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03.27.14

Modern Warfare: Assassination, Surveillance, Censorship and More Digital Abuses

Posted in News Roundup at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The ‘civilising’ power of technology without human rights

Drones

  • Up in the air

    When America invaded Iraq in 2003, it had a couple of hundred; by the time it left, it had almost 10,000.

  • UN watchdog urges Barack Obama to review deadly drone policy

    A UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration on Thursday to review its use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants abroad and reveal how it chose its targets.

  • US human rights record chastised in UN report
  • UN watchdog urges Obama to review deadly drone policy

    A UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration today to review its use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants abroad and reveal how it chose its targets.

    In its first report on Washington’s rights record since 2006, it also called for the prosecution of anyone who ordered or carried out killings, abductions and torture under a CIA programme at the time of President George W. Bush, and to keep a promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

  • Medals need revision in war on terror

    Physical risk is the central issue in recent disputes over the Purple Heart and the recognition of drone pilots. The controversies have helped prompt Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to order a yearlong study of how the Pentagon awards its ribbons and medals.

  • Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK holds discussion on drone warfare

    Peace activist Medea Benjamin spoke to a crowd of Radford University students, faculty and community members last Wednesday evening in McGuffey Hall.

  • EU should press Obama on drone secrecy

    Trade and the crisis in Ukraine are likely to dominate the agenda during US President Barack Obama’s first official visit to Brussels on March 26.

    But the European Union and Nato leaders also should use the summit to press Obama on another critical issue: ensuring that US operations against terrorist suspects, most often carried out with remotely piloted aircraft known as drones, comply with international law.

  • UK government must clarify position on drone intelligence-sharing, MPs say

    The British government should be more transparent about intelligence-sharing that leads to covert drone strikes, say MPs in a report published today.

    The call for greater transparency ‘in relation to safeguards and limitations the UK Government has in place for the sharing of intelligence’, came in a report on drones by the Defence select committee. The report acknowledged that intelligence-sharing was outside the committee’s remit and called on the Intelligence and Security Committee to examine the issue.

    The report adds that it is ‘vital’ that a ‘clear distinction’ is drawn between UK drone operations and covert strikes such as those conducted by the US in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

  • Ministry needs to be open about drone war
  • Exclusive: Minister in row over BT’s link to US drones’ war

    The former chief executive of BT, who is now a senior Government trade minister, is at the centre of a row over Britain’s alleged role in America’s secret drones’ war.

    Ian Livingston was head of the telecoms giant when it won a contract to set up a top secret £15m communications link between an RAF base in Northamptonshire and America’s headquarters for drone attacks in Africa. Last year he was made Lord Livingston and four months ago started a high-profile trade job in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

  • Minister in row over telecoms giant BT’s link to US secret drones war

    Mr Livingston was head of the telecoms giant when it won a contract to set up a top secret £15m communications link between an RAF base in Northamptonshire and America’s headquarters for drone attacks in Africa. Last year he was made Lord Livingston and four months ago started a high-profile trade job in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

  • US Drones’ Yemen Deaths: Was Lord Livingston Linked to BT Fibre-Optics Deal?

    Lord Livingston, former CEO of BT, is at the centre of a row over the company’s involvement in America’s secret military drone war, which has killed hundreds of civilians in Yemen.

  • MoD ‘too secretive’ on murder drones

    The Ministry of Defence needs to be more open about its use of unmanned aerial drones, MPs said yesterday.

  • MPs: Drones are a key future resource for British military

    Britain is due to hold its next strategic defence and security review (SDSR) in 2015, the year of a national election.

  • Amnesty International protests against US human rights violations

    Amnesty protesters were dressed in orange jumpsuits – as worn by detainees at the Guantanamo detention centre – when they demonstrated in Brussels on Tuesday.

  • This drone can steal what’s on your phone

    The next threat to your privacy could be hovering over head while you walk down the street.

