01.10.14
Posted in Action at 6:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The past week’s news about the NSA, its partners, and corporate spying
-
After the Snowden revelations interest in privacy services including VPNs has skyrocketed. This hasn’t gone unnoticed to HideMyAss, one of the largest VPN providers, who are now using Snowden’s name to promote their product. Some may think that’s a clever move, but it is rather ironic since HideMyAss previously handed over personal details of a Lulzsec member to the U.S. Government.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Former Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano flatly rejected the idea of clemency for Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whom the Obama administration has charged with theft of government property and unauthorized disclosure of defense secrets.
-
-
These aren’t just three categories of leaks; they’re three different ways to think about Snowden. People who care a lot about U.S. foreign policy are going to give more weight to Singer’s first category: leaks revealing espionage against U.S. adversaries and rival. They’re going to be more likely to view Snowden through that lens and to judge him harshly for, as they see it, carelessly and needlessly setting back the United States. The constituency of people who follow U.S. foreign policy closely is relatively small, but it also tends to be deeply passionate not to mention disproportionately represented in Washington, D.C.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Security is a word often used but rarely defined. Does it mean to be protected by others? Does it mean personal freedom and autonomy? Or something else, like being free from fear or worry, or having food and shelter? Sadly, in public discourse the term has become jingoistic, used more to instill fear and establish control than to promote actual security. Consider NSA surveillance.
-
Quantum computing gets brought up in all kinds of conversations, usually when it does it is for causes like weather, medical, research – things like that. The NSA however looks at the technology as an opportunity to defeat almost every form of encryption possible. It’s an interesting application of the technology because of the overwhelming computational capacity that quantum computing introduces and as most people know, there is comfort in most encryption methods that is based on the notion that it would take x years to compute and crack the safeguards put in place with certain standards. If the NSA’s $79.7 million research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets” has its way, then that statistical assurance is decimated.
-
-
-
-
The National Security Agency (NSA) has received a lot of publicity recently. News just broke that the NSA has been privately funding research in order to build a quantum computer of its own. This is all well and good but why would they want to build such a computer? The answer lies in their desire to be able to crack the codes of banking, medical, business and government codes around the world.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
We’ve already seen one reaction to the New York Times’ call for clemency for whistleblower Ed Snowden. That one came courtesy of the terminally-perturbed Rep. Peter King, a man who cares so much for this country that he believes Snowden should be imprisoned for “appeasing terrorists.” Calling Snowden a traitor only gains you so much political traction these days, but King’s in no hurry to give up his antagonistic calls for Snowden’s head, even when his assertions of “terrorist appeasement” clash with his own background as a terrorist appeaser.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
The U.S. Department of Justice will appeal a district judge’s opinion saying a phone records collection program at the National Security Agency likely violates the U.S. Constitution.
-
The US Justice Department appealed Friday a federal judge’s December ruling that advanced a legal challenge to the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records.
-
The U.S. Department of Justice will appeal a district judge’s opinion saying a phone records collection program at the National Security Agency likely violates the U.S. Constitution.
-
The US government said Friday it has lodged an appeal against a judge’s ruling that the National Security Agency’s “almost Orwellian” bulk collection of telephone records is illegal.
Separately, spy chief James Clapper revealed that a secret court had renewed the NSA’s authority to gather call “metadata,” despite the controversy triggered when the program came to light.
-
House Judiciary Committee Member Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) recently pressed Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate National Intelligence Director James Clapper for allegedly lying to Congress while testifying before a committee.
-
“Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower” (editorial, Jan. 2) repeats the allegation that James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, “lied” to Congress about the collection of bulk telephony metadata. As a witness to the relevant events and a participant in them, I know that allegation is not true.
Senator Ron Wyden asked about collection of information on Americans during a lengthy and wide-ranging hearing on an entirely different subject. While his staff provided the question the day before, Mr. Clapper had not seen it. As a result, as Mr. Clapper has explained, he was surprised by the question and focused his mind on the collection of the content of Americans’ communications. In that context, his answer was and is accurate.
When we pointed out Mr. Clapper’s mistake to him, he was surprised and distressed. I spoke with a staffer for Senator Wyden several days later and told him that although Mr. Clapper recognized that his testimony was inaccurate, it could not be corrected publicly because the program involved was classified.
-
As the World Privacy Forum just told Congress, the bottom feeders of the data brokerage world are making big money selling lists of everything from rape victims and AIDS patients to alcoholics, giving marketers the power to hit those folks with emails, phone calls, and ads — and much of this data is coming from the net. In a report of its own, Senator John Rockefeller and his senate investigation committee highlight the massive amounts of consumer data that brokers collect online and off, starkly criticizing how little we know about how this data is collected and used.
-
-
-
-
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is leading a class-action lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of Americans against President Barack Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) over its spying on the American people, Breitbart News has learned.
-
A US senator has bluntly asked the National Security Agency if it spies on Congress, raising the stakes for the surveillance agency’s legislative fight to preserve its broad surveillance powers.
-
-
“Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked in a letter to NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander released from the senator’s office.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Edward Snowden (shown) isn’t finished exposing damning details of the federal government’s unconstitutional surveillance programs.
In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Benjamin Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer working with the whistleblower, reveals that in 2014 the world “can expect to see [Snowden] engage a little more in the public debate.”
-
-
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government agreed Friday to a public inquiry into surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), but it was unclear if the panel would invite testimony from Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the snooping.
-
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government agreed Friday to a public inquiry into surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), but it was unclear if the panel would invite testimony from Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who exposed the snooping.
Merkel had tried to head off a parliamentary inquiry, conscious of the tension it would cause with Germany’s most powerful ally. But her top parliamentary aide yielded Friday to pressure from opposition parties to appoint a commission.
-
Rafael Correa is one of those Latin American presidents which ruling circles in the U.S. consider uncontrollable and thus especially dangerous. To get rid of such politicians, Washington makes use of a wide arsenal of means, from interfering in election processes to physical elimination. After the strange death of Hugo Chavez, who led Latin America’s resistance against the Empire, it is Correa who is increasingly seen as his successor, the leader of the «populist forces» on the continent… – See more at: http://www.ingeniouspress.com/2013/12/29/u-s-intelligence-planning-oust-president-ecuador/#sthash.qnLgw3y1.dpuf
-
If you’re sending encrypted e-mail with the default Mail app on OS X Mavericks, your setup may be saving plaintext messages on the mail server. Mac-based users of the GPG encryption app began noticing this unfortunate behavior in October when using Gmail. Even after unchecking the “Store draft messages on the server” and “Store sent messages on the server” checkboxes, the changes would mysteriously vanish.
-
-
-
The National Security Agency on Saturday released a statement in answer to questions from a senator about whether it “has spied, or is … currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials”, in which it did not deny collecting communications from legislators of the US Congress to whom it says it is accountable.
-
Robert Litt, the general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has written to the New York Times to deny the allegation that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress about the collection of bulk phone records by the National Security Agency (NSA).
-
The founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250 million. It was expressed at the time that there might be possible conflicts of interest between Bezos’ business at Amazon and the Post’s coverage of commerce and politics.
-
This is fully 17 years before Edward Snowden purloined the NSA’s Crown Jewels from the NSA’s Hawaii RSOC.
Remarkably, the article’s author also later describes a 1994 incident at an NSA RSOC when a contractor employee was caught accessing restricted files on a classified system!
-
Because of the scope of the NSA’s activities, Paul added, “every person in America who has a cell phone would be eligible for this suit.”
-
Paul said he is urging all US citizens with mobile phones to join a group action aimed at preventing Obama from “snooping on the American people”.
-
-
-
While we were just suggesting that there are ways that NSA employees who believe the organization has gone too far can make a difference without also leaking documents, some are beginning to suspect that Snowden’s activities may be creating at least some copycats — and the interesting tidbit is that they may be less likely to get caught, because everyone assumes any new leaks are from Snowden. Matt Blaze recently noted that the most recent bombshell concerning the NSA’s catalog of exploits, didn’t actually name a source. And Glenn Greenwald has hinted strongly that the information is not from Snowden.
-
Here is my recent talk at the CCC in Hamburg, discussing the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war in the internet and the war on whistleblowers…
-
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange stirred a new controversy this week when he denounced the Catholic Church’s confessional system as a means to spy on its congregants for the sake of power.
-
Yesterday Kossack Mike Stark posted this diary about Stratfor emails posted by Wikileaks.
Stratfor is a Texas-based global intelligence firm whose list of clients includes Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency.
[...]
Decent folks who believe in tolerance and equality are no longer powerless against Rush Limbaugh’s efforts to spread intolerance on the radio. StopRush is making a major impact by convincing advertisers on this show to withdraw their ads–and with your help we can do even more. Just a few emails, tweets, or Facebook messages a week to Limbaugh’s advertisers can go a long way toward making hatred less profitable. It is our collective voice that makes us strong.
-
Google Glass has a rival: Nano-tech contact lenses that work with a pair of glasses and provide wearers with a virtual canvas on which any media can be viewed or application run, projected onto human eyes, are set to be unveiled in the US.
-
In our country suspicion is now our way of life.
-
A column on why former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden should not be granted clemency—and will not be given clemency—was written by Slate’s Fred Kaplan on January 3. It quickly became regarded as a sharp well-argued rebuttal to The New York Times’ editorial, which labeled Snowden a whistleblower and urged President Barack Obama to show him leniency so he could come back to the United States.
-
In June 2013, the American public learned conclusively about the wholesale surveillance of virtually all Americans through secretive programs by the National Security Agency (NSA) that continue to be implemented today. These programs collect the phone records, email exchanges, and internet histories of people all over the world who would have no knowledge of this were it not for the disclosures of former federal contractor Edward Snowden.
-
-
On April 22, 2013, Miles J. Stark of Clay County, West Virginia made a bad decision. Stark was going through a divorce at the time and had grown concerned about his wife’s relationship with an “unnamed individual.” So he entered his wife’s workplace after normal business hours, located her PC, and installed a tiny keylogger between her keyboard cable and her computer. The keylogger would record his wife’s e-mails and her instant messaging chats as she typed them out letter by letter, along with the usernames and passwords she used for various online services. Stark left the office without getting caught.
-
This is an odd and flawed argument—logically and legally…
-
-
Former NSA and CIA leader Michael Hayden is indicative of the horrors of the coming American authoritarian state. He is a bookish, cherubic, nondescript, avuncular man who nonetheless has contributed greatly to those programs of such a degree of enormous potential for evil are only waiting for the correct political climate and leadership to trigger a reign of darkness and terror unique to this country’s history.
-
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul sharpened his rhetoric against the National Security Agency’s snooping on American citizens Sunday, comparing the agency’s programs to the British actions that provoked the American Revolution 230 years ago.
-
2013 has certainly been a watershed year for information security. But to understand how things might subsequently unfold in 2014, it’s worth remembering that each and every revelation of 2013 will be processed and acted upon by humans. Humans with their unchanging human nature, and organisations created by us humans, with their similarly unchanging nature.
Centre stage must of course go to Edward Snowden and the ongoing revelations about comprehensive surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA).
[...]
Combine that with the fact that even a headline in conservative US magazine “Foreign Policy” described NSA chief General Keith Alexander as a “cowboy”.
Combine all that, and I think we’re looking at a groundswell of opposition to what some have called the “surveillance state” at a level seen in Western nations only once a generation — like the Vietnam Moratorium or, in Australia and especially New Zealand, opposition to French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa.
-
Obama and Congress should rein in this government surveillance program.
-
The UK government’s former chief information officer has defended the rights of nations to gather data and spy on citizens, although warned that there must be clear oversight into these practices.
John Suffolk, who left a post in the UK government in 2011 to become global cyber security officer for Chinese vendor Huawei, wrote in a blog post that nations must have the ability to scan data and try to protect citizens from any threats.
-
The catalogue further says that Mobile phone SIM cards can also be easily hacked using a tool dubbed MONKEYCALANDER. This exploits a flaw, only recently spotted by security researchers but used by the NSA since 2007, that allows code to be installed on a SIM card that will track and monitor an individual user’s calls and location.
-
Schneier, who previously had served on Co3 Systems’ advisory board and has helped shape the look and feel of the software-as-a-service firm’s architecture, says the time had come for him to make a change and leave BT. He had been the security futurologist for BT since it purchased his network monitoring services firm Counterpane Internet Security in October of 2006.
