Clapper as director of national intelligence as a result of his misstatements to Congress about the NSA’s dragnet data-collection programs. The group, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said that Clapper’s role as DNI “is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs”.
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The RNC has declared domestic spying illegal. A faction led by George W. Bush-era bureaucrats is pushing back.
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The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA’s top executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother nourished is essential — and any interference with that flow is unthinkable.
European Reaction
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When the EU agreed its current Data Protection Directive in 1995, the internet was just coming onto the horizon, and Mark Zuckerberg was just 11.
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SAP and Atos are working with the European Union to bring in new standards for web-based programmes and data storage in an effort to tackle growing surveillance fears following ongoing NSA revelations.
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AT&T’s ambitions to expand in Europe have been put on ice, for now. And the NSA spying scandal is at least partly to blame.
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Public broadcaster ARD airs interview in which whistleblower says National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage
People’s Voice
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It only makes sense that the NSA be confronted online. After all, it’s the Internet the agency uses to spy on us. They’re not following us down dark streets or steaming open our snail mail. Instead, they’re monitoring our emails to discover who is in our circle and stalking us on Facebook and Google Plus. Especially if we use Windows, there’s no need for them to dirty their hands sifting through our garbage when they can enter through a virtual trap door on our computer to rifle through our word processor and spreadsheet files. Phone tapping? How old school in a world where every call we make, even from a land line, becomes VoIP somewhere along the line. When we use VoIP or Skype, they can easily listen. If we visit a website located in a country on their hit list, they sit-up and take notice.
Corporations’ Voice
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The Obama administration has reached a deal with a number of technology giants, allowing the companies to disclose more information on customer data they are compelled to share with the government.
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For quite some time there have been rumours of Google wanting to take AI to the next level. Popular Android-based game, ‘Ingress‘ presents an artificial layer on top of real world landmarks and allows players to claim territories while the interact with their surroundings. Although it’s not what the public expected initially, it did represent the future that Google envisioned for gaming.
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72% of you said that you thought the NSA’s actions would have an effect on the entire U.S. software industry, with 20% of you expressing the opinion that proprietary software developers only would be effected. Taken together, this means that 92% of you are of the opinion that the NSA’s dirty tricks will have a negative effect on the U.S. tech sector. 7% of you answered “maybe a little but not much” with only 1% choosing “not at all.”
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01.23.14
Posted in Action at 4:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Apple has been hit with a hefty class action lawsuit, courtesy of three men from Massachusetts who say the computer company illegally collected and sold its customers’ personal information.
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The NHS has been going through some fairly radical changes. This will affect who can see your medical records and what they can do with them.
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This is the kind of charge that gives people like Richard Stallman fits. Basically, if you have a microphone connected to your computer Chrome accesses it through a Web Speech API and is capable of performing speech-to-text tasks. The claim is that these features can be hijacked through pop-under windows for eavesdropping purposes.
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Forecast of social network’s impending doom comes from comparing its growth curve to that of an infectious disease
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The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.
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The bulk collection of phone call data by US intelligence agencies is illegal and has had only “minimal” benefits in preventing terrorism, an independent US privacy watchdog has ruled.
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The U.S. National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records provides only minimal benefits to countering terrorism, is illegal and should end, a federal privacy watchdog said in a report to be released on Thursday and reviewed by Reuters.
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The federal agency that declared the NSA’s telephone dragnet illegal has now released its 238-page report. One of its best features is a succinct presentation of 4 specific reasons that the program cannot be justified even under the PATRIOT Act. “There are four grounds upon which we find that the telephone records program fails to comply with Section 215,” the text states. Here are those reasons:
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Pitched to us as an entry in a C-Span competition about what issues Congress should deal with in 2014, Data Obsession breaks down the controversy over domestic surveillance with help from AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein.
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You see, spying is kind of a sensitive topic in the reunified Germany. Before the reunification in 1990, citizens of Communist East Germany grappled with spying on one’s own friends, family and colleagues, under orders by the Stasi secret police.
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An new commission to be headed by Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt is set to investigate the implications of the US snooping affair for the future of the internet.
