02.28.14

Privacy and Human Rights Watch: Peeping Crown, Extradition, EU Resistance to Drones, and More

Posted in News Roundup at 5:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The latest (past 24 hours) stories about eroding human rights (exploiting transitions to digital), especially privacy rights

GCHQ

• Your Naked Webcam Images May Be Stored By NSA’s British Partner

  GCHQ documents say between 3-11 percent of Yahoo webcam chats contain ‘undesirable’ nudity.

• NSA Spying On Yahoo Users And Xbox Owners, Leaked Documents Claim

  The government is spying on Yahoo users via their webcams and X-box, according to a report based on leaked Eric Snowden documents. Both the American and British governments are now accused of spying on citizens in their own home, sans either a warrant or just cause.

• GCHQ peered into millions of Yahoo video chats

• GCHQ’s interception and storage of Yahoo webcam images condemned

• Spy agency intercepts Yahoo webcam chats, nudes and all

• Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ

  • 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone

UK

• Lauri Love refuses to turn over Encryption Keys in UK demand under RIPA

• British Hacker Faces Extradition To US, Not To Mention Five Years’ Imprisonment In UK For Failing To Hand Over Encryption Keys

  Techdirt followed the the saga of the hacker Gary McKinnon, whom the US authorities wished to extradite from the UK to face charges of causing damage to military computers, for some years before the UK Home Secretary blocked his extradition, and the case against him in the UK was dropped. That was a great result for McKinnon after a 10-year fight to avoid extradition, but it meant that the key issues that his situation raised were never addressed.

Reform/Legal

• Citing privacy concerns, U.S. government won’t share NSA reform proposals

• “The NSA May Enable a Police State”: Former Counter-Terror Czar

  “Once You Give Up Your Rights, You Can Never Get Them Back. Once You Turn On That Police State, You Can Never Turn It Off.”

  Richard Clarke is one of the four White House panelists on NSA spying, and the former top counter-terror czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations.

Local Action

• Utah can’t quit figure out how to deal with the NSA datacenter

  While the NSA datacenter and its activities are in the national spotlight, local authority remains divided on how to treat it.

Algorithms

• NSA robots are ‘collecting’ your data, too, and they’re getting away with it

  Eavesdropping by algorithm is still eavesdropping, whether a human looks at your data or not. Real reform can’t abide by the spy dictionary anymore

Alexander

• Outgoing NSA chief wants snooping row ‘resolved’

• U.S. lacks rules for online war, NSA chief says

  In one of his final Capitol Hill appearances, Gen. Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency’s director, on Thursday called for a stronger strategy to deter cyberattacks, saying the line that would prompt a U.S. response against an adversary “does not yet exist.”

• Outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander signals openness to surveillance reform

  Alexander says NSA could accept a change where agency would only be allowed to collect phone data related to terrorism

‘Metadata’

• Due to activist lawsuits, US gov’t wants to keep our metadata longer

• US government cites PRISM for needing to keep phone records for longer

Amazon/CIA

• Amazon’s Cloud Keeps Growing Despite Fears of NSA Spying

  When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well. People would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers, the argument went, rather than host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA.

Civil Rights

• Under Obama, rule of law slowly eroding

  If President Barack Obama gets his way, five American citizens will have become victims of announced “targeted assassinations” by the military and CIA. Coupled with disturbing statements by United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, it is evident that the principle of the rule of law has lost force in the past few decades, especially after 9/11.

  [...]

  It was enshrined in the American, British and French Revolutions as sacred, and is an essential precept of liberalism.

• Massive Impediments Standing in the Way of Solving America’s Greatest Problems

  *Eliminate the National Surveillance Agency, the NSA; completely stop the enormous spying on the American people. Take the other 12 U.S. intelligence agencies and combine their functions into one. We have the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security to monitor imminent or longer term dangers to this country.