-
The battle to beat back the NSA – and restore our old republic
-
-
After Edward Snowden spilled the National Security Agency’s beans three months later, Mr. Clapper retreated to his Ministry of Truth persona when asked by NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on June 10 why he lied to Mr. Wyden: “I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘no.’”
-
Although weaknesses in one pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) at the heart of a US National Security Agency (NSA) scandal have been known for years, recent media attention has given light to proof-of-concept code.
-
While mega IT behemoths including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Cisco, Juniper, et al, may, or may not deny any knowledge of, or cooperation with, the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its international counterparts, or nemeses, the fact is that near ubiquitous, secret backdoor access to networks and computing and communications devices has been gained.
-
-
How a teenage misfit became the keeper of Julian Assange’s deepest secrets – only to betray him
-
-
-
-
A schoolboy trying to save his youth club was hauled from class after his plan to protest outside David Cameron’s constituency office was spotted – by anti-terror police.
In an astonishing over-reaction, 12-year-old Nicky Wishart was warned he faced ARREST.
-
-
Today’s dose of paranoia and confusion comes to us courtesy of RyanNerd. We’ve seen schools react badly to perceived threats before, but the lack of a single crucial detail makes it impossible to determine whether this incident is one of those cases. What we do know is that three New Jersey schools were locked down and swarmed by police officers as the result of a single text from a student to a parent.
-
Our choice isn’t between a digital world where the agency can eavesdrop and one where it cannot; our choice is between a digital world that is vulnerable to any attacker and one that is secure for all users.
-
AN EX-UK GOVERNMENT CIO has waded into the security debate about NSA and GCHQ surveillance of the internet and told everyone to chill out.
John Suffolk, the global head of Cyber Security for Huawei and a former UK government CIO and CISO, penned his thoughts in a blog post with the title, ‘Let’s get real about the NSA. Not all technology and data is born equal.’
Suffolk said that he has followed the debate about government surveillance and can see why some people might have some concerns. His concern is that people are worrying about the wrong thing, adding that he can’t see a problem with a data-hungry government that won’t stop eating.
-
Government-trained security company Morta Security has been snapped up by Palo Alto Networks for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition was announced on Monday and arms Palo Alto Networks with a company whose staff hail from the National Security Agency, US Army, US Air Force, and others.
“The Morta team brings additional valuable threat intelligence experience and capabilities to Palo Alto Networks,” Palo Alto Networks chief Mark McLaughlin said in a canned statement.
-
The NSA’s Tailored Access Operations show there’s a way to be safe and get good intelligence without mass surveillance
-
“I hope that with Microsoft’s collusion with government agencies now public knowledge, businesses will start to look at alternative options,” suggested blogger Mike Stone. Indeed, “I would like more transparency from those IT giants,” echoed Google+ blogger Alessandro Ebersol. “They are dealing with our lives, and there’s not much we can do to protect ourselves.”
-
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.
-
-
Bipartisan duo wants to cut NSA’s utilities, ban research at state schools and impose sanctions on contractors
-
Access to that telephone metadata would be extremely useful for manipulating the legislature. So is it wise to collect it and make it accessible to a secretive executive-branch agency? Even if the NSA has never abused the temptation, will they resist it forever? Operating on that assumption seems both reckless and needless, given the scant evidence that the Section 215 program is necessary and the significant public interest in maintaining the integrity and legitimacy of the legislature.
-
See, there’s a problem when you lie: you always forget how to keep your story straight. You may remember, for example, that Senator Dianne Feinstein, at the end of October, released a bill that pretended to be about reforming the NSA and its surveillance programs. The bill was spun in a way that was designed to make people think it was creating real reforms, with a fact sheet claiming that it “prohibited” certain actions around bulk data collection, but which actually codified them in the law, by including massive loopholes. It was an incredibly cynical move by Feinstein and her staff, pretending that their bill to actually give the NSA even greater power and to legalize its abuses, was about scaling back the NSA. But that’s the spin they put on it — which almost no one bought.
-
Tomorrow MEPs on the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee will present their draft report on the Internet surveillance of the UK and USA as well as other EU states. Its recommendations are damning and the UK Government comes in for particularly strong criticism.
-
The White House is holding a number of meetings on possible National Security Agency reforms. President Barack Obama reportedly met with staffers for intelligence officials on January 8 in a meeting that was classified “top secret.”
-
The president sat down with a small group of lawmakers Thursday to discuss NSA surveillance. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
-
-
A classified Pentagon report concludes that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden downloaded 1.7 million intelligence files from U.S. agencies in the single largest theft of secrets in the history of the United States, according to lawmakers.
-
-
Civil liberties committee report demands end to indiscriminate collection of personal data by British and US agencies
-
The leaders of the US intelligence agencies were holding talks at the White House on Wednesday as US president Barack Obama neared a decision on curbing the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk surveillance powers.
-
National Security Agency employee Kevin Igoe is to keep his position on the panel of an influential internet standards working group, the powers-that-be decided last weekend.
Igoe, who co-chairs the Internet Research Task Force’s Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG), had been accused by those campaigning for his removal of pushing for the adoption of a weakened version of the “Dragonfly” key exchange protocol.
-
-
-
Four men who were part of a group that wrote mobile history tell for the first time how strong protection against eavesdropping of cell phones was weakened.
-
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.05.14
Posted in Action at 5:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Stories of interest from recent weeks, focusing on the environment and those who harm it
Japan
-
Tepco is planning on dumping all of the radioactive water stored at Fukushima into the ocean. The industry-controlled nuclear regulators are pushing for dumping the radiation, as well.
-
-
-
United States
-
-
Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.
-
Through an analysis of the financial structure of the organizations that constitute the core of the countermovement and their sources of monetary support, Brulle found that, while the largest and most consistent funders behind the countermovement are a number of well-known conservative foundations, the majority of donations are “dark money,” or concealed funding.
-
-
The presentation created by global intelligence firm Stratfor divides environmental groups into four categories: radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists. The document then offers strategic ways of dealing with each type.
-
-
-
The extensive global operations of the US military (wars, interventions, and secret operations on over one thousand bases around the world and six thousand facilities in the United States) are not counted against US greenhouse gas limits. Sara Flounders writes, “By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.”
-
The Pacific Ocean is warming at a rate faster than anything seen in the last 10,000 years and we may have the warmest Arctic in the last 120,000 years. Our burning of fossil fuels is the big thing pushing us toward the brink. Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, claims that we have enough wind and solar to power the world. The question is why aren’t we using it? This isn’t a matter of changing how we get energy, it means shifting the power dynamic in this country—and across the world for that matter—and literally putting power in the hands of individual people and communities. Not only will renewable resources cut down global warming but also, as fossil fuel costs rise, the cost for wind and solar power is actually decreasing.
United Kingdom
-
Met Office issues yellow weather warnings of ice and rain, with 96 flood warnings in place and a further 244 areas on flood alert
-
Ministers “stepping up the search for shale” with new exploration rights to be offered to fracking firms next summer
Canada
-
Canada is having a cold snap at the moment. This week, in Southern Manitoba, the temperature reached a blisteringly frigid -31 degrees Celsius, or nearly -24 Fahrenheit. (Wind chill values in Winnipeg—in case you were curious and/or in need of some meteorological schadenfreude—dipped to -58 Fahrenheit.) Which is crazy, and which makes for, as Yahoo’s Geekquinox blog puts it, “the coldest afternoon temperatures the area has seen in several years.”
-
Back in 2012, when Canada’s Harper government announced that it would close down national archive sites around the country, they promised that anything that was discarded or sold would be digitized first. But only an insignificant fraction of the archives got scanned, and much of it was “>simply sent to landfill or burned.
Unsurprisingly, given the Canadian Conservatives’ war on the environment, the worst-faring archives were those that related to climate research. The legendary environmental research resources of the St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick are gone. The Freshwater Institute library in Winnipeg and the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Centre in St. John’s, Newfoundland: gone. Both collections were world-class.
An irreplaceable, 50-volume collection of logs from HMS Challenger’s 19th century expedition went to the landfill, taking with them the crucial observations of marine life, fish stocks and fisheries of the age.
-
Africa
-
Oil drilling may bring benefits in healthcare and education, but critics are concerned about corruption and the effect on wildlife
-
Millions of tonnes of old electronic goods illegally exported to developing countries, as people dump luxury items
Chevron
-
A court in Canada has ruled Ecuadorean farmers and fishermen can try to seize the assets of oil giant Chevron based on a 2011 decision in an Ecuadorean court found it liable for nearly three decades of soil and water pollution near oil wells, and said it had ruined the health and livelihoods of people living in nearby areas of the Amazon rainforest.
-
U.S. oil company Chevron has suspended exploration for shale gas in northeastern Romania after hundreds of anti-fracking protesters tore down fences.
Chevron won approval to drill exploratory wells in the town of Pungesti, but halted work for a second time Saturday after residents blocked access to the site.
Deep Sea and Sea Traffic
-
Five hundred miles southeast of Hawai’i, in international waters far out of sight of any land, there are vast mineral resources 5,000 meters below the sea.
-
Shrimp populations in northern New England have declined so quickly that a regulatory agency has banned all shrimp fishing for the 2014 season in order to allow the small crustaceans to replenish themselves. The sharp fall-off in shrimp stock is due to overfishing and worsening environmental conditions, experts say.
-
A floating vessel that is longer than the Empire State Building is high has taken to the water for the first time.
Australia
-
‘Strictest conditions in Australian history’ to safeguard Great Barrier Reef while building three terminals at Abbot Point
-
The Japanese Whale Poaching Fleet has left Japan, setting sail for the Australian Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. The factory vessel, the Nisshin Maru left Innoshima Port today and the refuelling vessel, the Sun Laurel, left just days prior. The harpoon ships no longer have their AIS (Automatic Identification System) on and it appears that they are underway as well.
Middle East/Persian Gulf
-
Israel has granted oil exploration rights inside Syria, in the occupied Golan Heights, to Genie Energy. Major shareholders of Genie Energy – which also has interests in shale gas in the United States and shale oil in Israel – include Rupert Murdoch and Lord Jacob Rothschild.
-
Google Earth has been once again used by researchers for scientific discovery.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia scoured Google Earth in search of fishing weirs along the coasts of seven Persian Gulf nations. They found some 1,900 fish traps, suggesting that the total fish catch in the Persian Gulf may be up to six times the officially reported level of 5,260 metric tons per year.
Other
-
We must wake up to the global land crisis or face a very real threat of famine
-
Quantities required for the fracking process may make it problematic in areas of the UK where resources are scarce
Permalink
Send this to a friend
01.02.14
Posted in Action at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Micorsoft
-
Scary. Insane. Ridiculous. Invasive. Wrong. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has had the ability to secretly activate a computer’s camera “without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording” for years now. What in the hell is going on? What kind of world do we live in?
Marcus Thomas, the former assistant director of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, told the Post that that sort of creepy spy laptop recording is “mainly” used in terrorism cases or the “most serious” of criminal investigations. That doesn’t really make it less crazy (or any better) since the very idea of the FBI being able to watch you through your computer is absolutely disturbing.
-
The FBI team works much like other hackers, using security weaknesses in computer programs to gain control of users’ machines. The most common delivery mechanism, say people familiar with the technology, is a simple phishing attack — a link slipped into an e-mail, typically labeled in a misleading way.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Snowden
-
Along with journalist colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, I spent six days with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong. He had spent almost all of his short adult life working in America’s spy agencies, but at the end of those six days, the unknown 29-year-old became one of the most famous faces on the planet. He went public in a Guardian video, revealing himself as the source of one of the biggest leaks in western intelligence history.
-
Only three months after the Snowden leaks on NSA snooping began, we learn from Ars Technica that the developers at FreeBSD have decided to rethink the way they access random numbers to generate cryptographic keys. Starting with version 10.0, users of the operating system will no longer be relying solely on random numbers generated by Intel and Via Technologies processors. This comes as a response to reports that government spooks can successfully open some encryption schemes.
-
-
Agency Implementing 2-Person Rule, Increasing Encryption Use
Greenwald
Machon
-
While British politics and media display a strong reluctance to confront the harsh realities of UK spying, we should be worried about further revelations of a dystopian, Orwellian surveillance system gone global, former MI5 agent Annie Machon told RT.
-
Here’s an RT interview I did about the media response to Edward Snowden, the media response, privacy and what we can do.
Obama
-
The facts that we know so far – from Fisa court documents to LOVEINT – show that the NSA has overstepped its powers
-
Before he left for Hawaii, the president was sending signals that government surveillance programs need an overhaul to restore the public’s faith on issues of national security.
