02.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Roundup of Linux (kernel) news from the past few days, including some rather exciting announcements
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Hey, things are looking pretty normal, and rc4 is smaller than rc3, so
I’m happy.
The biggest patch in here (accounting for about a sixth of the total)
is just DaveJ re-indenting a reiserfs file. Ignoring that whitespace
cleanup, the rest is mostly the usual mix of drivers, networking and
some architecture updates.
Nothing big, and nothing that looks particularly scary.
So get to it, and test it all out.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few minutes ago, February 20, that Linux kernels 3.13.4, 3.12.12, 3.10.31 LTS, and 3.4.81 LTS are now available for download.
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Lennart Poettering has announced the release of systemd 209 and once again it’s another massive release with stuffing more features into the init system, including preparing the user-space side for the kernel D-Bus implementation.
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This example can be used to setup a minimal Linux installation for any task. In this tutorial however I am going to use kernel development as an example. Since the process I have used in the past have been from sporadic sources, I wanted to consolidate the information for my own need. This tutorial is the result of that effort. So that next time if I feel like doing something kernel related, I don’t have to start over again.
Graphics Stack
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Good news: AMD’s press / global communications team is finally talking up their open-source Linux graphics driver features. Bad news: they appear to still need lots of training over their own Linux graphics drivers. Or is there some Linux driver shake-up happening? Here’s some of what they are promoting right now with the AMD Linux graphics driver.
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Back on Tuesday I delivered a launch-day review of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti on Linux. This first graphics card built on NVIDIA’s new Maxwell architecture has been running fantastic under Linux for being a mid-range graphics card. The GM107 GPU core found on the GTX 750 Ti is incredibly power efficient, as was shown in numerous articles on launch-day. For those curious more about the GeForce GTX 750 Ti Linux performance, here are some more OpenCL and OpenGL performance results.
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Wayland clients running on the Weston compositor now have support for the minimize button.
Clients using an XDG shell surface now support the state of being minimized with this Git commit on Tuesday.
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Broadwell support has been a work-in-progress on Linux for many months and most of the hardware enablement is complete. The Mesa driver has had mainline support for Intel Broadwell graphics for some time now, but only today is it being enabled by default and not hidden behind the Intel preliminary hardware support flag. The latest Broadwell work was with this commit and other changes.
Benchmarks
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Early Linux 3.14 kernel benchmarks indicated there might be some slowdowns in disk/file-system performance for this next major kernel release. That early testing was done from an Intel ultrabook with solid-state drive while we’re now in the process of carrying out more focused testing of Linux 3.14 on both HDDs and SSDs. In this article are our first hard drive benchmarks from the Linux 3.14 Git kernel compared to the stable 3.12 and 3.13 kernels.
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After running through some challenges in setting up PC-BSD/FreeBSD 10.0 and its many changes, here are benchmarks of the feature-rich operating system update. Benchmarks were done on the same laptop of PC-BSD 10.0, the former PC-BSD 9.2 release, and Ubuntu 13.10.
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In my last article on next-gen filesystems, we did something in between a generic high altitude overview of next-gen filesystems and a walkthrough of some of btrfs’ features and usage. This time, we’re going to specifically look at what ZFS brings to the table, walking through getting it installed and using it on one of the more popular Linux distributions: Precise Pangolin. That’s the most current Long Term Service (LTS) Ubuntu release.
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02.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: This week’s news about absence of legal adherence and other moral issues
Brazil and EU/Germany
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The European Union and Brazil have agreed to lay a fibre-optic undersea communications cable across the Atlantic, between Lisbon and Fortaleza. The cable — which will cost $185 million (£110 million) — is designed to “guarantee the neutrality” of the internet and “enhance the protection of communications”.
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There was something of an international uproar last year when it was revealed that the NSA, in addition to snooping on its own citizens, had bugged the personal cell phone of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany. The prospect of the U.S. spying on the head of state of a country it supposedly considers an ally infuriated many, especially Merkel, and President Obama quickly promised to stop. That promise was quickly walked back by administration officials, and on Sunday, the Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported that the NSA is still tapping the phones of Merkel’s closest aides, including Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere.
Snowden and Judgment
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Edward Snowden, who exposed these illegal activities — much like Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed the “Pentagon Papers” in the early 1970s — due probably to his conscience, is now a hunted man hiding in Russia. He is reviled by President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker John Boehner, former Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain, to name a few.