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Tor, an acronym for “the onion router,” is software that provides the closest thing to anonymity on the Internet. Engineered by the Tor Project, a nonprofit group, and offered free of charge, Tor has been adopted by both agitators for liberty and criminals. It sends chat messages, Google (GOOG) searches, purchase orders, or e-mails on a winding path through multiple computers, concealing activities as the layers of an onion cover its core, encrypting the source at each step to hide where one is and where one wants to go. Some 5,000 computers around the world, volunteered by their owners, serve as potential hop points in the path, obscuring requests for a new page or chat. Tor Project calls these points relays.
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So far, six states (Missouri, California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Indiana) have introduced bills that target the NSA. Though they all differ somewhat, each state’s bill would impede NSA operations within their boundaries.
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Edward Snowden risked everything to expose the secret NSA spying program of our calls and emails. Now he’s been formally charged with violating the Espionage Act—the same law used to charge Bradley Manning, who provided information to WikiLeaks.
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01.22.14
Posted in Action at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Bits of news about privacy (mostly from today but also slightly older)
Libel Against Snowden
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Leaker tells The New Yorker: “The American public has a seat at the table now.”
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Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden denied accusations that he was working for a foreign government when he stole countless classified documents detailing U.S. surveillance programs and efforts to gather information on world leaders.
In an interview with the New Yorker, published Tuesday evening on the magazine’s Web site, Snowden said claims that he may have been working for the Russians as a spy were “absurd.”
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Snowden Q & A
NSA
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He is quite blatantly playing to public ignorance when he says that he is doing these essentially unnecessary things, as Wittes points out, to “maintain the trust of the American people, and people around the world.” It is an odd way to build trust when you find public concerns unfounded but try to sound like you’re all for reform. Conservatives are hoping all of this is atmospheric nonsense to calm his base, while the intelligence community goes along its way and all that follow-up — like the Trayvon Martin civil rights investigation by the Justice Department — goes nowhere.
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Freedom is the great deity of the west, the goddess central to American identity; the idea being that individuals have autonomy—good or bad, wise or foolish, controversial or conventional—to live their lives with minimal interference from the government.
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Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
This “theory” that the NSA was hamstrung by its lack of access to millions of irrelevant call records practically debunks itself at this point. The defenders of these programs can’t seem to find a better rhetorical device than this one, which has been completely eviscerated by dozens of intelligence experts and the 9/11 Commission itself.
Morell’s position on the surveillance review task force seems to be as a “devil’s advocate” — someone placed on the board by the president to ensure no one gets too carried away trying to protect Americans’ rights or limit the NSA’s power.
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Among the ironies of Barack Obama trying to sell us the gargantuan NSA domestic spying program is that such techniques of telephone surveillance were used against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to destroy him and stop the Civil Rights movement. Had the republic’s most notorious peeping tom, J. Edgar Hoover, succeeded in that quest, Obama might never have been president, or even been served in Virginia restaurants.
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So far, six states (Missouri, California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Indiana) have introduced bills that target the NSA.
International
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The Snowden revelations have confirmed our worst fears about online spying. They show that the NSA and its allies have been building a global surveillance infrastructure to “master the internet” and spy on the world’s communications. These shady groups have undermined basic encryption standards, and riddled the Internet’s backbone with surveillance equipment. They have collected the phone records of hundreds of millions of people none of whom are suspected of any crime. They have swept up the electronic communications of millions of people at home and overseas indiscriminately, exploiting the digital technologies we use to connect and inform. They spy on the population of allies, and share that data with other organizations, all outside the rule of law.
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CEO Felix Langhof insists that corporations formed during the internet era have a systemic blind spot towards this new market, simply because the practice of attaching their ID to their customers’ actions is now so deeply engrained.
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Who do you trust? That’s a question asked increasingly by a security industry with a growing sense that the National Security Agency (NSA) has sought to weaken encryption or get backdoors into computers, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the media. Now, trust is also the theme of a new conference called TrustyCon that will vie for attention on Feb. 27 in San Francisco while the big RSA Conference for security pros is also taking place in that city.
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Benioff said the discussion about the NSA and data privacy over the last 6 months is “way overdue… Only through transparency will we get back to trust… Trust will drive customer choice because the customer has to have the choice about exactly where they want their data and how to manage it and see it and it cannot be anonymous. I think our model is closest to where we need to go: customers can choose what country their data is run out of. They can go into the data center, see it and monitor it. Tech vendors have to provide this kind of transparency and can’t pin it on the government.”