Judgement
-
-
The September 11th terrorist attacks revealed, in the starkest terms, just how dangerous and interconnected the world is. While Americans depended on technology for the conveniences of modernity, al-Qaeda plotted in a seventh-century milieu to use that technology against us. It was a bold jujitsu. And it succeeded because conventional intelligence gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connecting al-Qaeda.
Prior to the September 11th attacks, the National Security Agency (“NSA”) intercepted seven calls made by hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar, who was living in San Diego, California, to an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA intercepted those calls using overseas signals intelligence capabilities that could not capture al-Mihdhar’s telephone number identifier. Without that identifier, NSA analysts concluded mistakenly that al-Mihdhar was overseas and not in the United States. Telephony metadata would have furnished the missing information and might have permitted the NSA to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) of the fact that al-Mihdhar was calling the Yemeni safe house from inside the United States.
-
1984
-
A Scottish sci-fi writer has cancelled the last instalment in a trilogy about high-tech government spying after discovering that the NSA has been doing exactly what he described in his books.
-
-
Snowden in 2013 revealed what George Orwell in 1949 had already revealed in 1984: that Big Brothers who spy on their citizens will go on to do very bad things. He then asked for asylum in a country with a long history of its own citizens seeking asylum from his country.
Sci-FI Made Real
-
-
-
-
-
-
Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.
-
-
A leaked NSA cyber-arms catalog has shed light on the technologies US and UK spies use to infiltrate and remotely control PCs, routers, firewalls, phones and software from some of the biggest names in IT.
The exploits, often delivered via the web, provide clandestine backdoor access across networks, allowing the intelligence services to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks that conventional security software has no chance of stopping.
Corporate and Other
-
Kelly hired David Cohen, the former head of the C.I.A.’s spy division, to run the force’s intelligence outfit. Cohen, a trained economist known to be intensely loyal to his superiors (and profane with everyone else), created the Demographics Unit, which imbedded special recruits in eighteen Muslim neighborhoods to monitor every aspect of daily life. At the same time, Kelly created the International Liaison Program, which posted detectives in eleven hot spots overseas, including London, Paris, Madrid, Abu Dhabi, and Tel Aviv. “We’ve reorganized the department to accommodate this world view,” Kelly said. “You might say that the N.Y.P.D. has aspired to become a Council on Foreign Relations with guns.”
-
We have all heard by now of the massive surveillance being conducted by the NSA and other governments across the world. China is a well-known anti-privacy country and others have decided to also spy on their citizens’ social network activities amongst other things. The Internet censorship trends are getting pretty bad.
-
Older teenagers have turned their backs on Facebook, an EU-funded study has found. Young people are opting for alternative social networks like Twitter and WhatsApp, while the “worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service.”
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.30.13
Posted in Action at 2:40 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: A roundup of recent news about civil and human rights, as well as their chance of revival owing to public scrutiny
THE CAUSE of human rights (and general dignity) seems to have been lost. It often seems like we are moving backwards — not forward — when it comes to values which are not so relative. In this post we share some troubling recent news (from December), highlighting the type of practices we’re now inclined to view as “normal”. Thankfully, the Internet and especially the Web are not yet thoroughly censored, so now there’s an opportunity to fight back with information. Become active and be vocal while it’s still permissible, legal, and not censored (more on censorship in another future article). We may be running out of time.
Police in north America is not enjoying much positive publicity these days, with sexual perverts [1-3] misusing their power in the police forces. Guess who needs to pay for warrantless cavity searches [4-5]? It’s breathtaking! Don’t just blame states like Texas [6-7]. Excessive policing against dissent [8-13], journalists [14-16], students [17-20], young people [21-23], babies/parents [24] or minorities is still an issue [25] that’s without borders. It’s happening in supposedly ‘progressive’ places like Toronto as well. Some cops act like drunken military commanders [26] and shoot people sparingly [27-30] (because they think they can get away with anything). It’s not much better in the UK [31]. It has become a subject of great ridicule [32]. In the East there is a lot of police brutality too, as demonstrated in a supposedly ‘Westernised’ country like South Korea last week [33]. In the ‘Westernised’ Middle East, notably Israel, people are now turned into numbers [34-35]. Russia is still up to oppression, so not much changes there, except the PR stunts [36-40]. So much for progress, eh? The sad thing is that Snowden, Manning and other voices of consciousness hardly appear in the radar [41-42]; people are too busy watching sports and celebrities. Some focus on gender segregation issues [43-44] and other aspects of repression [45-46].
Many still think that sarin gas was used by Syria’s government, despite evidence to the contrary from the UN’s Syrian chemical weapons report [47]. It is starting to look like a plot to destabilise and start a war by falsely blaming leaders of nations yet again. It happened decades ago in Korea [48] and a decade ago in Iraq, where contractors like Blackwater (now feeling betrayed by the CIA [49]), made a killing. There’s a lot of money in this black budget [50-56], even when there’s poor intelligence [57] (provided it serves the agenda). A lot of people still believe, especially now that there’s more disclosure, that the CIA was also behind the killing of JFK [58-59] (most American citizens already believe so based on polls). Now that the Washington Post is visibly connected to the CIA [60-62] and the New York Times rewrites history on behalf of the CIA [63-65] it oughtn’t be too shocking that level of trust in the CIA — just like the NSA — has hit bottom low. “NYT and ABC News lied about CIA operative,” says another source [66-67], having shown complicity between the corporate press and the CIA (the corporate press is trying to cover this scandal up [68]). Looking back at CIA role in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s [69], one author recalls and tells the story of malicious intervention. A lot of people still don’t know why Iranians don’t like the West, especially the UK and the US (coup against democratically-elected leadership for foreign oil interests).
Now that an “Interrogation Manual” of the FBI is accidentally out [70-71] we might as well consider how it is connected to the CIA, where the word interrogation (among other euphemisms) often means torture. CIA agents in Iran turn out to have had roots in the FBI [72] (he is said to have ‘retired’ from it). The CIA’s zeal for secrecy [73-75] — just like in notorious Soviet equivalents [76] — is not without victims [77-79]. This is a “colossal flop” and as an anti-terrorism mechanism the CIA has done a terrible job [80-82], mostly decreasing national security by making new enemies, not making peace with those who ask for it [83] and are in peace with 99% of the world (literally 99%), thereby singling out the US [84]. In Latin American countries, including in Colombia and at the border of Ecuador, the CIA continues to bomb people [85-90] (by proxy this time, unlike in previous decades). Is Uruguay next to suffer from foreign intervention because it its new marijuana laws [91-93]? In countries like Pakistan this leads to blowback [94] and oustings [95-96]]. No amount of torture [97-111] (even in Poland) and coverup of torture [112-118] is going to stop (secrets come out sooner or later [119]); usually it only contributes to blowback, a term which the CIA itself coined. This is why we need WikiLeaks [120], bringing accountability to those who abuse power.
The US has become known for drone assassinations due to the bad strategy ‘championed’ by the CIA [121-123]; WikiLeaks proponents are outraged given what they know [124]. Iraq is probably next as a place in which to carry out such assassination, based on the shipment of Hellfire missiles [125-127] (not noticed much because of the Christmas vacation, just like the bombings of Gaza [128-129]). The Pentagon shows no signs of stopping this assassination policy [130-131] and Obama’s promise of reducing drones use are as useless as ever, as an article from Boxing Day [132] helps explain. It was first published (now in many Web sites) after Obama’s drones had killed people on Christmas Day [133-138] (Obama personally orders these strikes [139]) for the first time ever, leading to much anger even at a political level [140-143], which means that the wrath of political espionage/retaliation by NSA is possible (Pentagon chief Hagel had been trying to dodge this public backlash [144-146]). This wasn’t the only attack by drones at that time [147-148] and it happened in multiple nations. Sincerity is a huge casualty [149-152] because the secrecy here works against the CIA, not for it. This breeds a lot of excess suspicion [153-154]. In Yemen, lack of communication [155-157] does a huge damage after imprecise methods (air strikes [158]) rendered yet another botched attack on wedding goers [159-176]. The New York Times’ CIA-leaning coverage of this was exceptionally disgusting [177]. People in Western nation [178-182] and also in the Arab world strongly condemn this [183-185], but the strategy evidently carries on, even on Christmas day (shortly afterwards). It’s the Pentagon’s “Weapon of choice” [186-188] as it breeds hatred [189], even from journalists [190-191] (whom Obama wanted arrested or killed). Don’t be deceived by Obama exploiting Nelson Mandela’s death for publicity; remember the CIA’s role in the attacks on Mandela [192-198] (the corporate press belittles this fact [199]). “As engineers, we must consider the ethical implications of our work,” one writer recently stressed [200], so all these criticisms of the drones war [] should be taken into account in this context. The people who want to use technology against people are usually not technical people; they have leverage and control over some who are. We need to refuse to obey such people. Whenever we are told that a “militant” dies we should read that as “adult male” (the New York Times already admitted that this is what it means by “militant”). The corporate press is very much in this killing game, especially press with CIA ties. Anger over drones has become too easy to find in the news [201-205], even Western news channels (although usually in sections written by readers and authorised reluctantly by editors for ‘balance’).
There is some hope though. In the UK, there is an unprecedented legal challenge to CIA’s drones strikes. It has reached the Court of Appeal [206]. Bribes from the CIA to various obedient leaders are being discovered now; these help discredit the work of those merciless assassins [207]. $2.5 million of taxpayers’ money also gets given to ‘disappear’ CIA agents that got caught [208]. How will taxpayers react now? Nice employers, eh? Overnight is needed here [209].
Through Bezos and Amazon contracts, the CIA has been getting closer to the private sector (Amazon can help track book reading habits, purchasing history, etc. [210]), so there is clearly an expansionary issue here — a shift of power from government-protected (impunity) thugs to the private sector. This ought to worry not just non-US citizen because with NDAA 2014 (also passed the over Christmas vacation [211-]216) a lot of the above policies are now applicable universally, i.e. the CIA can ‘disappear’ US citizens, even those to whom it gives bait [217]. Jailing is becoming a selection process that’s motivated politically and so is assassination. This is hugely worrisome. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
Const. Sasa Sljivo told court on Dec. 11 he has stripped “hundreds” of people completely naked, which is against police policy as laid out by the Supreme Court.
-
-
-
-
Federal agents wrongfully strip-searched a New Mexico woman at the El Paso border crossing, then took her to a hospital where she was forced to undergo illegal body cavity probes in an attempt to find drugs, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday.
-
There are several problems with what went on here, not the least of which is the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ determination that these officers (in effect) did nothing wrong. According to the court, the pre-warrant search may have been illegal but the evidence can’t be excluded because its existence was confirmed by an “independent source.”
-
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last week adopted yet another court-created federal exception to the exclusionary rule in state-level search and seizure cases that allows evidence to be admitted in the face of clear police misconduct, even though Texas has a statutory exclusionary rule that – unlike the court-created federal version – includes no exceptions on its face. See Judge Elsa Alcala’s opinion (pdf) on behalf of the majority, a concurrence (pdf) from Judge Tom Price, and a dissent (pdf) from Judge Lawrence Meyers.
-
Dissent is once again a criminal act in America. People who object to right-wing lunacy used to be called “communists” and treated as enemies of the state. Now “anarchist” is the label of choice used to harass those who disagree.
-
-
Eight demonstrators tied themselves to one another wrist-to-wrist in the falling snow Tuesday morning, and lay down across the road in a human chain, blocking access to an immigration detention center in Elizabeth, N.J. Detention officers on their way to work waited in a line of cars stretching down the street.
-
We have previously warned that everyone from Christian street preachers to peaceful protesters will be subject to new draconian powers proposed by the Home Office which mean that individuals that are considered annoying can be driven from the streets. That is why we are very happy to support the newly formed Reform Clause 1 campaign which was launched in Parliament yesterday.
-
How corporations and spy agencies use “security” to defend profiteering and crush activism
-
-
-
-
Photography Is Not A Crime is in the middle of another police department vs. citizen feud and this one, like the last, is based on dubious “crimes” and a police department’s disingenuous legal response to being slammed with phone calls as a result of its own actions.
The story starts out with a Louisiana woman (Theresa Richard) being arrested by Crowley Police Dept. officers for recording inside a police station. This was the latest in a long line of attempts by the CPD to silence and intimidate Richard after she filed a lawsuit against the department for false arrest and imprisonment stemming from an incident last year, when she (along with other members of her family) were accosted by police officers and accused of stealing a safe.