On Dec. 18, 2013, a panel gave the president 46 recommendations, all of which meant shut down the spying on American citizens.
That same month, a federal judge ruled the NSA spying was unconstitutional.
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A few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald, while working with NBC News, revealed some details of a GCHQ presentation concerning how the surveillance organization had a “dirty tricks” group known as JTRIG — the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Now, over at The Intercept, he’s revealed the entire presentation and highlighted more details about how JTRIG would seek to infiltrate different groups online and destroy people’s reputations — going way, way, way beyond just targeting terrorist groups and threats to national security.
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Another slide lists ways to “discredit a target”: “Set up a honey-trap,” “Change their photos on social networking sites,” “Write a blog purporting to be one of their victims,” “Email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends, etc.”
There’s also a slide on how to discredit a business: “Leak confidential information to companies/the press via blogs etc,” “Post negative information on appropriate forums,” “Stop deals/ruin business relationships.”
Blackphone
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Whether classed as the device for the clinically paranoid or the suitably vigilant, the Blackphone is a compelling reason to surface from the Android seas. Periscope up!
What we’re looking at is a phone that’s well-timed if nothing else. In recent years Earth’s paranoia has been inflated like it was some sort of mad blue-green balloon having a panic attack in space, and we’re all now super vigilant about protecting our privacy. (Aren’t we?)
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Zuckerberg ‘Anger’
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Never let it be said that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is one to overhype a crisis. Asked about the National Security Agency’s spying scandal, which has hit Internet firms with widespread fears among users about being snooped on, he responded: “Well, it’s not awesome.”
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CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the NSA spy scandal that broke this past summer has strained some of the company’s relationships overseas.
Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft
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After Amazon signed a lucrative, long-term cloud computing contract with the CIA, concerns surfaced that the Internet giant might divulge customer information to the agency. So far, a petition for Amazon’s owner to address these concerns has gathered over 29,000 signatures.
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IBM is creeping towards the cloud, picking up startups on the way, including a NoSQL database company to fill in some of the perceived shortcomings of DB2.
The acquisition of Cloudant was announced on Monday and will give IBM control of a NoSQL “database-as-a-service” (DBaaS) [As a service? What the hell was a database beforehand? A pleasure cruise? – Ed]. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
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Microsoft’s Lync communications platform collects a surprising amount of sensitive, analyzable data about its users, making employers who use Lync privy to some very personal information about their employees.
Software developer Event Zero told Microsoft’s Lync 2014 conference that by using call data collected by the platform, companies could analyze information to the point of discovering intimate personal details about employees’ lives, like which are dating one another, or who in the company may be looking for another job.
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A former White House security advisor has suggested that you, dear reader, are naive if you think hosting data outside of the US will protect a business from the NSA.
“NSA and any other world-class intelligence agency can hack into databases even if they not in the US,” said former White House security advisor Richard Clarke in a speech at the Cloud Security Alliance summit in San Francisco on Monday. “Non-US companies are using NSA revelations as a marketing tool.”
Security
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We talked about “Certification Authorities” in the previous installment when discussing how X.509 certificates function. In the X.509 world, you don’t assign trust to people’s certificates, but instead pick an authority who signs all the keys. Any key bearing the CA’s signature is implicitly assumed to be fully valid. Usually, there are several levels of authorities, commonly referred to as “Root authorities” and “Intermediary Authorities,” and together they form a “certification chain.”
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Local Law
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A pair of bills in the Utah State Legislature are taking a look at the National Security Agency’s massive data center in Bluffdale.
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Torture
Air Strikes
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A senior security official confirmed to The Express Tribune that CIA Director John Brennan traveled to Islamabad last Friday and held meetings with Army Chief General Raheel Sharif and his Pakistani counterpart Lt General Zaheerul Islam.
However, the official, who requested anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the media, insisted that he only ‘paid a courtesy call’ on the Army Chief. “It was a routine visit,” the official added.
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The Obama administration’s proposals, some of which are likely to face resistance in Congress, reflect changing fortunes for once-sacrosanct defense spending.
Drones
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It’s been more than a year since incoming CIA Director John Brennan signaled his intention to shift drone warfare to the Pentagon as soon as possible. Brennan, a career spook, was said to be determined to restore the agency to its roots as an espionage factory, not a paramilitary organization. And President Obama endorsed his plan to hand drone warfare over to the military, according to administration officials.