  • $397 billion fighter jet deployment may be delayed by software glitches
  • To replace drone strikes, US to give Yemen Hellfire-armed crop dusters
  • Drone project at Fresno State a call for ‘contemplation’ (video)

    The 49-foot-by-27-foot sculpture, based on a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator aerial vehicle, is a memorial to civilians killed by unmanned U.S. drones overseas, said artist Joseph DeLappe.

  • City Theatre pushes kill button with ‘Grounded’

    Drone strikes by the United States seemed to be in the news only sporadically in 2011, when George Brant chanced on a statistic that said the Obama administration was using them at least four times more than the pace they were employed by President George W. Bush. His curiosity ignited, the playwright delved into the subject and emerged with “Grounded,” an award-winning play that explores the life of someone who pushes a kill button while 8,000 miles from the target, then goes home to her family.

Human Rights

UK Human Rights

Censorship Using Threats

  • Fulldisclosure — Improving network security through full disclosure

    This list is meant as a spiritual successor to the grok.org.uk Full-Disclosure list started by Len Rose and John Cartwright in 2002 and terminated abruptly in March 2014 due to bogus legal threats. We are giving this list a fresh start, so members of the old list need to resubscribe here. “

UK Censorship by Default

FOIA

Ukraine

Encryption

  • Young MIT researcher develops NSA-proof encryption service

    If you were horrified by the revelations of the American National Security Agency (NSA) spying on citizens, world leaders, blue chip technology companies and – oh yeah, the pope – then you’ll be glad that a young researcher working at MIT has developed a way to encrypt all the data that leaves your computer before spies and hackers can get their hands on it.

  • Mylar stops NSA & hackers from stealing your data

    Stop living in a fear that the NSA, other government agencies, ISPs and hackers will steal your important data & funny-cat videos. MIT engineer Raluca Popa has built a new platform, called Mylar, that helps you build secure NSA-proof web applications. Most of the web applications typically depend on the servers to store and process the data. Anyone who gets access to the server can get control of entire data and there’s nothing you can do about it. Mylar solves this problem through its unique approach to the problem. Mylar stores the data on the server in encrypted form and decrypts it in the user’s browser. Only the intended user can therefore can use the information.

Privacy of Allies

  • NSA director badly out of touch [Letter]

    It might be time for the National Security Agency director Keith Alexander to come down from the ivory tower where he sits and be put out to pasture. He and his executive staff are in a world or atmosphere that is disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. Just ask our closest allies and their leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Corporations Spying

  • Don’t Listen to Google and Facebook: The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership Is Still Going Strong

    The U.S. intelligence community is still playing word games with us. The NSA collects our data based on four different legal authorities: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and modified in 2004 and 2008, Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. Be careful when someone from the intelligence community uses the caveat “not under this program,” or “not under this authority”; almost certainly it means that whatever it is they’re denying is done under some other program or authority. So when De said that companies knew about NSA collection under Section 702, it doesn’t mean they knew about the other collection programs.

  • The NSA’s spying has in fact hurt U.S. cloud providers

Snowden

Reform

Facebook Joke

Torture

GNOME News: GNOME 3.12, Screenshots, Videos, and Boxes

Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Announcements

Packaging

New Features

Pre-release

  • GNOME 3.12 Seeded by GNOME OS Projects
  • TARBALLS DUE: GNOME 3.12.0

    Tarballs are due on 2014-03-24 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.12.0 newstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.12.0. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!

  • GNOME: 3.12 almost here

    I wanted to make one more post before the imminent release of 3.12 showing how gedit changed in this cycle, but the recent series of posts by Matthias feature plenty of gedit images and left me without fresh screenshot material

Boxes

Ubuntu

  • GNOME Software on Ubuntu (II)

    So I did a bit more hacking on PackageKit, appstream-glib and gnome-software last night. We’ve now got screenshots from Debian (which are not very good) and long application descriptions from the package descriptions (which are also not very good). It works well enough now, although you now need PackageKit from master as well as appstream-glib and gnome-software.