-
UK students protesting corporate attacks against their rights to education, control over their universities, and freedom of expression were brutally repressed by the British police in cooperation with university officials.
-
-
Students protesting in an area at the centre of London’s student district could be imprisoned or fined, after the University of London obtains a court order banning protests on campus for six months.
-
-
Officials at a Colorado school where a 6-year-old boy was suspended for kissing a girl have dropped the term “sexual harassment” from the boy’s record, instead calling the behavior misconduct.
The change was made after the boy’s parents and the principal met to discuss the issue.
-
-
-
Exclusive: Essex social services have obtained a court order against a woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and for her child to be taken from her womb by caesarean section
-
-
The group of 16 soldiers who felt they were being “led by muppets” staged a mutiny by sitting down on parade and refusing to get up, a court martial hears
-
-
Eric Crinnian, an attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, says police came to his door looking for parole violators, and got upset when he refused them permission to tramp through his house and paw through his possessions. In fact, he claims, one cop went so far as to threaten to shoot his dogs if he made them abide by the requirements of the law by getting a search warrant to look through his home. Remarkably, a criminal justice professor says the police actions may not be illegal, though they could be awkward in court.
-
-
-
-
-
From noon till late at night, about 100,000 citizens and labor workers angrily demonstrated against the current government’s election manipulation scandal and clampdowns on labor groups as well as moves toward privatization of the nation’s railway system, though the administration denies such claims. Some observers are calling the outbreak of demonstrations proof that public anger has nearly “reached its boiling point” [ko].
-
-
Sometimes it’s kind of scary how Israel treats asylum seekers. From jailing them with no trial to brutal arrests and now, referring to them as numbers. It’s as if they don’t think they’re human beings, with names.
Yuval Goren, a journalist from the daily Maariv, got hold of a document in which the state asks the court to sentence the 153 asylum seekers who recently marched from the Holot “open detention facility” in the Negev to Tel Aviv to three months in jail.
-
Russian newspaper reports bill submitted by Vladimir Putin would apply to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina
-
-
Two jailed members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot were released Monday following an amnesty law that both of them described as Kremlin’s public relations stunt ahead of the Winter Olympics.
-
A member of Russian punk band Pussy Riot who was released from prison Monday denounced her release within hours.
-
Russia expected to pass amnesty law with amendment extending scope to include those arrested on Greenpeace ship
-
-
-
-
-
-
Despite the strong citizen mobilisation and the numerous reactions [fr] voiced against it, the French Senate just voted in second reading the controversial 2014-2019 Defense Bill and its dangerous terms without any changes. This vote closes parliamentary debate on this text: the French Constitutional Council alone can now alter the application of these measures infringing the basic rights of citizens. La Quadrature du Net strongly calls the members of the French Parliament to formally place the matter before the Constitutional Council for a decision on the conformity of this law to the French Constitution.
-
The release of a United Nations chemical weapons inspectors’ report pointing to multiple sarin gas attacks carried out by so-called “rebel” forces further exposes the Obama administration’s lies about Syrian government responsibility for an August 21 chemical shelling of the Ghouta area outside of Damascus.
-
According to a CIA document declassified in March 2006, the U.S. government lied publicly about pushing for a United Nations “on-the-spot” investigation into Soviet, Chinese and North Korean charges of U.S. use of biological weapons (BW) during the Korean War.
According to the document, a “Memorandum of Conversation” from the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) dated July 6, 1953, the U.S. was not serious about conducting any investigation into such charges, despite what the government said publicly. The reason the U.S. didn’t want any investigation was because an “actual investigation” would reveal military operations, “which, if revealed, could do us psychological as well as military damage.”
-
THE former head of the US security contractor Blackwater, vilified as a mercenary who personified the excesses of the war on terror, has spoken of his feeling of “ultimate betrayal” after being outed by the Obama administration as a CIA agent.
With his all-American good looks, assured manner and a powerful physique that befits a former US Navy Seal, Erik Prince is a difficult man to feel sorry for. He arrives for an interview wearing Kaenon sunglasses and a leather flying jacket with the insignia of Presidential Airways — one of his former companies.
-
-
-
Think of it as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) plunge into Hollywood — or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world’s most infamous jail.
-
These revelations come in the aftermath of thousands of new emails released by Wikileaks’ “Global Intelligence Files.” The emails reveal Popovic worked closely with Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based private firm that gathers intelligence on geopolitical events and activists for clients ranging from the American Petroleum Institute and Archer Daniels Midland to Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Northrop Grumman, Intel and Coca-Cola.
-
Palantir Technologies, the data-mining company that is partly backed by the Central Intelligence Agency, has raised another $107.5 million, according to a filing.
-
-
-
-
Historian Dr Helen Fry believes the CIA is responsible for JFK’s assassination
-
Six shooters who participated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including three with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were named by a prominent critic of the Warren Commission Report (WCR). Remarkably, Lee Harvey Oswald, the Warren Commission’s lone-assassin-designate, was not among them.
-
The Washington Post, one of the premier mouthpieces for the establishment, is facing a tsunami of criticism and calls for full disclosure after the newspaper’s new owner, Amazon CEO and Bilderberg luminary Jeff Bezos, secured a $600 million contract with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for “cloud” services. According to critics, the Washington Post boss’s CIA ties represent a serious conflict of interest that, under basic ethical standards in journalism, must be disclosed to readers — at least whenever the paper is reporting on the “intelligence community” and its activities. So far, however, the Post has not publicly announced whether or not it will acknowledge what analysts say is a cut-and-dry conflict of interest.
-
-
News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark.
The Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon — which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. But the Post’s articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper’s sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon.
Even for a multi-billionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That’s more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the Post four months ago.
And there’s likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech “cloud” infrastructure.
-
A former CIA analyst poured cold water over the New York Times’ new report suggesting al-Qaida was not involved in the September 11, 2012 attack against American targets in Benghazi, Libya — calling the article “an effort to revive this discredited theory that the anti-Islam video was behind it.”
Fred Fleitz spoke with Fox News’ Jamie Colby about the “bombshell” New York Times report published Saturday, which claims the murder of Libyan Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans was carried out by Libyans angry over an American-made anti-Islamic video posted on Youtube.com months before the attack.
-
-
Sources within Libya, including intelligence sources within the Libyan Tribal system have reported that the American shot in Benghazi today Ronald Thomas Smith II was not a teacher as was widely reported. Tribal elders report that currently there are no foreign teachers employed in Libya and that Ronald Smith was in Tripoli meeting John McCain on Tuesday and Wednesday according to sources who were present during the meetings.
-
Since 2007, ABC News and the New York Times have known that ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, missing in Iran, was spying there for the CIA.
-
-
-
Given the number of books and articles about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its controversial undertakings across the globe, it’s surprising that the US spy agency’s first encounters with the Arab and Muslim world have not garnered more attention. Hugh Wilford’s new account, America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East, is an attempt to illuminate this dark and murky terrain.
-
-
-
-
CIA nominee Caroline Krass angers intelligence committee by claiming legal opinions on surveillance are beyond its scope
-
Over 50 years after the Bay of Pigs invasion went awry, the US federal government is still attempting to keep secrets about the failed overthrow of the Cuban government, with an Obama administration lawyer arguing this week to keep a document classified.
-
Kuzma’s suit against the CIA came just six months after he filed a freedom of information suit against the FBI on behalf of Leslie Pickering, a former spokesman for the press office of the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group.
Pickering knows the FBI is watching him but says he wants to know how and whether others have been targeted.
Kuzma also is working with Irwin on a federal freedom of information suit brought by members of Occupy Buffalo.
The group is seeking information documenting the extent of the government’s surveillance of the protest group.
-
Foreign Secretary William Hague today won a ruling to keep documents relating to the death of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko out of the public domain ahead of a proposed inquest.
Sir Robert Owen, the coroner presiding over the inquest into Mr Litvinenko’s murder, ruled earlier this year that a cache of Government papers concerning matters of relating to the death could not be withheld on grounds of national security.
-
Associated Press’ national security writer, Lara Jakes, wrote on Friday evening that the CIA paid Levinson’s family about $120,000, the value of the new contract the agency was preparing for him when he left for Iran, and the government gave the family a $2.5 million annuity, which provides tax-free income, multiple people briefed on the deal said. No one wanted a lawsuit that would air the secret details.
-
Robert Levinson was used by the CIA, forgotten by the USA, recently burned by media revelations, and left in Iran nearly seven years ago. The details surrounding the Levinson case are complex and his present whereabouts and physical condition are unconfirmed. It was back in 2007 that the retired FBI agent went missing in Iran. The story at the time was that he was simply a business man who had traveled there for private purposes. This idea has since been discounted as recent media revelations clearly assert that Levinson was in fact contracted in some capacity by the CIA. The revelations go on to show that, contrary to past statements by U.S. officials denying his connection to the government, Levinson had indeed been working on an unsanctioned intelligence gathering mission when he went missing.
-
Robert A. Levinson was an overweight bear of a man who once worked as an FBI agent and desperately wanted to recapture the life of international intrigue he relished as an expert on Russian organized crime. But as he sat in a hotel room in Geneva in early 2007, he was anxious about a secret mission he had planned to Iran.
-
Most CIA officers abroad pose as U.S. diplomats. But those given what’s called non-official cover are known as NOCs, pronounced “knocks,” and they typically pose as business executives. At the forum, the NOCs spoke of their cover jobs, their false identities and measures taken to protect them. Few said much about gathering intelligence.
A colleague passed a caustic note to the senior officer. “Lots of business,” it read. “Little espionage.”
-
Think of it as the CIA’s plunge into Hollywood – or into the absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency’s moves couldn’t be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11 global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of the world’s most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an orange jumpsuit in the world’s most infamous jail.
-
National security secrecy and a benighted sense of “what’s good for the country” can be a dangerous mix for democracy, empowering self-interested or misguided officials to supplant the people’s will, as President Truman warned and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern explains.
-
Cuban President Raul Castro has called for “civilised relations” with the United States, saying the two countries should respect their differences.
-
-
The war against Colombia’s socialist insurgency has turned on a campaign of targeted assassinations of rebel leaders using technology provided by the US.
-
A new report has exposed a secret CIA program in Colombia that has helped kill at least two dozen rebel leaders. According to the Washington Post, the program relies on key help from the National Security Agency and is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It began under former President George W. Bush, but continues under President Obama. The program has crippled the FARC rebel group by targeting its leaders using bombs equipped with GPS guidance. Up until 2010, the CIA controlled the encryption keys that allowed the bombs to read GPS data. In one case, in 2008, the United States and Colombia discovered a FARC leader hiding in Ecuador. According to the report, “To conduct an airstrike meant a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would hit the camp using a U.S.-made bomb with a CIA-controlled brain.” The attack killed the rebel leader and sparked a major flareup of tensions with Ecuador and Venezuela. The U.S. role in that attack had not previously been reported. We’re joined by the reporter who broke this story, Dana Priest of the Washington Post. Priest is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work focuses on intelligence and counterterrorism.
-
Ecuador President Rafael Correa warned Monday that reports US intelligence played a role in a 2008 Colombian attack on FARC rebels in his country could threaten regional peace efforts.
Over the weekend, The Washington Post reported that a secret Central Intelligence Agency program had helped Colombia kill at least two dozen leftist guerrilla leaders.
-
-
A secret US intelligence program has helped Colombia’s government kill at least two dozen leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the rebel insurgency also known as FARC, The Washington Post reported.
-
And the paper says the US provided Colombia with GPS equipment that can be used to transform regular munitions into “smart bombs” that can accurately home in on specific targets, even if they are located in dense jungles.
-
-
-
Here comes the backlash: one day after Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize marijuana, a United Nations drug control agency issued a press release condemning the country’s decision.
-
For the third time in three years, a CIA station chief has been outed in Pakistan, a country where the CIA is running one of its largest covert operations. It’s a remarkable record of failure by the CIA, since each outing, which has required a replacement of the station chief position, causes a breakdown in the agency’s network of contacts in the country.
-
To a question, Mazari said if the PTI discovered the name of pilot who had operated the drone, then the name will be shared with the police and ostensibly he or she will also be nominated in the FIR.
-
-
An inquiry into whether Scottish airports were used by the CIA to transport terror suspects to secret prisons for torture has been scrapped and handed over to MPs.
-
The European Court of Human Rights will on Tuesday examine claims that Poland turned a blind eye to the torture on its territory of two Guantanamo-bound prisoners of the CIA. Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, a 42-year-old Palestinian, and Saudia Arabian national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 48, will tell the court that the government in Warsaw authorised the US intelligence agency to detain their clients in Poland for several months in 2002-03 and that they were repeatedly tortured by waterboarding during that time.