But a funny thing happened on the way back to cloak-and-dagger. According to intelligence experts and some powerful friends of the CIA on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the agency may simply be much better than the military at killing people in a targeted, precise way—and, above all, at ensuring that the bad guys they’re getting are really bad guys. And that distinction has become more important than ever at a time when Obama is intent on moving away from a “permanent war footing” and on restricting targeted killings exclusively to a handful of Qaida-linked senior terrorists.
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The U.S. government’s drone use as a means to combat global terrorism was one of the main topics at an event hosted by the Amnesty International Chapters of Georgetown University and Georgetown Law Center on Sunday night in the Intercultural Center Auditorium.
Foreign Policy
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Ukraine is delaying the formation of a new government until Thursday following the ouster of democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych after months of protests that killed dozens of people. The Obama administration has indicated it no longer recognizes Yanukovych as Ukraine’s leader and has pledged financial support to Ukraine. President Yanukovych had come under fire for strengthening ties with Russia instead of Europe. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has rejected the interim government.
Police
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Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot by a Euharlee police officer on Friday when he answered the door. Police say he was pointing a handgun, not the video game device. Roupe was an aspiring Marine, his family said.
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02.23.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:48 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Just a few months ago, the developers behind Nuclear Dawn, InterWave Studio, announced that a Linux version of the game was incoming. As a follow up to the announcement a beta was made available for the game on Linux. But right after that everything went silent for the development house.
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Valve’s digital game distribution service now hosts 333 games for Linux, compared to 60 games last February. (Strangely, Steam’s store page claims that 541 games are now available, but when you search the entire catalog it shows only 333 titles. We’ve asked Valve for clarification. UPDATE: Valve confirmed that 541 are available for Linux. The 333 count appears to be a glitch.)
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There is an “ask me anything” going on in reddit-land right now with the folks from the current Humble Bundle, I decided to ask the question a lot of people have been wondering.
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I think it harms their reputation with Linux fans to have a game completely missing for the sake of what sounds like their egos.
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The Legacy of Mirimotha is an open world, fantasy role playing game. At the beginning of the game, the player is provided with eight unique races in which they can customize their appearance and profession. The professions are: trader, thief, fighter, or a mixture of all three. The player has the choice of changing these options at any point during the game.
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Linux gaming used to be a wasteland. The only options were simple open source games and the handful of commercial ports that could still be obtained. By comparison, the present day seems like a jungle some times, with more and more options emerging, and it can feel like a full time job keeping up on developments.
Today, we’ll take a brief look at the various options available to you, and what benefits and drawbacks you can run into. This isn’t meant to be completely exhaustive, but rather a good introduction, if you are new to Linux or to the concept of Linux gaming in general. As such, we’ll be covering four primary sources.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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As we all know that JBoss AS has been renamed to WildFly. A lots of new features has been added and lots of has been upgraded. Finally WildFly 8.0.0 Final has been released on Feb 11.2014. WildFly Project Lead Jason Greene announced the same.
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The latest Wine development release is now available for offering the best support for running your Windows games and other applications on Linux.
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Cantata, a Qt-based music player for MPD (Music Player Daemon), has reached version 1.3.0 just yesterday, and a fix for compiling it in KDE, 1.3.0.1, was put out a few moments ago. This release comes with 87 fixes and improvements. Some major changes and new features include:
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The demise of due process, justice for the accused, rule of law, etc.
War on Dissent
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The recent anti-NSA, anti-surveillance protests were the latest manifestation of a burgeoning movement for freedom from mass surveillance and the liberation of information.
It is this new resistance movement, comprised of myriad individuals and organizations, which is perhaps the greatest measure of the legacy of Aaron Swartz.
By the time of his death a little more than a year ago, Aaron Swartz had already achieved more in his 26 years than most activists achieve in a lifetime. He was a technological innovator, contributing his computer expertise to develop open platforms such as RSS, Creative Commons, and Reddit, while working to liberate information from closed databases like JSTOR (the online digital library of scholarly and scientific research).
However, he also took the fight into the public arena, articulating a language of freedom and social responsibility, tirelessly working to raise public consciousness of the all-encompassing, draconian system of control erected around us all.
Ukraine
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The Ukraine Parliament voted Saturday afternoon to impeach President Viktor Yanukovych, capping a day of extraordinary events in the nation’s capital here.
Lawmakers also voted to hold elections on May 25, and after the vote began singing the national anthem.
Parliament also approved the immediate release of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, after more than two years in prison. After leaving a prison hospital in Kharkiv, Tymoshenko flew to Kiev where she visited Hrushevskoho Street, the site of deadly clashes between police and protesters in January, where she laid flowers at the site in which a protester was slain.