  • Ubuntu Developers Explain Why Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS Will Not Ship with GNOME 3.12
  • Ubuntu Gnome gets LTS status

    Steve Langasek of Ubuntu Technical Board had raised his concerns when the proposal was made, “I am very concerned about this proposed support timeline. 2 years and 3 months means that the support period would end the same month that 16.04.1 is likely to be released. Given that our policy has been to not recommend (or advertise in the UI) LTS upgrades until the first point release, this effectively gives users zero margin between the dropping of security support for Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04, and the first upgrades to Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04.

Kernel News: Collaboration Summit, Releases of Linux, and Lots of Graphics Milestones

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Collaboration Summit

  • Linux Kernel Panel: What’s what with Linux today

    At an exclusive gathering at the Linux Collaboration Summit, some of the crème de la crème of Linux developers talked about what’s going on with the Linux kernel today.

  • Open Source Isn’t Just For Developers Anymore
  • New Report: The Way Software is Built is Changing. Are You a Part of the Trend?

    Open source software was first introduced in the enterprise by developers who used it in secret. CIOs and other managers would assert there wasn’t any open source within their walls only to uncover multiple skunkworks projects built on and with open source. Over the last decade, the use of open source software and tools has gone mainstream and today developers and managers alike understand and reap the benefits. Today no one gets fired for using open source.

  • It takes an open-source village to make commercial software

    At the Linux Foundation’s Linux Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only event for top Linux and open source developers, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Foundation, said in the keynote: “Open source will be the new Pareto Principle.” By that, he meant that 80 percent of technology value—whether it’s from smartphones, TVs, or IT—will be coming from open source software development with only 20 percent coming from proprietary programming.

  • Panel: How to Enable Large-Scale Collaboration

    Companies are increasingly turning to collaborative software development to build their products and services and speed innovation, keynote presenters at Collaboration Summit told us this morning. But how does this process actually happen? Open source directors from Intel, Citrix and the OpenDaylight Foundation shared some of their secrets of collaborative development in an afternoon panel discussion, moderated by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. Below is an edited version of the conversation, which covers the rise of open source foundations, how to attract top engineering talent, how to manage open source developers, and more.

  • Watch Live Video of Collaboration Summit Keynotes on March 26
  • From Internet of Things to SDN, Open Source Collaboration Key to Tech Innovation

    Open source and collaborative software development has evolved in recent years to become an essential part of technology industry innovation, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin in his opening keynote at Collaboration Summit today.

  • One Week Left To The 2014 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

    Kicking off one week’s time will be the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley, California.

Releases

Kernel Misc,

  • systemd 212 Arrives with Improvements for the Brightness Setting

    systemd 212, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts, which provides aggressive parallelization capabilities and uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, has been released and is now available for download.

  • “Cryogenic” Linux Kernel Drops Power Use

    Alejandra Morales announced the Cryogenic Linux kernel module on the LKML today. Cryogenic aims to reduce system power consumption by “enabling cooperative clustering of I/O operations among the various applications that make use of the same hardware device. In order to achieve this target, Cryogenic provides an API that enables applications to schedule I/O operations on SCSI and network devices at times where the impact the operations have on energy consumption is small.”

Wayland

  • Initial XWayland Support Looks To Land In X.Org Server 1.16

    Originally XWayland served as an X.Org module by which modified DDX hardware drivers could be loaded on the system so they could offer their 2D support. However, given the advancements of GLAMOR, that is being used instead so we can have one unified XWayland DDX without the need for having patched drivers for hardware support and should work on just about any platform that has OpenGL support. GLAMOR tends to still be slower than the hand-written 2D paths in the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-intel DDX, but there’s still a lot of optimizations and code rewrites taking place of the code now that it’s moved from being a standalone library to living within the X.Org Server.