-
Europe’s human rights court shone a rare public light Tuesday on the secret network of European prisons that the CIA used to interrogate terror suspects, reviving memories and questions about the “extraordinary renditions” that angered many on this continent.
-
The European Court of Human Rights is hearing a case brought by two terror suspects who accuse Poland of conniving in US human rights abuses.
-
-
Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri bring first case against Poland at ECHR
-
Terror suspects subjected to extraordinary rendition tell European court of human rights they were waterboarded
-
Lawyers say a Saudi national and a Palestinian were tortured in a secret US facility in a remote part of Poland.
-
-
-
-
An inquiry into whether Scottish airports were used by the CIA to transport terror suspects to secret prisons for torture has been scrapped and handed over to MPs.
-
Britain’s intelligence agencies ‘totally unprepared’ for US response to 9/11 and years later ‘co-operated with interrogations’
-
But Polish envoys said they could not share information with the court because that could compromise a separate investigation by Polish prosecutors, and because the court could not guarantee the information would be kept confidential.
“The government does not wish to confirm or deny the facts cited by the applicants,” Artur Nowak-Far, under-secretary of state in the Polish foreign ministry, told the court.
-
The European Court of Human Rights yesterday heard claims that Poland had turned a blind eye to the torture of two Guantanamo-bound prisoners of the CIA on its soil.
The case marks the first time Europe’s role in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects reached the European Court of Human Rights.
Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, a 42-year-old Palestinian, and Saudi Arabian national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 48, told the court that Warsaw authorised the US intelligence agency to detain their clients in Poland for several months in 2002-03.
-
-
-
-
-
Three years, $40 million and 6,000+ pages later, the report on CIA torture and secret prisons during the Bush era is still stuck in the declassification process, with CIA officials fighting the Senators calling for its release.
-
-
It cost $40 million to produce, documents serious wrongdoing, and doesn’t threaten national security. Team Obama won’t release it.
-
-
WikiLeaks’ major achievement is in weakening the authority of US intelligence, according to the whistleblowing website founder, Julian Assange, who has just marked three years under virtual house arrest in the UK.
Julian Assange believes that the WikiLeaks website he founded represents “an example of a small publisher beating the Pentagon” and by doing so reducing the public fear of government institutions.
-
U.S. drone attacks have killed 2,446 civilians in the last decade in Pakistan alone. The Pakistanis know us by our drones, not by our love.
-
“To me, America means drones, and drones mean the death of our people. How can we be friends with those who kill our people?” says Murad Ali, a rickshaw driver in Peshawar, Pakistan. “When Obama became the president, I hoped that there would be a positive change in American policies. I am surprised that Obama proved himself to be the enemy of Pakistani people and Muslims.”
-
-
Chairman PTI Imran Khan expressed shock and disappointment over Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s statement that PTI’s drone protest was isolating Pakistan.
Khan, in a statement, reminded the PM that PML-N, along with the PPP had not only been a party to the parliamentary resolutions (present and previous) against drones, but also party to the anti-drone resolution in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) provincial Assembly.
-
-
The daily wrote that 10 ScanEagle reconnaissance drones — smaller versions of the larger Predator drones that once were frequently flown over Iraq — are expected to be sent by March. Administration sources told the Times that the delivery comes as the Iraqis had virtually run out of Hellfire missiles.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Americans abhor mass shootings in our communities, but why do we allow our government to kill so many innocents abroad?
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Unmanned aerial vehicles, better known as ‘drones’, are in high demand and are a multimillion dollar industry. They are praised for not risking pilot’s lives and are formidable weapon – a nightmare for the enemy. But there are loud voices that label them as unaccountable killing machines and demand they be banned. Today we talk about the drone controversy with a former drone pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce Black.
-
-
-
-
Pakistan is planning to introduce an anti-drone resolution at an upcoming meeting of the UN Human rights Council in Geneva, Press TV reports.
-
Islamabad says drone strikes kill too many civilians and violate its sovereignty.
-
-
Chuck Hagel wants to bolster fraught relations with Pakistan as airstrikes continue to cause anger and suspicion
-
An alleged U.S. drone strike killed two al-Qaida suspects in Yemen’s southeastern province of Hadramawt Friday, an official said, a day after U.N. rights experts expressed “serious concern” over such attacks.
“The drone raid targeted a vehicle in which two al-Qaida suspects were travelling completely destroying it and killing them,” the government official in Hadramawt — an al-Qaida stronghold — told Agence France Presse.
The source could not immediately identify the suspects.
-
Sana’a: At least two alleged Al Qaida fighters were killed on Friday in the Yemen’s southeastern Hadramout province, security official told Gulf News.
-
It has long been said that in war, “truth is the first casualty.”
It is generally accepted, however, that the United States, the world’s leading democracy, should try to make truth-telling a common practice when it goes to war.
When Gen. David Petraeus was U.S. commander in Afghanistan in 2010 he issued guidance to his troops, one of the key points of which was to “be first with the truth.” The guidance explained, “Avoid spinning, and don’t try to ‘dress up’ an ugly situation. Acknowledge setbacks and failures, including civilian casualties, and then state how we’ll respond and what we’ve learned.”
-
-
-
The Ishaq Principle has the weight of mathematical law: Kill, kill, kill, profess no knowledge of the killing, throw a curtain of extreme secrecy around the event, and make special provision for wedding parties, more especially traversing remote areas. Drone murder is a WAR CRIME. Its personal authorization by POTUS makes him a war criminal. Period. We may pretend, as is now happening, that Putin is evil incarnate, but if so, I contend that Obama is keeping up with him, atrocity for atrocity.
-
-
Former DEA El Paso boss: Agent Camarena had discovered the arms-for-drugs operation run on behalf of the Contras, aided by U.S. officials in the National Security Council and the CIA, and threatened to blow the whistle on the covert operation.
-
-
Yemen’s parliament has voted for a ban on drone strikes, but experts said Monday lawmakers have limited powers and their vote is unlikely to impact Washington’s bid to crush Al-Qaeda militants.
-
These drone strikes are NOT the antiseptic, surgical strikes claimed by the administration. It is NOT only an unknown number of terrorists that are being killed, it is also ordinary people trying to live lives like you and me. What could possibly give the United States the right to send our deadly weapons into other countries and kill its citizens? Just imagine how the U.S. would react if another country were to send its drones here with the excuse it is killing people who may do harm to their country. How many of us would not want to turn our fury on the invading country?
-
“Bryant saw a flash on the screen: the explosion. Parts of the building collapsed. The child had disappeared. Bryant had a sick feeling in his stomach.
“‘Did we just kill a kid?’ he asked the man sitting next to him.
“‘Yeah, I guess that was a kid,’” the pilot replied.
“‘Was that a kid?’ they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
“Then someone they didn’t know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. ‘No. That was a dog,’ the person wrote.
“They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?”
Welcome to pixel war.
-
-
-
-
“Before any strike is taken,” President Obama assured us in his speech this May on U.S. Drone and Counter-terrorism policy, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured.” Nice words, but as Jon Snow remarks in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, “Men are men, vows are words, and words are wind.” Sorry, I can’t help it if a GOT quote most aptly fit there.
-
-
Yemen’s parliament has voted for a ban on drone strikes, but experts said Monday lawmakers have limited powers and their vote is unlikely to impact Washington’s bid to crush Al-Qaeda militants.
The United States operates all unmanned aircraft flying over Yemen in support of Sanaa’s attempts to break Al-Qaeda, and intensified strikes this year have killed dozens of militants.
-
For those of us concerned with the Constitution, due process, and the rule of law, however, “suspected militant” is just a euphemism for a person not charged with any crime, not afforded even the most perfunctory due process protections, but executed by presidential decree anyway. In this way, we are no better than those we kill in the name of safety.
-
Anger over the American drone campaign against militants in Yemen swelled Friday with word that most of those killed in a strike a day earlier were civilians in a wedding party.
The death toll reached 17 overnight, hospital officials in central Bayda province said Friday. Five of those killed were suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda, but the remainder were unconnected with the militancy, Yemeni security officials said.
-
Missiles fired by a U.S. drone slammed into a convoy of vehicles traveling to a wedding party in central Yemen on Thursday, killing at least 13 people, Yemeni security officials said.
-
Fifteen people who had been heading to a wedding in Yemen have been killed in an air strike. Local media reported that a drone attack had been responsible, and the party-goers had been hit instead of an Al-Qaeda convoy
-
Missiles fired by a US drone struck a convoy of vehicles on their merry way to a wedding in Yemen on Thursday, killing AT LEAST 13 people, and leaving charred bodies and vehicles littering a road. Thing is, nobody really knows whether these were good guys or bad guys. Either way, they’re dead.
One military official told the Associated Press that the drone mistook the wedding party for an al-Qaida convoy, killing local tribesmen instead of terrorists. In other words, a bunch of innocent civilians just got toasted by the good, ole U S of A.
-
Eighteen Yemeni civilians have been killed this week in two separate attacks by U.S. military drones.
-
-
A truck full of 14 people is bumping its way down rural Yemen when, out of nowhere, a missile strikes. And then another. Children are killed, officials argue with local tribesmen over whether or not the 11 killed in the strike were members of al-Qaeda. The US, which doesn’t take ownership of the strike for months, refuses to comment further.
-
A drone strike by the United States, which targeted a wedding convoy, reportedly killed anywhere from ten to seventeen people and injured as many as thirty individuals.
-
-
-
With the development of robotic warfare, accountability has virtually gone extinct.
-
So most of the dead appeared to be people suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda. That’s a whole lot of qualifiers to make the point that those who were killed were the intended targets.
But there’s a pattern of the Times doing this.
In August of this year there were several suspected US drone attacks. Strikes on August 1 and August 8 reportedly killed several civilians, including children, part of a series of drone strikes around that time.
-
-
Another bill, HR-1083, called the “No Armed Drones Act” (NADA), would establish prohibitions to prevent the use of an unmanned aircraft system as a weapon while operating in US airspace. Rep.Welch signed onto this bill on Oct. 22, 2013.
-
States that have already acquired lethal, remotely piloted aircraft have at least a moral responsibility to use the technology wisely. As a result of CIA actions, the US is creating generations of enemies in some regions of Pakistan – and perhaps at home as well – for no discernible strategic advantage.
-
In a recent BBC documentary, it was alleged a short-lived British Army unit called the Military Reaction Force (MRF) had assassinated suspected Republican terrorists on the streets of west Belfast. It was suggested that some of those killed were unarmed.
One of the interviewed soldiers said: “We were not there to act like an Army unit. We were there in a position to go after IRA and kill them when we found them.”
Perhaps those of us who criticise the CIA’s activities in Pakistan should ponder what the MRF allegedly did. The agents of the British State – the armed forces and police – are there to uphold the rule of law. Assassination moves us one step closer to anarchy.
-
It is difficult to comprehend how our Nobel Peace Prize President can defend lethal unmanned drone Predators and Reapers that deliver Hellfire missiles that kill, maim and terrorize thousands, are hideously immoral and counterproductive. Drones have assassinated wedding parties, children, farmers and rescuers, and murder people who have not been tried in a court of law. They are illegal.
Drone killings are acts of “premeditated murder.” Murder by sudden or secret attack is a crime in all 50 states, and was banned by Presidents Ford and Reagan.
-
We saw our prime minister’s (PM) silence over drones in his visit to the US.
-
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has referred to civilian casualties caused by U.S. forces as a reason for not signing the agreement. “For years,” Karzai said in a statement issued after the strike, “our people are being killed and their houses are being destroyed under the pretext of the war on terror.”
-
Our audience debate whether the U.S. should halt the use of drones in warfare.
-
During the Bush presidency, there were 48 recorded drone strikes in Pakistan; during Obama’s there have been more than 300. Although we would never know the ascertainable number of casualties by drones in Pakistan, commonsense does make some suggestions. The population of a typical village in Fata is not segregated in a manner that militants live on one side while women, children, old and sick people live on the other. Therefore, when a drone kills two or three militants as is often claimed, it must kill many more. That ‘precision kill’ story is humbug.
More so when, following Israel’s strategy in Palestine, the drones return to target the rescuers gathered to pick up the dead and wounded by the first strike. Are all rescuers militants? And how does one distinguish between a militant and a non-combatant? The New York Times in March 2012 made it easy to define a militant: “All military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise.”