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Qatar
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Zahir Belounis captained his Qatari team to the top of the league, but became a victim of modern-day slavery in Qatar when his club refused to pay his outstanding salary and then refused to sign an exit visa allowing him to leave the country.
Bosnia
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Exactly 30 years after the Olympic flame was lit in Sarajevo in 1984, the city was in again in flames. In recent weeks, protesters have stormed government buildings in an explosion of anger over their social situation, rampant poverty, moribund economy, and the stagnant social and political life. When the flame was lit back in 1984 I was seven and lived just across from the Olympic stadium. We could not sleep for two weeks, the flame was that powerful. But, we were at the same time very happy: it was a flame of prosperity, peace and endless possibilities.
Back then Sarajevo was projecting an image of what the European Union wanted its members to become: prosperous, diverse and secular with functioning industries, social equality, enviable social mobility and consistent growth. The European Union, as we now know, has failed to live up to that ambition.
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UK ‘Terrorism’
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The English judiciary continues to show its habit of subservience to the government on security matters. In August 2013, David Miranda, who was carrying a hard disk with files from Edward Snowden for his partner who worked for the Guardian newspaper, was detained and questioned for nine hours at Heathrow airport. He sought judicial review of his detention, and the authorities set up a justification under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Schedule 7 entitles them to question anyone for the purpose of ascertaining whether he is “a person who … is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism” as defined in section 40(1)(b) of the statute.
But patently that was not the purpose of his detention. There was no question of Miranda’s being involved in terrorism—no question at all. The purpose of the detention and questioning related entirely to the Snowden material he was carrying.
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Three high court judges have dismissed a challenge that David Miranda, the partner of the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was unlawfully detained under counter-terrorism powers for nine hours at Heathrow last August.
The judges accepted that Miranda’s detention and the seizure of computer material was “an indirect interference with press freedom” but said this was justified by legitimate and “very pressing” interests of national security.
Drone Assassinations
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Human Rights Watch has revealed as many as 12 civilians were killed in December when a U.S. drone targeted vehicles that were part of a wedding procession going toward the groom’s village outside the central Yemeni city of Rad’a. According to HRW, “some, if not all those killed and wounded were civilians” and not members of the armed group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as U.S. and Yemeni government offi
cials initially claimed. The report concluded that the attack killed 12 men, between the ages of 20 and 65, and wounded 15 others. It cites accounts from survivors, relatives of the dead, local officials and news media reports. We speak to Human Rights Watch researcher Letta Tayler, who wrote the report, “A Wedding That Became a Funeral: US Drone Attack on Marriage Procession in Yemen,” and Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of the TheIntercept.org, a new digital magazine published by First Look Media. He is the producer and writer of the documentary film, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield,” which is nominated for an Academy Award.
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Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill did not expect to take secret assassinations to Hollywood. Years of reporting on night raids and targeted killings in remote corners of Afghanistan, Yemen, and other fronts in the global war on terror became the film Dirty Wars, directed by Richard Rowley, which is up for an Academy Award for Best Documentary March 2. Scahill’s recent work has examined the overlap between the U.S.’ broad surveillance efforts and its checkered human rights record in the fight against terrorism. Scahill spoke to MSNBC about the film, what the drone program has done to America’s security, and how to repair our relationships abroad.
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On January 31, I made the following argument before a Court in the town of DeWitt where I was charged with Disorderly Conduct for protesting the MQ9 Reaper drones flown from Hancock Base over Afghanistan.. I argue that the War on Terror is illegal under International Law and drone attacks in particular violate both Human Rights Law and Humanitarian Law. Furthermore, by virtue of the Constitution of the United States, we are committed to abide by those laws and under the Bill of Rights, it is our privlege to uphold those laws.
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Terrorism (ter-ror-ism; see also terror) n. 1. When a foreign organization kills an American for political reasons.Justice (jus-tice) n. 1. When the United States Government uses a drone to kill an American for political reasons.If an ordinary American was plotting to kill an American, you could end up in jail on a whole range of charges including — depending on the situation — terrorism. However, if the president’s doing the killing, it’s all nice and — let’s put those quote marks around it — “legal.” How do we know? We’re assured that the Justice Department tells him so. And that’s justice enough in post-Constitutional America.
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The International Criminal Court has been urged to investigate possible war crimes committed by NATO member states for their role in aiding the U.S. drone war in Pakistan.