Facebook
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Don’t worry, like a viral outbreak, Facebook use will explode before plummeting down to Myspace levels of obscurity, says a new study from Princeton University.
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Social networks function like infectious diseases, according to Princeton researchers. They spread fast—and then disappear
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We’ll all be cured of Facebook soon. At least, that’s the conclusion of a new Princeton paper published this month on the Arxiv server that modeled the social network’s popularity over time as if it were an infectious illness. The conclusions may sound hard to believe—the scientists predict Facebook will lose 80 percent of its user base by the end of the year—but they sound a lot more probable if you know how they calculated that number.
The following are a bit older:
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Google. Amazon. Facebook. These giants of the web have a knack for juggling enormous amounts of data across tens of thousands of computer servers. And they’ve been kind enough to share their “big data” methods with the world at large. Many open source software projects now let anyone build similarly enormous operations capable of juggling similarly enormous amounts of data — including the National Security Agency.
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Italy’s Parliament today passed a new measure on web advertising, the so-called “Google tax,” which will require Italian companies to purchase their Internet ads from locally registered companies, instead of from units based in havens such as Ireland, Luxembourg and Bermuda.
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01.21.14
Posted in Action at 6:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: New links about privacy violations and legal/Constitutional violations
New Leaks
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According to newly-declassified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the National Security Agency (NSA) was (and may still be) tipping off the FBI at least two to three times per day going back at least to 2006.
Hours after President Barack Obama finished his speech last Friday on proposed intelligence and surveillance reforms, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified a number of documents from the nation’s most secretive court.
Speech/PR
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I doubt whether many people had high expectations of President Obama’s “big” speech last week about NSA spying. After all not only has he showed few signs of being willing to admit the value of Snowden’s revelations, he has, in general, been an immense disappointment to many who had placed such great hopes in his election. But at least this time he did not disappoint us, because what he announced was as disappointing as everyone expected.
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Remember, Obama is the chief executive of a super secretive surveillance state whose overarching purpose is to remain in power by any means available. As such, he and his surveillance state cohorts have far more in common with King George and the British government of his day than with the American colonists who worked hard to foment a rebellion and overthrow a despotic regime.
Indeed, Obama and his speechwriters would do well to brush up on their history. In doing so, they will find that the Sons of Liberty, the “small, secret surveillance committee” they conveniently liken to the NSA, was in fact an underground, revolutionary movement that fought the established government of its day, whose members were considered agitators, traitors and terrorists not unlike Edward Snowden.
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Germany
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Germany and the US appear to be edging closer to political confrontation. The Federal Prosecutor says there is sufficient evidence to open a politically explosive investigation into NSA spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
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Human Rights Watch
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The United States is setting a dangerous example for the world with its sweeping surveillance programmes, giving governments an excuse for mass censorship of online communications, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report Tuesday.
Microsoft-Funded But ‘NSA-free’
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The one-day TrustyCon, to be held on 27 February at the AMC Metreon Theatre in San Francisco, has drawn Mikko Hypponen as its keynote, giving “The talk I was going to give at RSA”. So far, the only other confirmed speakers are ISEC Partners’ Alex Stamos; Marcia Hofmann (EFA) and Christopher Soghoian (American Civil Liberties Union) who dropped out of the RSA Conference; Google’s Chris Palmer; and Black Hat’s Jeff Moss.
Ed: Microsoft-funded means not NSA-free. Microsoft receives a lot of money from the NSA.
UK
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Cryptoparties provide a great way for anyone to learn how to install and use encryption technology and other tips to keep you anonymous online. Tech facilitators will be there to help you with encryption of email, live chat and how to browse the web without being tracked. All are welcome to come learn and share skills in a fun environment.
Vietnam
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published details of an attempted malware attack on two of its employees by a group of hackers associated with the Vietnamese government. The hacker group, known as Sinh Tử Lệnh, has targeted Vietnamese dissidents and bloggers in the past; it now appears that the campaign has been extended to attacks on US activists and journalists who publish information seen as critical of the Vietnamese government.