-
The 21st century with flying cars and android servants envisioned in the likes of The Jetsons and Back to the Future have yet to become a reality, but flying robots do exist—just not in the forms we expected.
-
-
-
Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who shed light on US drones in Yemen, is not permited to attend ceremony to receive award
-
Tahir also talked about how she has experienced the hatred of people who are for the use of drones and how she is often attacked for being a “Taliban sympathizer.” She said that it sometimes goes so far that the topic becomes almost taboo.
-
-
When Obama took office, it seemed like Africa was finally going to get the serious attention that it deserved in terms of American foreign policy. After generations of neglect from the American government, maybe, just maybe, the United States would recognize the strategic value of the African continent, not to mention the basic need to treat the people of that continent as something more than a basket case full of failed states. Curious that when the United States has been energized, in places such as Libya, the country at issue is more Arab than African, and the man who the United States helped overthrow in Libya was actually emerging as America’s best friend in Africa against the growing threat of extremist Islamic influence and terrorism.
-
-
Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years. And as he emerged from prison, he did not seek revenge. He instantly forgave. He sought peace not war. Cheney said he was a terrorist. Was he? Cheney loved war. Mandela loved peace. Who was — who is — the terrorist?
-
-
-
The White House has announced President Obama and the First Lady will travel to South Africa next week to honor South African President Nelson Mandela.
-
The CIA’s involvement in these activities is unclear, but Leach claims the agency sent South Africans to a facility in Taiwan for advanced psychological warfare training. The Telcom auditing official called the CIA’s alleged wiretap training “very sinister.” He suspects the CIA used the program to develop its own spies in Telcom, to protect its assets in the country at this time.
-
Engineers are behind government spying tools and military weapons. We should be conscious of how our designs are used
-
-
-
Congressional representatives and government officials met Jaber and expressed their condolences, but provided no explanations. Nor has the US admitted that it made a mistake.
A week later, Gen Joseph Dunford, Jr., the US and NATO commander in Afghanistan, did apologise for a drone attack that killed a child and seriously wounded two women in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.
-
The United States’ use of lethal drones to kill terrorists in foreign countries began in the Bush administration and has significantly widened under the Obama administration.
-
The US must also not forget that the soldiers who slay the innocent from their computer screens will return to their own communities either psychologically damaged or as ruthless killers. It must not be forgotten that 350 US troops returned from Iraq and took their own lives in 2012. Societies that become too comfortable with killing inevitably bear the tragedy themselves. It is in our hands to fill this world with communities of peace through education, rather than communities of war perpetrating random attacks. Time has come for the superpowers to change their plans in the Middle East. They must use education as a weapon, not drones. If they really desire peace, that is.
-
An unprecedented attempt to discover if British officials are complicit in the CIA drone campaign in Pakistan reached the Court of Appeal this week.
The case is brought by Noor Khan, a Pakistani tribesman whose father was among over 40 civilians killed in a March 2011 drone strike.
Khan’s lawyers are attempting to get English courts to examine whether UK officials at GCHQ share information about targets in Pakistan with the CIA, and whether this could therefore make British spies complicit in murder or war crimes.
-
On December 5, 2013 Rep. Barbara Lee of California asked for and was granted permission to address the United States House of Representatives for one minute regarding the war in Afghanistan. What she said was absolutely shocking!
“Mr. Speaker, as most of us joined family and friends over Thanksgiving week last week, 2,500 Afghan elders voted on a security agreement that could potentially leave thousands of United States troops in Afghanistan for at least another decade.”
-
The Associated Press revealed today that “retired” FBI agent Robert Levinson was recruited by a band of rogue CIA analysts to run a totally unauthorized spying operation. He’d been working with them for years, and had a contract since 2006 related to writing articles about his “travels.”
-
Barret details how the CIA was created out of WWII and the failure of intelligence at Pearl Harbor. He said that over the years there have been a number of efforts to keep the power of the CIA in check.
-
If you plan on looking for online deals this Black Friday — and if 2013 is anything like 2012, more than 57 million Americans will — you’ll likely visit a little website called Amazon.com. From the outside, the world’s largest online store works like magic: Click a button and in few days, some chosen item will miraculously show up at your doorstep.
-
-
Since 2011, the NDAA has contained provisions for the indefinite detention of American citizens.
-
Congress is in recess now (that’s why it’s so quiet here in Washington) and when they return the first order of business for the Senate is to take up the 2014 NDAA. The bill, authorizing activities of the Department of Defense, is one of the few bills that routinely gets a full hearing in the Senate and has a high likelihood of being passed into law.
[...]
In short, S. 1353 does very little of note. Indeed, I am comfortable predicting that it will be added to the NDAA with nary a dissent. And thereafter, Congress may well wash its hands of cybersecurity and mark the problem “sovled” — which, come to think of it, might very well be the best possible result.
-
The troubling NDAA provision first signed into law in 2012, which permits the military to detain individuals indefinitely without trial, remains on the books for 2014.
-
Eighty-five of 100 U.S. senators voted to renew the president’s power to indefinitely detain Americans, denying them of their fundamental right to due process.
-
Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan signed Senate Bill No. 94 into law yesterday. The bill seeks to nullify section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). “It is important to recall that indefinite detention first appeared in section 1021 of the 2012 NDAA, which provided warrant for indefinite detention of U.S. citizens,” said Snyder.
-
Jeremy Hammond faces 10 years in prison for hacking Stratfor Global, but many details of his conviction don’t add up
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Action at 7:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Serving those who abuse their power
Summary: 2013 a terrible year for spies and vandals who work for the state; propaganda blockbuster designed to manufacture consent for this is already in the pipeline
Having repeatedly covered NSA affairs for several years now, we finally have documents confirming what we warned about, reminding people that Free software is essential for genuine trust in computing [1]. This post is an accumulation of about 3 weeks of news about the NSA and its affiliates (commercial companies and other ‘satellite’ agencies around the world). This will hopefully help readers get their heads around it all with a high level of concision (yet a comprehensive enough scope). It takes a huge amount of time to prepare a post like this (weeks of daily research) and the references below should help support the claims, providing a gateway to further information.
In December, the series of revolutionary [2], important [3] and widely-known [4] scandals turned 6 months old [5]. Two court decisions were contradicting one another and the ACLU plans to appeal, based on its latest statement. The ACLU challenged in court the tracking and profiling systems that are based on people’s phonecalls. One judge considered it illegal [6-9] and unconstitutional [10-11], agreeing with many prominent commentators [12] (maligned by CNN [13]), putting aside the later ruling [14-18]. Even sections of the corporate media [19], which usually pretends to be impartial while pro-NSA [20], gave this coverage.
Merkel, who told Obama this was reminiscent of the Stasi [21,22] (still in positions of power [23]), made some headlines also. A German coalition now generally favours German-owned or Free software because of the NSA revelations [24-25] and lack of trust [26-27] (Germany is not alone [28-29]). France would be hypocritical to say much at this point [30] and new videos reveal a very high degree of distrust even within Europe itself, dividing East and West, still (Not East and West Germany but Russia and/or Europe and north America/UK) [31-32].
The importance of the latest court ruling is high; it is a nightmare for the NSA [33] because it recognises Edward Snowden as a whistleblower [34] and makes it known that the real criminals are Clapper, Alexander and other military men/politicians including President Obama [35], who tries to dodge discussion about his complicity in this [36-43] and actively obstructs justice [44-46], delaying/procrastinating [47] where possible, etc.
The US and UK (closely connected [48]) have politicians who merely parrot the talking points from spooks [49-50] and this is being noticed. They no longer get away with it so easily, not even when state propaganda channels repeat the claim (CBS is widely disgraced for what it did for the NSA a few weeks ago).
Edward Snowden, another man whom history will most likely remember as a hero [51] is looking for asylum to become effective next year, choosing Germany [52-53] or Brasil as one very strategic, strong-enough-to-resist-blackmail asylum (the reporter who worked with him lives there) [54-56]. Brasil has just ditched Boeing, perhaps in part due to Wikileaks and Snowden (revealing corruption and back doors) [57-60]. In this age of governance by algorithms [61] and hardware (e.g. CCTV [62]) we risk approaching something that’s worse than 1984, to paraphrase Snowden [63-69] (he claims to have “won” [70-75]). Some people want the NSA shut down [76] and they get their views broadcasted [77-78], citing/crediting Snowden’s contributions [79-80].
It is only getting worse over time [81-84], as the NSA is ignoring advice from NSA manager-turned-whistleblower, instead following the trajectory suggested by Morell (CIA) [85-88]. And so, observing a sort of entryism (fox guards the hen house), Snowden wants to accomplish real change this time [89], with or without help from the corporate press [77-78]. He called for real change (through Congress [79], which should protect him [80]) in this age of more useless promises from chronic liars [89].
British scientist Tim Berners-Lee (best known for creating the Web) called for real change [90], but British spies and their apologists (see Guardian articles, including one about Bletchley Park) seem to just burying the current events under the rug [91-94].
There are real concerns here [95] because political espionage (see the surveillance used against KGB’s Putin [96-97] and outrageous surveillance of regulators, politicians, and even charities [98-111]) or industrial espionage (examples given before) are the key areas the NSA has been involved in. It’s not about terrorism [112-114], which is mostly a privacy-infringing [115-117] pretext and excuse [118] (the corporate press needs to acknowledge this [119], putting aide the 9/11 hype [120-121]). “Sometimes I think we do the terrorists’ job for them,” Dan K. Thomasson wrote [122], alluding to how we prove them right by mocking and revoking our own freedom and rights.
Zynga’s Mark Pincus has asked Obama to pardon Edward Snowden [123], but the spies want to just kill Snowden [124-126] because they are sociopaths [127-128] (exceptionalism complex) and empathy/sympathy cannot be tolerated [129-130] (Snowden cannot expect fair trial [131-132]). It should be noted that Zynga, a spam and surveillance company (which also makes games), is too hypocritical; it’s ridiculous for Zynga to take such a position. A lot of the surveillance done by the NSA has been facilitated by so-called ‘cloud’ and Internet companies, as well as carriers [133-144]. They store data for the government, so they — and especially phone companies — should be seen as NSA extensions [145]. Fake/weak encryption and back doors play a role [146-147] (bribes played a role [148-152] and alternatives now emerge, e.g. from BitTorrent [153-154]). Perhaps Mark Pincus worries about loss of business [155-156], not ethics. Some businesses walk out of the US for business purposes [157-158], especially when it comes to data storage.
The NSA has become somewhat of a joke (subject of satire [159-161]) and its biggest proponents in politics are the same right-wing politicians who tried to classify Wikileaks “terrorism” and treat it as such [162]. They lie, too [163]. It’s that exceptionalism again.
Some suspect that the NSA now interferes with free speech [164-165] using cracking techniques [166] (evidence is weak most of the time). Glenn Greenwald has blasted the corporate media [167-180] for helping the NSA do its thing and also hinted at the next major leak: the NSA and GCHQ are dying to snoop on your gadgets mid-flight [181]. Alan Dershowitz, who pretended to help Wikileaks (he only exploited Wikileaks), is showing his real face again by slamming Greenwald [182-185] and Applebaum, a Wikileaks employee, has just had his house in Germany allegedly raided [186], ahead of a major report [187-188] that reveals serious NSA crimes [189] and back doors — the types of back doors that would in theory enable spooks to plant suicide notes and tamper with browser history before assassinating people and making it look like a suicide [190].
The surveillance industry is taking many blows and right now the British media is trying to use Turing [191], a national hero to manym as part of a recruitment drive for GCHQ. This includes a propaganda film featuring the same shameless actor who starred in the anti-Wikileaks film. It’s not just the CIA but also the NSA et al. that require popular propaganda films to change public image. Be ready for gullible people to get deceived and to somehow associate NSA et al. with beating the Nazis, never mind if a lot of Nazi officers actually joined the CIA and NSA after WW2. Propaganda can be powerful and it is inevitable. The more we find out about the NSA, the better equipped we’ll be in shooting down this type of propaganda. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
With open source code the NSA would be foolish to install a true back door.
-
-
Freedom is a precious commodity. Like virtue, once it is given up, it is difficult — if not impossible — to regain.
-
The NSA “has become a four-letter word in the US” and Americans are irritated, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams, told RT while commenting on a ruling which states that the agency’s spying is legal.