• The Five Commandments of Barack Obama: How “Thou Shalt Not” Became “Thou Shalt”

• Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Obama’s Commandments

  Think of us as having two presidents. One, a fellow named Barack Obama, cuts a distinctly Clark Kent-ish figure. In presiding over domestic policy, he is regularly thwarted in his desires by the Republicans in Congress and couldn’t until recently get his most basic choices for government positions or the judiciary through the Senate. For the most minimal look of effectiveness, he has to rely on relatively small gestures by executive order. In the recent history of the American presidency, he is a remarkably powerless figure presiding over what everyone who is a media anyone claims is a riven, paralyzed, even broken government structure, one in which the Republicans are intent on ensuring that a Democratic president can do nothing until they take the White House (which is almost guaranteed to be never). What this president wants, almost by definition, he can’t have. He is, as Guardian columnist Gary Younge wrote recently, a man who’s lost the plot line to his own story and has been relegated to the position of onlooker-in-chief.

• Politics, not law, has become the master of British justice

  There is one law for their terrorists and another for ours. “Theirs” kill a soldier in Woolwich and get slammed up for life. They get a verbal lynching from the red-tops, with Rot in Jail headlines and screams the rope would be too good for them, the filth and scum. “Our” terrorists get royal pardons and “letters of assurance”, even if, as may be the case, they slaughter four soldiers and eight horses in cold blood in Hyde Park. That is how it must seem to many people.

• US biggest violator of non-Americans’ human rights: China report

  The Untied States is the world’s biggest violator of human rights of non-American persons and has been strongly condemned for conducting surveillance and prisoner torture around the globe, a report on US human rights said Friday.

  The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013 was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council, or the Cabinet, in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013 issued by the US State Department on Thursday.

• Chinese Cabinet report questions US human rights record

  China has hit back at the US over the human rights debate alleging the “world judge of human rights” has serious question marks hanging over its own record.

  [...]

  Washington has long “made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks” on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions again in its just-released reports, the Chinese report says.

  “However, the US carefully concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems,” it adds.

  Chinese ally Russia has also repeatedly said the United States has no right to claim a mantle of moral leadership. Moscow has criticized Washington sharply over human rights, pointing to secret CIA jails abroad and treatment of inmates at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and elsewhere.

Drones

• U.S. Militant, Hidden, Spurs Drone Debate

  Mr. Shami, a militant who American officials say is living in the barren mountains of northwestern Pakistan, is at the center of a debate inside the government over whether President Obama should once again take the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of an American citizen overseas.

• Landslide vote in European Union condemning U.S. drone use

  European Union Members of Parliament condemned the use of drones in targeted killings in a vote of 534 to 49. The vote proposing a ban referred to the drone strikes as “unlawful.”

• Pakistan Party Ends Blockade Of NATO Route

  Activists of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf, led by cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, had blocked the route from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar for the past three months in a protest over U.S. drone strikes.

• MEPs concerned about EU drone programme

  Increased European research on unmanned aircraft is making the European Parliament nervous.

Military

• America’s military aims to slim down for a peace-time footing

  Proposed cuts to defence spending would shrink US army to smallest size in 74 years

• Sen. Graham: CIA deputy misled on Benghazi memo

  An influential U.S. senator says the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack was so fraught with inaccuracies and misleading testimony in the weeks preceding the 2012 presidential election that it warrants a new and thorough investigation by a joint Senate committee.

• Ukraine was a playbook CIA coup d’état – Prof Francis Boyle

  The very first act of the western-backed insurrectionists which represent a small percentage of the population and have managed to overthrow the government was to attempt rob Russian speakers in Ukraine of their language.

• Ex-CIA CTO Gus Hunt joins venture capital firm as advisor

  Hunt will be giving advice to startups in his new role at the San Francisco-based investment firm as they seek out profitable deals from the federal government. He told VentureBeat in an interview, “I’m taking my understanding of the intelligence space and scouting out the opportunities.”

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