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Facebook
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When it comes to privacy, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says — and doesn’t say — is surprising.
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Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon are collecting enormous amounts of information all day, every day. They use powerful supercomputers to analyze this data. Many people use this to better market products to consumers, for instance.
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01.17.14
Posted in Action at 8:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past couple of days about the practice of spying on people and then killing some of them
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The state-level campaign to turn off power to the NSA got a big boost January 15, 2014, as Washington became the first state with a physical NSA location to consider a Fourth Amendment protection act designed to make life extremely difficult for the massive spy agency.
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A campaign which aims to turn off the electricity to the NSA so that it can’t store data on citizens is in full swing.
The campaign has started in Washington and appears to be part of a partisan effort to rein in the country’s Men in Black.
Washington became the first state with a physical NSA location to consider the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, designed to make life extremely difficult for the massive spy agency.
The Bill, which has the catchy title HB2272, has been designed by Republican David Taylor and Democrat Luis Moscoso. It was introduced to the house in the dead of night and is based on model language drafted by the OffNow coalition.
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Throughout the NSA leak scandal, the surveillance agency’s defenders have insisted its actions are legitimate in part because they’re overseen by all three branches of government. The characterization has always been extremely misleading. For example, the secret FISA court system is often incapable of verifying the truth of what they’re told by the NSA, and so many members of Congress were ignorant of how the Patriot Act has been interpreted prior to the last reauthorization that, had the ignorant voted the other way, it would’ve changed the outcome.
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President Barack Obama is to announce changes to US electronic spy programmes after revelations made by ex-intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
He aims to restore public confidence in the intelligence community.
Mr Obama is expected to create a public advocate at the secretive court that approves intelligence collection.
His proposals come hours after UK media reports that the US has collected and stored almost 200 million text messages per day across the globe.
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The U.S. National Security Agency has been gathering nearly 200 million text messages a day from around the world, gathering data on people’s travel plans, contacts and credit card transactions, Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday.
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A slide from a presentation, seen by The Guardian and Channel 4 News, shows how Dishfire gave spies access to a trove of information. For example, by intercepting the welcome messages phone users receive when they arrive in a new country, the NSA tracked the movements of more than 1.5 million people every day. The agency spied on phone users’ contacts by hoovering up five million missed call alerts per day, as well as business cards sent by text message.
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The US National Security Agency (NSA) has collected and stored almost 200 million text messages a day from around the world, UK media report.
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During a speech at a hacker convention five months ago, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander showed a PowerPoint slide that listed eight things his agency “does NOT collect.” In the months since, every single claim has been proven a lie.
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NSA has come under intense scrutiny because of Edward Snowdens disclosures about their spying on all Americans. But there are more problems at NSA than their violation of the fourth amendment protections of the constitution.
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Mounting evidence shows surveillance has had no impact on preventing terrorism. Is the public paying attention?
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President Barack Obama tomorrow will create a panel to examine how data-collection efforts like the National Security Agency’s spy programs affect Internet companies and privacy rights, said two people familiar with White House deliberations.
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Former NSA employee Edward Snowden’s leaks to the public have sparked months of controversy and could lead to reforms.
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President Barack Obama’s plan to keep phone data with the National Security Agency for now is a victory for telecommunications companies, which resisted the idea of holding the records themselves over concerns about lawsuits, lost business and unwanted responsibility.
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It’s been a mixed week for Chinese telecoms giant Huawei after the firm announced impressive financials but was forced again to deny allegations of security weaknesses in its products.
The device and telecoms kit maker announced its unaudited financials on Wednesday, claiming sales revenue for 2013 will reach between 238 billion and 240 billion yuan (£24bn). This will be a year-on-year jump of around 8 per cent, or 11.6 per cent when measured in US dollars.
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This issue is headed to the Court of Appeals. From there, it will likely go the Supreme Court. The high court checked and balanced President George W. Bush when he overstepped his legal authority by establishing military commissions that violated due process, and attempted to deny constitutional habeas corpus to Guantanamo detainees. It remains to be seen whether the court will likewise refuse to cower before President Barack Obama’s claim of unfettered executive authority to conduct dragnet surveillance. If the court allows the NSA to continue its metadata collection, we will reside in what can only be characterized as a police state.