-
When June 2013 came to a close, the world was just coming to terms with the revelations of widespread and unaccountable spying by the American National Security Agency (NSA) revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Mass gathering of metadata, recording of phonecalls, spying on civilian populations: at first, it seemed as if this would be a good old fashioned unaccountable-spy-agency-against-the-people kind of story. But it would soon become apparent that the rot went much further than that.
-
-
The broad issue that Judge Leon looked at is the NSA’s power to collect metadata – the record of who is telephoning whom, when the call is made and for how long. Defenders of the NSA argue that the acquisition of phone metadata only allows the agency to see the context in which a call is made, establishing links between potential terrorists. It does not give the NSA access to the content of calls.
-
In the six months since Edward Snowden began leaking details about the National Security Agency’s efforts to collect telephone data on a colossal scale, NSA officials have repeatedly asserted that the program is on firm legal ground. Now U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon has ruled that it probably infringes on the Fourth Amendment, calling it “almost Orwellian” in scope.
-
60 Minutes’ NSA flattery: CBS News’ 60 Minutes touted a big story on the NSA surveillance beat when it got exclusive access to NSA officials to talk to them about their mass surveillance programs and Edward Snowden’s leaks. The story did contain one bit of pertinent news — that the NSA is considering granting Snowden amnesty in exchange for the return of its documents, a trial balloon that Reuters’ Jack Shafer examined more closely.
The piece’s reporter, John Miller, explained an behind-the-scenes interview with 60 Minutes that he didn’t want the story to be a puff piece. As it turned out, in the eyes of most every media critic who watched it, that’s exactly what he produced. The Wire’s Sara Morrison laid out a good, basic summary of the puffiness of the piece, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt highlighted a few elements: zero difficult questions, no NSA critics in the piece, unchecked ad hominem attacks against Snowden.
-
In a stunning decision, a DC-based federal judge has ruled that the National Security Agency spying revealed this summer violates the constitution.
-
-
-
Klayman has praised the courage of Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who ruled that the NSA’s regular collection of virtually all phone records is almost certainly unconstitutional.
Klayman’s case, on behalf of a Verizon Wireless customer, was launched after the extent of government spying on Americans was unveiled by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who said the court’s decision made him feel justified in releasing classified documents. Named in the case are the NSA, Department of Justice and several U.S. officials, including President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
-
-
A U.S. judge ruled the National Security Agency’s program that collects records of millions of Americans’ phone calls is lawful, rejecting a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union to the controversial counter-terrorism program.
-
-
-
The National Security Agency on Friday won a court opinion ruling that its tactics of bulk phone data collected on Americans and others worldwide does not violate the U.S. Constitution. Following the decision, vandals began defacing the Wikipedia entry for the district court judge who issued the decision: the Hon. William H. Pauley III.
-
A panel has recommended curbing the secretive powers of the National Security Agency, warning its mass spying sweeps in the war on terror had gone too far.
-
-
-
During angry exchanges over the scope and scale of American spies’ snooping exposed by the NSA whistlewblower Edward Snowden, Angela Merkel reportedly told Barack Obama his country’s conduct was reminiscent of the Stasi.
The German Chancellor had the discussion with her US counterpart in October, shortly after the revelation that her personal mobile phone had been tapped.
-
It was set up as a unique historical experiment: an agency that would open up the secret service’s files to those it had spied upon. But now the commissioner in charge of the East Germany’s secret police archive has admitted that his agency still counts 37 former Stasi employees among its staff.
-
-
-
One year ago, most people on either side of Atlantic had scant or no knowledge of the NSA and its activities. Edward Snowden’s revelations changed all that and rocked one of the pillars of transatlantic relations.
-
Deutsche Telekom has also proposed to help Europe avoid NSA surveillance by creating “Schengen area routing,” a network for the 26 European countries that have agreed to remove passport controls at their borders. This network would supposedly allow these nations to securely exchange data among themselves. Conveniently, the Schengen area does not include the U.K., which is now known to be closely cooperating with the NSA.
-
-
During its first four years, Berlin-based Posteo e.K. struggled to find customers for its secure e-mail service. That changed in June, when U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that his former employer monitored phones and e-mails worldwide. In the past six months, Posteo has tripled the subscribers of its 1-euro-per-month ($1.37) encryption service, to more than 30,000.
-
The French President promulgated [fr] the 2014-2019 Defense Bill last night. Adoption of article 20 (former article 13) opens the door to the generalised surveillance of communications and the failure to request its constitutional challenge demonstrates the deep crisis of a political system which does not hesitate anymore to massively compromise fundamental rights. La Quadrature du Net thanks all those who contributed to the opposition to this article. It calls for the continuation of the fight against surveillance of our communications on the Internet by any means: before parliament or judges, through technology and usage choices.
-
-
-
Back in August, not long after Edward Snowden began leaking details about NSA surveillance programs, President Obama created a panel to review the NSA’s data surveillance practices and recommend changes. Yesterday, the panel released its 308-page report and recommended 46 changes, including ending the collection of phone call metadata, which the panel says “creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.” Instead, phone companies or other private entities should control the data, and it should only be accessed with an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
-
-
It’s curious how then-President Bill Clinton was impeached and removed from office by the US Congress for just one lie concerning the relatively trivial matter of an extramarital affair – a scandal that didn’t concern his official duties.
But James Clapper and Keith Alexander, who are in charge of the NSA system, have told a number of lies while under oath – one journalist counted 14 lies by Alexander – to the US Congress concerning matters of vital importance to the Congress, the American people and the world. Specifically, they have lied, used half-truths, and obfuscated while under oath to conceal from the Congress, and the public, the massive surveillance of the American people’s online activities secretly carried out by the NSA. Yet no charges or attempted charges have been brought.
-
The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.
-
During a White House meeting called to brief America’s largest tech companies today about government overreach in electronic surveillance, President Barack Obama changed the subject – angering some meeting participants by shifting gears to address the failed launch of healthcare.gov.
‘That wasn’t what we came for,’ a vice-president of a company whose CEO attended told MailOnline. ‘We really didn’t care for a PR pitch about how the administration is trying to salvage its internal health care tech nightmare.’
-
A panel of presidential advisers has urged the White House to rein in the National Security Agency, and recommended a set of expansive policy reforms that would check the agency’s broad surveillance powers, including an end to the bulk collection of virtually all American phone records. At the same time, the recommendations also leave in place most of the NSA’s surveillance programs.
-
The review panel’s calls for minor reforms are already more than President Obama is likely to want to make, but as the surveillance scandal continues to grow, his ability to put off calls for reform with promises of “transparency” is going to be tested.
-
Notice how the White House moved quickly to thwart the only substantive NSA changes the review group was making
-
There is one concrete way for the president to demonstrate good faith in dealing with the reforms: Pardon Edward Snowden.
-
US President Barack Obama has suggested there may be a review of surveillance by the National Security Agency in the wake of a series of spying revelations.
-
-
U.S. government intelligence officials late last night released some previously secret declarations submitted to the court in Jewel v. NSA — EFF’s long-running case challenging the NSA’s domestic surveillance program – plus a companion case, Shubert v. Obama. The documents were released pursuant to the court’s order.
Surprisingly, in these documents and in the brief filed with them, the government continues to claim that plaintiffs cannot prove they were surveilled without state secrets and that therefore, a court cannot rule on the legality or constitutionality of the surveillance. For example, despite the fact that these activities are discussed every day in news outlets around the world and even in the president’s recent press conference, the government states broadly that information that may relate to Plaintiffs’ claims that the “NSA indiscriminately intercepts the content of communications, and their claims regarding the NSA’s bulk collection of … metadata” is still a state secret.
-
The U.S. government again claimed state-secrets privileges in a move to block two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans’ phone communications and email, according to court filings late Friday.
-
This weekend, the US government filed documents in two long-running cases (both in California’s Northern District) related to National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance. As the New York Times notes, these filings mark the first time the government acknowledged that the NSA “started systematically collecting data about Americans’ e-mails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants.” However, the bigger takeaway from the new documents is that the government continues to evoke state secrets privilege—the right to prevent certain, potentially harmful information from being used in court even if it means a case might be dismissed—despite previous rulings against this argument.
-
-
Robles: Do you think that the UK has lost a lot of sovereignty to the US, especially with all this NSA spying and stuff? Or is that…?
Galloway:No, I do, I believe that the British State has essentially rented itself out, I don’t want to be too candid in the analogy, but it has …
Robles: I was going to say lapdog, but I tried not to.
Galloway:Well it’s worse than that. It has prostituted itself to the United States. The GCHQ at Cheltenham is doing most of the heavy lifting for the National Security Agency, in the illegal vacuuming of the spectrum, and is collecting uncountable scores of millions of telephone calls, texts and e-mails every day across Europe, and further beyond, as the fiber optics cross the British landmass, coming from the United States across the Atlantic and thence to Europe.
-
The special NSA report was a promotional. It follows a string of spectacularly biased ‘news’ shows and shoddy reporting
-
Home affairs committee asks home secretary whether she has been given proof by MI5 and MI6 to support their rhetoric
-
-
-
-
-
-
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told the Brazilian government that he would be willing to help it investigate US eavesdropping activities in Brazil in exchange for political asylum.
In an open letter to the Brazilian people published by Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, Snowden – who is currently in hiding in Russia – offered support over NSA program’s targeting of Brazil.
“I’ve expressed my willingness to assist where it’s appropriate and legal, but, unfortunately, the US government has been working hard to limit my ability to do so,” said the letter, translated into Portuguese by the newspaper.
-
Brazil ditches Boeing’s F/A-18 in favor of SAAB’s JAS 39 Gripen over the NSA’s rogue behavior. In a press conference tonight, Brazil’s defense department announces that Brazil will buy the Swedish fighter jet, according to multiple Brazilian sources. The direct reason for rejecting Boeing’s F/A-18 was the United States’ hostile and unacceptable spying behavior against Brazil and the rest of the world.
-
-
-
The United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency operate Special Collecting Services (SCS) “listening posts” in more than 80 cities worldwide, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. [1] In recent months, the NSA’s extensive electronic eavesdropping
-
One of the biggest stories of the year has been the perhaps-not-shocking revelation that the American NSA and our own GCHQ have been snooping on our everyday communications. Becky Hogge writes about how we’re struggling to grasp the consequences of this erosion of our rights, and asks what we might do to counter it
-
-
The The 30-year-old who revealed the NSA’s massive spying programs claims the widespread surveillance is far beyond the ominous thought police of author George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
-
After NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden granted The Washington Post an extensive interview this week, he took to United Kingdom airwaves to offer the traditional “alternative Christmas address” on Channel 4.
-
-
-
-
-
-
“If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public.”
-
-
Nearly six months after the first leaks, The Washington Post has landed the first extensive interview with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, offering a new peek into his motivations for the life-changing leaks and his subsequent life in Russia. In contrast to earlier interviews, Snowden now says the leaks are having the real political impact he’d hoped for. “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” Snowden told the Post. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated.”
-
-
-
-
How many people have been blackmailed by NSA employees using these technologies?
The NSA isn’t saying.
-
-
We’ve been here before, in the 1960s and ’70s, when spy agencies flagrantly violated civil rights in the name of national security.
-
-
-
The NSA’s surveillance programme is prompting many US writers to abandon topics that could be deemed too sensitive – yet that programme looks set to grow
-
A review group hand-picked by United States President Barack Obama said last week that the National Security Agency needs to reform dozens of the ways it does business. One member of that panel, however, says the NSA doesn’t do enough.
Michael Morell, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a member of the five-person NSA review group compiled by Pres. Obama, said in a recent interview that the secretive US spy agency should have its powers expanded to collect not just telephone metadata, but email information as well.
-
-
There can no longer be an illusion that our information is private or used only for good purposes
-
-
All is not well in the land of US spooks despite them having access to all the data on citizens that they can eat.
William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, has warned that the agency knows too much.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the NSA can’t understand the data it has because it has too much to do anything useful with it.
-
-
That’s not the NSA routine — even Snowden doesn’t say it is. Cellphone usage, like that of other phones, goes into its collection of “metadata” — that is, what number is calling what number. The automatic collection does not include locations or travels of the phones.
-
-
The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has collaborated with more than 100 free speech groups and leading activists in an open letter to protest against the routine interception of data by governments around the world.
-
-
-
In the US, the official response to Snowden’s revelations celebrates journalism and calls for real change. In Britain, the picture has been rather different
-
-
The Edward Snowden revelations about government surveillance of private individuals resulted in 10 major issues of public interest being brought to the fore, the editor of the Guardian has told a high-profile panel convened to discuss internet privacy.