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Journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald posted a disturbing report at their new site The Intercept about the NSA’s secret role in the U.S. assassination program. It’s a fascinating read, and I recommend you read it in its entirety, but I wanted to explore a very specific passage in the report—an interview with a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA.
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When operators were assigned to “Sky Raper,” he adds, it meant that “somebody was going to die. It was always set to the most high-priority missions.”
So here we have a bunch of joystick jockeys not only responsible for killing nameless, faceless brown people thousands of miles away, but as if that wasn’t enough of a violation, they decided to sprinkle a dash of rape culture onto their acts of horrific violence.
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Mufti cited the example of the NSA leaks and the discussion in the US about journalist Glenn Greenwald’s ethical responsibility. He said “Journalists are not just citizens, they have the responsibility to uphold democracy.”
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The CIA would be prohibited from using unmanned drones to carry out strikes abroad, under legislation introduced by Rep. Michael Burgess. The Texas Republican’s bill would vest that authority solely in the Department of Defense.
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If life-altering mistakes don’t warrant accountability, maybe that’s because nothing can
Torture
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Nearly a decade has passed since disturbing images first surfaced of Iraqi prisoners who were abused by their American military guards and interrogators at Baghdad’s now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
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Officials in Lithuania have decided to investigate whether the Baltic nation participated in the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) secret rendition program of harboring terrorism suspects at “black site” prisons.
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A military judge held a secret war court session Saturday on defense lawyers’ efforts to uncover evidence of what the CIA did to the alleged USS Cole bomber across years in the agency’s clandestine overseas prison network.
Both the public and the alleged terrorist were excluded from the 111-minute hearing in the case that seeks the execution of Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri as mastermind of the Oct. 12, 2000, terror attack that killed 17 U.S. sailors off Aden, Yemen.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: News from the past couple of days, focusing on privacy, surveillance, and abuses of power
Ombudsman (Ireland)
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Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times in Ireland broke a story claiming that the offices of the scrutiny body that monitors the Irish police force had been bugged. It has remained the main story in Ireland ever since. There are some elements of the story which appear undeniable. Sources close to this increasingly complex Dublin scandal are persuaded that there was a surveillance operation. Even government insiders are speculating privately about who may have been behind it, despite the justice minister publicly questioning whether it existed at all.
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Verizon/Phones
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Last year’s revelations over the U.S. tapping of phone and internet data gave telecoms firms pause for thought over whether they should sell their “big data” for gain, but the commercial potential could prove irresistible.
Although figures are scarce, analysts think selling data on mobile users’ locations, movements, and web browsing habits may grow into a multi billion-dollar market for the business.
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Russia
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Eteri Tutberidze said reporters bugged the locker room at Lipnitskaia’s practice rink in Moscow with listening devices after the 15-year-old left the Winter Games to train for the ladies individual competition. The coach also accused the media of stalking Lipnitskaia’s family in her hometown of Nizhny Bardym, a village in the Ural Mountains with a population of just 300.
Germany
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The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has stepped up its surveillance of senior German government officials since being ordered by Barack Obama to halt its spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bild am Sonntag paper reported on Sunday.
Revelations last year about mass U.S. surveillance in Germany, in particular of Merkel’s mobile phone, shocked Germans and sparked the most serious dispute between the transatlantic allies in a decade.
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The United States National Security Agency (NSA) has stepped up its surveillance of senior German government officials since being ordered by Barack Obama to halt its spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel, the German Bild am Sonntag paper reported on Sunday.
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Far from giving up on its habit, the US National Security Agency is reportedly still wiretapping some 320 prominent German economists and politicians. Although President Barack Obama has allegedly delivered on his promise to leave German Chancellor Angela Merkel alone, America’s omnipresent spy agency is still keeping tabs on hundreds of her compatriots, the crème de la crème of the German political and economic world, including Federal Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. This is according to the Bild am Sonntag.
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Still upset over the U.S. spying on her phone, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced this week that her country would consider establishing new data networks based in Europe that could shield individuals’ private communications from National Security Agency (NSA) prying.
UK
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On December 3rd last year the editor of the Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger, was questioned by the House of Commons select committee on home affairs. Its chairman, Keith Vaz, perhaps hoping to start Rusbridger off on an easy one, asked if he loved his country. It was an odd, and oddly un-British, question, and Rusbridger, frequently described as unflappable, admitted to surprise before declaring that, yes, he and his journalists saw themselves as patriots.