  • Ozone-Wayland – Beta Channel updated to M35

    The Ozone-Wayland developer team is proud to announce our next source release based on Chromium 35.0.1897.8.

Display Server Debate

  • KDE community refutes Canonical developer’s claim ‘the display server doesn’t matter’

    Canonical showed wisdom recently by dropping its own Upstart and chose systemd which it initially criticized as NIH, invasive and ‘hardly justified’. The Free Software community is expecting that Canonical will show prudence and drop their MIR and adopt Wayland. Canonical has great ambitions with Ubuntu, their struggle is much bigger so it may be wise for them to use limited engineering talent to tackle the issues Ubuntu is facing in desktop and mobile space by using the technologies being develop by the larger Free Software community.

  • Does The Display Server Matter? The Latest Mir vs. Wayland Argument

    Robert Ancell, a Canonical employee and Mir developer, wrote a blog post yesterday entitled “Why the display server doesn’t matter.” In the personal blog post, Ancell argues that for too many years the X display server has been in use but finally we’re reaching two new contenders for next-generation display servers: Mir and Wayland-based compositors. Robert Ancell states, “The result of [applications accessing the display server via a tool-kit and hardware/drivers becoming more generic] is the display server doesn’t matter much to applications because we have pretty good toolkits that already hide all this information from us. And it doesn’t matter much to drivers as they’re providing much the same operations to anything that uses them (i.e. buffer management and passing shaders around).”

  • Does the Display Server matter?

AMD

Intel

  • Intel Pushes XenGT For GPU Access To Virtual Machines

    XenGT is designed just not for 3D graphics acceleration within guest instances but also for media acceleration and GPGPU compute acceleration. There’s use-cases for XenGT within cloud computing, data centers, rich virtual clients, multi-screen infotainment, and other areas. With other Xen GPU pass-through solutions there is no ability for both the host and guest operating systems to each access the same GPU simultaneously but they must be independently assigned at this time as there isn’t a guest virtual GPU driver as in the case of VMware SVGA2 or VirtualBox Chromium. With Intel’s XenGT solution, however, there is sharing support — multiple VMs can access the same graphics processor due to its full virtualization. XenGT is pushed as offering performance, features, and sharing capabilities.

  • Intel’s Linux Driver Installer Updated to 1.0.4

    This tool allows easy installation of drivers for Intel graphics hardware. The newer version is available for Ubuntu 13.10 and Fedora 20 users only. Ubuntu 13.04 /Fedora 19 users can install this utility but they won’t receive upgrades to newer Graphics Stack. This utility doesn’t support versions below Ubuntu 13.04 and Fedora 19. Support for 13.04 will be dropped next month with the release of 14.04.

  • Intel 3.0 X.Org Driver Lands Yet More Changes

    While there have been pre-releases of the xf86-video-intel 3.0 X.Org driver going back to last September, it’s still not ready to be released, but a new feature update was made available.

  • Intel Linux Driver Installer Hits Version 1.0.4

NVIDIA

  • NVIDIA GeForce 700 Series: Stick To The Binary Linux Drivers

    For current and potential owners of NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards that are curious about the graphics driver situation on Linux, under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the latest open and closed-source NVIDIA drivers with the latest “Kepler” and “Maxwell” graphics cards. Here’s what you need to know now if trying to use the open-source Nouveau driver with these very latest NVIDIA graphics processors.

  • Nouveau In Linux 3.15: Maxwell Support, GPU Fault Recovery Work

    Nouveau’s main set of open-source NVIDIA Linux driver changes for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been merged into drm-next, but don’t get your hopes up too high.

    If you were hoping there was finally proper re-clocking / dynamic power management or other breakthroughs for this open-source NVIDIA Linux GPU driver, there isn’t anything real exciting like that for end-users with Linux 3.15. The main changes to this drm-nouveau-next pull is the first stage of ongoing GPU fault recovery support, initial support for the Maxwell GPUs, and various fixes throughout the entire driver.