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In the world of cybersecurity, Bruce Schneier is an unusually accessible voice for those of us who feel we don’t quite understand what’s going on. The author of 12 books, and a prolific blogger and speaker, Schneier helped the Guardian go through the top-secret documents from the U.S. National Security Agency leaked by Edward Snowden last year.
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U.S. officials are reacting cautiously to revelations published in The New York Times that the National Security Agency has found a way to spy on computers even when they are not connected to the Internet. Report says software was implanted into 100,000 computers worldwide.
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As President Obama prepares to announce Friday what action he will take with the future of the National Security Agency, two whistleblowers visited West Chester University with recommendations on how to roll back government surveillance.
The two former NSA employees, William Binney and Thomas Drake, sat down with a WCU class Tuesday to discuss the current state of privacy in the country and their struggle for freedom.
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With Alpine and the area off limits to drone testing, Texas still was one of the six states selected for “drone test sites,” the Federal Aviation Administration has announced.
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The United States carried on two ten-year wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where we killed an estimated 250,000 civilians. We killed many more Muslim fighters by the tens of thousands. We destroyed their country with our bombs. Because those third world countries lack birth records, identification and death certificates–the numbers could be much higher.
In most large city in America, such as Denver, newscasters relate killings every night of the week. Chicago, Houston, Detroit and Los Angeles suffer gang killings nightly.
One in four children suffers bullying by a teen thug in high schools across America every day during school terms. In other words, our children cannot attend school without fear of being beat up, harassed, called names and demeaned by meaner, bigger students who have no other purpose in life but to manifest their thuggery.
What bothers me: we promote horrific violence via our continuous wars promoted by bankers and the military industrial complex that profit at the cost of human lives. We promote TV violence such as “Criminal Minds” and “NCIS” where lots of people commit diabolical mayhem. We support social media arcade games for kids like “Doom” and worse. Our movies feature horrific violence that pours into our kids minds and emotions. It’s like the 60s movie “Clockwork Orange” seems normal. You can watch television “Cops” where violence becomes normal. Our drones in the Middle East kill any number of humans without identity.
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President Barack Obama said last May that control of the United States’ weaponized drone program would shift away from the Central Intelligence Agency and into the hands of the Pentagon, but a new report suggests Congress could keep that from happening.
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The authoritarian regimes, bloody revolutions and tense diplomatic relations in the Middle East dominate the news today. Much of this turmoil was presaged by the activities and experiences of three covert CIA officers in the 1940s and 1950s, says Hugh Wilford, professor of history at California State University, Long Beach. In “America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East,” Wilford chronicles American adventures in the Middle East after World War II. He recently spoke to U.S. News about romanticized spy games, staged coups and the consequences of it all. Excerpts:
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A “progressive” columnist whose own organization is pursuing a “fresh approach” in contrast to “a far-right Republican Party that is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America,” is petitioning the Washington Post to publicize its owners’ financial investments each time it reports on the CIA.
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The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, speaking at a Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration in Chicago Wednesday, took several swipes at President Barack Obama, at one point saying that while King would have said, “I have a dream,” the president would have to say “I have a drone.”
According to a story in The Chicago Sun Times, Wright, Obama’s former pastor, spoke at the breakfast hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union and called on those there to reject the “three-headed demon” of “racism, militarism and capitalism” — the foundations of Western society.
Wright went on to slam the president by saying that each week Obama presides at a meeting to decide where drones will be launched.
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Congress’ $1.1 trillion spending bill contains a secret provision torpedoing President Obama’s plans to pass the drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon. In a classified annex, the bill specifically prohibits any funds being used to facilitate such a transfer, the Washington Post reports. Obama wants to shift the CIA from its paramilitary footing back to an intelligence one, and perhaps bring greater transparency to the drone program. But lawmakers don’t trust the military with the keys.
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Congress has moved to block President Barack Obama’s plan to shift control of the U.S. drone campaign from the CIA to the Defense Department, inserting a secret provision in the massive government spending bill introduced this week that would preserve the spy agency’s role in lethal counterterrorism operations, U.S. officials said.
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