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The Queen and Prince Charles are using their little-known power of veto over new laws more than was previously thought, according to Whitehall documents.
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The extent of the Queen and Prince Charles’s secretive power of veto over new laws has been exposed after Downing Street lost its battle to keep information about its application secret.
Whitehall papers prepared by Cabinet Office lawyers show that overall at least 39 bills have been subject to the most senior royals’ little-known power to consent to or block new laws. They also reveal the power has been used to torpedo proposed legislation relating to decisions about the country going to war.
Apple
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Did U.S. government spies create the security hole that Apple patched last week?
PRISM Dropbox
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Dropbox has updated its privacy policy to address privacy concerns about the National Security Agency’s requests for user data.
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Dropbox, a cloud storage app the government recommends for federal teleworkers, has revised its privacy policy to address concerns about other federal workers spying on users’ data.
The new policy, which goes into effect March 24, acknowledges that Dropbox might share user data with outsiders to comply with the law, “if we determine that such disclosure is reasonably necessary.” An email to users immediately adds that the company will follow its own Government Request Principles, guidance that obliquely antagonizes the National Security Agency and includes fighting requests for bulk data.
PRISM WhatsApp
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The company warns users need to be aware that when they send messages, the recipient’s device may not be secure. But it says it does not store any chat history and that messages are wiped off its system after delivery.
Lawsuits
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In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner just before his presentation, Fein said he would also comment on events since the book’s 2009 publication, events that illustrate how “violations of the constitution have become so chronic that they numb the public and even elected officials to the danger we encounter as we move toward what I call ‘one branch tyranny’ – secret government, [with] everything subordinated to a risk-free existence and absolute executive power.”
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Of the many questions that still surround the National Security Agency’s vast global spying operations, one seems especially pertinent: Do they actually work? That is, have they helped to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans?
In the case of the NSA’s phone-data program – in which the agency vacuums up information about essentially every call made by Americans – it’s getting harder and harder for the government to answer yes. The latest evidence comes from a report last week by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal agency established on the recommendation of the Sept. 11 Commission to balance the right to liberty against the need to prevent terrorism.
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Following news reports that a foreign ally of a U.S. intelligence agency may have spied on a BigLaw firm, the American Bar Association has asked the director of the National Security Agency and its general counsel for an explanation of how it deals with attorney-client privilege.
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On Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2014, the individual Government Defendants, Barack H. Obama, Eric H. Holder, Keith B. Alexander, Roger Vinson, the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Security Agency (NSA), in our initial lawsuit over the NSA spying on the American people – the one that produced a great victory last December when Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that President Obama and the NSA had egregiously violated the Fourth Amendment and the U.S. Constitution – presented me and the other plaintiffs with the gift that may keep on giving. In response to a court order issued about 10 days earlier, wherein Judge Leon testily told the Obama Justice Department lawyers to get the show on the road and finally file an answer to the complaint as they were in default for not having responded timely, President Obama’s lawyers stonewalled the judge in the answer they later filed on the day reserved for love, not obstruction of justice.
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An attorney suing the federal government over the National Security Agency’s spy programs says the Obama administration is delaying and obstructing the court, and a default judgment against the individual defendants would be an appropriate remedy.
The case was brought by attorney Larry Klayman in U.S. District Court in Washington over the NSA’s PRISM spy program that gathers details about the telephone calls and contacts of innocent Americans.
Wikileaks
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Another document, from July 2011, details discussions between NSA offices as to whether WikiLeaks might be designated a “malicious foreign actor” for reasons of surveillance (the language in the document is “targeting with no defeats”). Such a designation would simply broaden the scope of activities available to the agency. “No defeats are needed when querying against a known foreign malicious actor.” The response from the agency’s general counsel on the subject of WikiLeaks’ status is tentative – “Let us get back to you.”
Amazon
Breakup
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The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.
Putting the U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyberwar wing, in the same location and under the same commander, expanded the NSA’s power. The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.
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Edward Snowden
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People marched through Naples Saturday in support NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Constitution and the 4th Amendment. At the same time, they were protesting a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. speaking in Naples, for his comments against Snowden. We heard from both sides about why they feel so strongly.
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Following former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosure of widespread spying by the U.S. government, there has been a massive push to develop privacy-centric software and hardware. During the 2014 RSA Conference, which begins on Monday in San Francisco, data security and privacy solutions will be demonstrated at a frantic time in the industry.
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02.21.14
Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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