  • Nvidia adds Linux support for GK20A GPU

    Linux creator Linus Torvalds criticized Nvidia in 2012 at Aalto Talk as “the single worst company we have ever dealt with.” Along with him many other members of the open source community previously criticized Nvidia’s proprietary hardware and software, which made open source alternatives difficult.

Overlap

03.26.14

Links 26/3/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 3:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 26/3/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 26/3/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 3:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

03.25.14

More Links: Human Rights, Intervention, Surveillance, Wikileaks

Posted in News Roundup at 2:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Human Rights

Intervention

  • From Turkey’s Covert War on Syria to the “Crimea Connection”
  • Interview with Ex-CIA Collaborator: “The CIA’s Plans in Venezuela Are Far Advanced”

    Raúl Capote is a Cuban. But not just any Cuban. In his youth, he was caught up by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They offered him an infinite amount of money to conspire in Cuba. But then something unexpected for the US happened. Capote, in reality, was working for Cuban national security. From then on, he served as a double agent.

  • The New York Times manufactures ignorance: More half-truths about Ukraine

    Something else must be added instantly. It is no good thinking that the vote was somehow forced by the barrels of Russian rifles. The imagery is familiar, time-tested Cold War stuff with obvious truth in a lot of cases. And scarcely would Putin be above intimidation. But it does not hold up this time, if only because there was no need of intimidation.

    The plain reality is that Putin knew well how the referendum would turn out and played the card with confidence. Washington and the European capitals knew, too, and this is why they were so unseemly and shamelessly hypocritical in their desperation to cover the world’s ears as Crimeans spoke.

    This raises the legality question. There is blur, certainly, but the legal grounding is clear: International law carefully avoids prohibiting unilateral declarations of independence. In any case, to stand on the law, especially Ukraine’s since the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month, is a weak case in the face of Crimeans’ expression of their will.

    There was a splendid image published in Wednesday’s New York Times. Take a look. You have a lady in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, on her way to something, probably work. Well-dressed, properly groomed, she navigates the sidewalk indifferently between a soldier and a tank.

CIA

  • The CIA Doesn’t Want You to Know How Badly It Botched Torture

    The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he’d narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.

  • Democrats have Votes to Release CIA Report on Secret Prisons and Interrogation Techniques

    The Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to send a long-awaited report on the CIA’s interrogation practices to President Barack Obama’s desk for his approval — or redaction.

    Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she has the votes on the narrowly divided panel to publicly reveal the executive summary and key conclusions of a 6,300-page report on Bush-era interrogation tactics, a move sure to fuel the Senate’s intense dispute with the CIA over how the panel pieced together the study. That vote is likely to happen sometime this week.

  • NSA, CIA, FBI & DIA Sued Over Withholding of Records on Capture & Surveillance of Mandela
  • Obama, the CIA, Congress, and the Constitution

    The President of the United States has one overriding obligation: to uphold the Constitution and to enforce the laws of the land. That is the oath he swears on Inauguration Day. Failure to meet fully that obligation breaks the contract between him and the citizenry from whom he derives his authority and on whose behalf he acts. The consequence is to jeopardize the well-being of the Republic.

  • Local Police in Florida Acting Like They’re the CIA (But They’re Not)

    The City of Sunrise, Florida, tried to take a page from the CIA’s anti-transparency playbook last week when it responded to an ACLU public records request about its use of powerful cell phone location tracking gear by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents. And the state police are trying to get in on the act as well. We have written about the federal government’s abuse of this tactic—called a “Glomar” response—before, but local law enforcement’s adoption of the ploy reaches a new level of absurdity. In this case, the response is not only a violation of Florida law, but is also fatally undermined by records the Sunrise Police Department has already posted online.

  • US President to Decide on Report About CIA Secret Jails

    This topic is the center of a serious debate between the president of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein and the CIA, especially about spionage on the employers of the panel and about if they acceded to non-authorized information.

  • Crimea crisis puts US spying in new spotlight
  • Wyden on CIA, NSA, FISA, electronic surveillance

    Last week, Senator Ron Wyden spoke to an audience of about 700 in downtown Portland on the current state of our national surveilliance and national security system.

    Over the weekend, I finally found the time to listen to it — and man, you should listen to his speech. It is both a high-level overview of everything that’s going on, as well as a specific rundown of Wyden’s concerns about the challenges posed to our civil liberties.
    - See more at: http://www.blueoregon.com/2014/03/wyden-cia-fisa-electronic-surveillance/#sthash.vtncHcUG.dpuf

  • Editorial: Lifting the lid on the scope of snooping

    In a remarkable about-face, the Central Intelligence Agency recently came under attack from one of the Senate’s staunchest defenders of national surveillance in the name of national security. On the Senate floor, Dianne Feinstein dramatically made public her accusation that the CIA spied on her committee’s staff in Congress’ lengthy investigation of U.S. interrogation methods.

  • U.S. ignores human rights abroad

    Among the reporter-columnists whose bylines I never miss, Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage of The New York Times is at the top of the list. He is penetratingly factual and stays on stories that are often surprising.

    At the bottom of page 12 of the March 14 Times — in what should have been on the front page, garnering Savage another Pulitzer — was this: “U.S., Rebuffing U.N., Maintains Stance That Rights Treaty Does Not Apply Abroad.”

    This treaty, signed by our Senate in 1992, is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, Savage notes, “bans arbitrary killings, torture, unfair trials and imprisonments without judicial review” (The New York Times, March 14).

    This treaty jumped into the news, thanks to Savage, because, as he states in his opening paragraph: “The Obama administration declared … that a global Bill of Rights-style treaty imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad.”

Wikileaks

Privacy

  • Admit It, You Don’t Care About Digital Privacy

    When former NSA analyst Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. government’s near-limitless ability to hoard and monitor private communications, it created shockwaves of indignation and forever changed the way we all conduct our digital business.

  • Mass Surveillance: French Spooks and Telcos Hand in Hand

    Since May 2013, consecutive revelations have increasingly exposed the extent and severity of the extralegal surveillance activities conducted by French authorities. It is time for the French government to break its deafening silence on this issue and allow for an open and democratic debate on the extent of its surveillance practices. This is all the more important following the “Loi de programmation militaire” and these recent revelations regarding the cooperation of network operator Orange with French intelligence services. France must make it a priority to revise its current legislation in order to respect international law on privacy.

  • Chris Hedges at Oxford University: Is Edward Snowden a Hero?

    An Oxford debate in late February posed the question: Is Edward Snowden a hero? In an impassioned defense of a patriotism that courageously stands against the abuse of state power, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges said yes, and by a vote of the those present, won the contest.

  • Glenn Greenwald: Obama’s NSA Proposals Are A Vindication Of Our Reporting

    Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday that President Obama’s new proposals to overhaul the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data are a vindication of Edward Snowden and the journalists who have been reporting on the revelations contained in the documents he provided.

Digitised Oppression: Censorship, Surveillance, Cracking, Drones, and More

Posted in News Roundup at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Censorship

Jimmy Carter

IBM

Phone Surveillance

Smears

China

Privacy

  • Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in LA Are Under Investigation
  • Who or what can stop the NSA?

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

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

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

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

  • Why NSA spying is breaking UK law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drones

CIA

  • CIA horrors
  • CIA Moved Tons of Cocaine Under Mayan Jaguar Court Documents Reveal

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

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

  • John Pilger: CIA role in Australia’s forgotten coup

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

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

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

  • The serious costs of weak CIA oversight

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

  • Constitutional Conflict Escalates between US Senate and CIA

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

  • Marcus: CIA making enemies of friends

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

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

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

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

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

PR Strategy

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