-
In his book “Decision Points”, former President George Bush recalls when he met Vladimir Putin for the first time at a Slovenian palace once used by the communist leader Tito. What was surprising to me was the fact that he admitted receiving a (psychological) intelligence briefing about Putin that included aspects of his personal religious faith.
-
-
-
New leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal an unexpected list of surveillance targets for the agency, including European economic regulators with no obvious connection to US national security. European Commission vice president Joaquín Almunia was one such target; he was surveilled during his tenure overseeing the European Union’s economic, financial, and monetary affairs. After Alumnia took authority over the commission’s antitrust office, he would go on to lead antitrust cases against Microsoft, Intel, and Google.
-
-
-
-
Unicef and Médecins du Monde were on surveillance list
-
Leigh Daynes, an executive director of Medecins du Monde in the UK, told the Guardian he was “shocked and surprised by these appalling allegations of secret surveillance on our humanitarian operations”.
-
Other targets were said to include the United Nations Children’s Fund, French aid organisation Medecins du Monde, French oil and gas firm Total, and French defence company Thales Group.
-
Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.
-
British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU’s competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top secret documents reveal.
-
-
-
Why Israel is reacting so differently than other countries, aside from possibly having been less naïve and having expected US spying, could relate to reports from a few months ago that Israel has sometimes joined the US in electronic spying on others and is on the receiving end of huge volumes of the controversial collected US intelligence.
-
-
A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
-
A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks, said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”
-
-
The National Security Agency likes to claim that intelligence officers are only collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, safely omitting their actual names from analysis. But a Stanford researcher, Jonathan Mayer, found that he and his co-author could easily match so-called “meta-data” to individual names with little more than a Google search.
-
-
Claims by the US spooks that they can’t find out much about a person from their metadata have been blown apart…
-
Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), who has been one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the NSA’s surveillance programs, said on Sunday that the government should move quickly to implement the White House’s reform recommendations, and suggested that by the end of next year, the NSA will no longer be collecting massive amounts of Americans’ phone data.
-
-
-
“The government seems to be trying to reset the clock to before June 2013 or even December 2005,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said in a statement.
-
Sometimes I think we do the terrorists’ job for them.
-
-
-
After all the virtual public flogging National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has received, in the past week a few voices have suggested cutting him some slack.
At a Tuesday closed-door meeting with tech leaders, one unnamed participant suggested to Obama that Snowden be pardoned; Obama said he couldn’t do that. During a 60 Minutes report on the leaks that aired Sunday, though, even an NSA official suggested it might be worth discussing amnesty—if and only if he returns the leaked documents securely, almost surely an impossibility at this point. (CBS news has been busy defending itself against accusations that Sunday’s show was a “puff piece.”)
Even that tiny, tentative olive branch seems to have crossed a line for security hawks. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander dismissed the idea, comparing Snowden to “a hostage taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10, and then say[ing], ‘You give me full amnesty and I’ll let the other 40 go.’”
Former CIA director James Woolsey responded to the suggestion of amnesty even more strongly, saying in a Fox News interview that Snowden should be hanged.
-
-
-
My Christmas holiday frequently includes a series of reunions with other former CIA people, often grouped by the overseas stations that we served in. This year the Istanbul gathering preceded Spain and the Rome Station ca. 1980 soon followed. Some of the retirees are still working for the government as contractors so I try to keep a low profile at such functions, rarely asking questions about what anyone might be doing and seldom venturing into any detailed critiques of current government policy. But sometimes my wife and I find the occasional gung ho expressions of solidarity with torturers and drone operators to be just a bit too much and we are forced to react.
-
-
-
-
-
The group, Safari Users Against Google’s Secret Tracking, has accused Google of bypassing security settings on the Safari internet browser in order to track their online browsing and to target them with personalised advertisements. However, Google is claiming that because it is based in the US the court has no jurisdiction to try the claims relating to UK claimants.
-
As Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University puts it, the intelligence agencies “presented with a mission by an extraordinarily imprudent national government in the United States, which having failed to prevent a very serious attack on American civilians at home, largely by ignoring warnings, decreed that they were never again to be put in a position where they should have known. This resulted in a military response, which is to get as close to everything as possible. Because if you don’t get as close to everything as possible, how can you say that you knew everything that you should have known?” In a real war, one in which the very survival of a state is threatened by a foreign adversary, almost anything is permissible, including the suspension of civil liberties, the right to privacy and all the other things we liberals hold dear. Between 1939 and 1945, Britain was governed by what was effectively a dictatorship wielding unimaginable powers, including comprehensive censorship, the power to requisition private property on demand, and so on. Citizens might not have liked this regime, but they consented to because they understood the need for it.
-
-
-
While the German cryptologist criticized carriers for failing to implement technology to protect customers from surveillance as well as fraud, he said he does not think they did so under pressure from spy agencies.
-
New cloud computing standards to be developed within the EU should facilitate users’ ability to transfer data and services between cloud providers, MEPs have said.17 Dec 2013
-
-
Concerns about the new technology were raised immediately, including from within the government. A 1984 report for the Greater London Council Police Committee warned that the system made every car a potential suspect and handed policy on mass surveillance to the police. “This possibility in a democracy is unacceptable,” it concluded.
-
A Senate committee released a report this week that goes to great lengths to determine all of the things that data brokers, the companies that trade in consumer data, don’t want to talk about. The 35-page report describes some of the companies’ strategies for collecting and organizing data, but significant portions of the report discuss what the companies are unwilling to talk about: namely, where they get a lot of their data and where that data is going.
-
-
Before the Internet, books were written — and published — blindly, hopefully. Sometimes they sold, usually they did not, but no one had a clue what readers did when they opened them up. Did they skip or skim? Slow down or speed up when the end was in sight? Linger over the sex scenes?
-
Hodgepodge of groups backs legislation that would limit authority to spy on Americans.
-
US President Barack Obama signalled that he might halt the National Security Agency’s collection and storage of millions of Americans’ phone records and instead require phone companies to hold the data.
-
After looking over the White House intelligence task force’s proposals to reform the way the US government does surveillance, we pointed out one oddity that hinted that the NSA may have been engaged in financial manipulation. Others have been combing through the report for other hints of things it might accidentally reveal, and Ed Felten (who I still think should have led the task force) has spotted another one, in how the report discusses the issue of backdoors in software.
-
New report recommends the government not in any way subvert, undermine or weaken commercial software
-
As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.
-
-
-
On Monday, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finland-based antivirus provider F-Secure, publicly canceled the talk he was scheduled to deliver at the RSA Conference USA 2014, which is slated for February. A highly sought-after security researcher who regularly speaks at Black Hat, Defcon, Hack in the Box, in addition to the more mainstream Ted and South by Southwest conferences, Hypponen said his cancellation was in protest of the recently revealed $10 million contract to make the NSA-influenced Dual EC_DRBG BSAFE’s default pseudo random number generator (PRNG). Hypponen also cited RSA’s decision to keep Dual EC_DRBG the default PRNG for more than five years after serious vulnerabilities were uncovered in it and Monday’s non-denying denial from RSA in response to Friday’s report from the Reuters news agency.
-
-
BitTorrent has reportedly announced a secure chat service that would only a message’s sender and receiver to see the content irrespective of whether it is encrypted or not.
-
-
James Madison would be “aghast.” That was one of the incendiary charges leveled at the National Security Agency and its mass surveillance activities by Judge Richard Leon in his December 16 opinion ordering the government to stop collecting some of the data that it’s been gathering on private citizens here and abroad.
-
The impact of NSA intrusion on our civil liberties can’t be overstated — but damage to America’s business reputation is serious, too
-
By now, we’ve heard from tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Cisco Systems that the National Security Agency’s spying poses a threat to their international business and, in Cisco’s case, is already hurting it. So what does that threat look like, exactly, at ground level?
Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they’re requiring – in writing – that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S.
-
Firms in the UK and Canada are reportedly updating their cloud contracts to demand that their data be kept out of the US. The report doesn’t contain enough details, however, to say if this is a trend or an isolated incident.
-
-
With Edward Snowden’s revelation and the surveillance scandal out, the general public cannot get enough of the jokes around the topic. Earlier this week, the video on the Youtube emerged showing Santa Clauses around New York spying on people. The title of the song “The NSA is coming to town” is a hit, making it one of the most top viewed videos online. Now Twitter community can’t get enough of it as well launching a funny competition and asking to share the title of their most favorite NSA movie title.
-
Santa Claus must be a real hero to deliver Christmas presents all over the world in one night and to find out where good and obedient boys and girls live. It is true that Santa’s workshop is full of elves and reindeers who are always ready to help, making it the busiest factory in the world during Christmas time. But Father Christmas needs to move his operation into the twenty-first century and start using military drones to make his deliveries, and various surveillance programs similar to the NSA program to find out who behaved badly.
-
Gen. Paul says Gen. Clapper lied to Congress, the nation under oath; Rep. King says it was an innocent mistake
Under the (literally) crumbling dome of the Congress Building in Washington, D.C., the question/revelation of spying on Americans by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is producing deep, and some would say revealing division within both ruling parties.
-
-
“It wouldn’t be logical for the NSA to target my show,” Klein said, pointing out he has aired numerous broadcasts questioning the loyalties of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Other broadcasts investigated what Klein described as the anti-American leanings of former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who has been serving as a conduit for Snowden to communicate to the public.
“I think Snowden is being used in a big way to turn Americans against the NSA,” said Klein. “The whole Snowden story stinks.”
-
-
For a fugitive, Edward Snowden is attracting rather a lot of well-placed sympathisers. “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” he said, when delivering Channel 4’s alternative Christmas message from his Moscow hideaway. The surveillance programmes run by governments now go far beyond anything George Orwell imagined, he added – which is a problem, because privacy matters. Quite right, says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web: this is why we need whistleblowers such as Snowden. What’s more, Richard Leon, a US federal judge, also thinks Snowden is right – America’s spying is almost Orwellian, and probably illegal.
-
Nearly seven months after journalist and privacy activist Glenn Greenwald publicized Edward Snowden’s first revelations of the vast scope of the NSA’s digital surveillance, his life has changed absolutely.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Greenwald hasn’t shied away from criticizing the perceived complacency of U.S. media and politicians in the face of revelations about the NSA’s collection of Americans’ and other people’s phone records and emails. But at the 30C3 on Friday, he took the opportunity to lambast American and British politicians and media organizations more harshly and directly than before.
-
Top-secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have been plastered across our screens and front-pages for months by Glenn Greenwald and his team.
And on Friday the journalist couldn’t help but leak a few details about a forthcoming wave of fresh revelations regarding the US and UK governments’ mass surveillance operations.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
When it comes to modern firewalls for corporate computer networks, the world’s second largest network equipment manufacturer doesn’t skimp on praising its own work. According to Juniper Networks’ online PR copy, the company’s products are “ideal” for protecting large companies and computing centers from unwanted access from outside. They claim the performance of the company’s special computers is “unmatched” and their firewalls are the “best-in-class.” Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off — the United States’ National Security Agency.
Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company’s digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.
-
-
One concern is that this growth in intelligence collection really has very little to do with terrorism and crime, but rather commercial interests. The death of Shane Todd in Singapore sheds a light on the relationship between industry and espionage, where there were concerns that the Chinese phone company Huawei is involved in espionage. Taxpayer money is being used to protect the intellectual property of private corporations.
-
Open source developer and writer John Graham-Cumming was able, through a Downing Street online petition, to persuade the Gordon Brown Labour-led government to issue an unequivocal apology for the gross indecency conviction of Alan Turning in 1952. After admitting a sexual relationship with a man, Turing was unable to continue work as a code breaker at GCHQ, as his security clearance was withdrawn. Two year later he killed himself. Linux Format caught up with the Graham-Cumming to discuss open source development, debugging and why he opposes the move for a pardon, which has been given via royal decree.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.18.13
Posted in Action at 11:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Elsevier denies access to the fruit of other people’s knowledge
Summary: Fresh attacks on Open Access by Elsevier trigger new calls for a boycott of everything Elsevier offers
Big journals have formed a sort of exploitative cartel which derives “value” from volunteering academics and then upsells access to work that should all along belong to taxpayers who funded it. We wrote about Elsevier going beyond exploitation and into corruption [1, 2] — a problem which is hardly unique and continues to make some headlines this month [1]. In order to sell all sorts of placebos [2] there is either bribery of journals of of academics who submit papers to journals (I have personally heard of such stories in other universities, not mine). Elsevier, however, is in many ways unique and a lot worse than its counterparts, which is why some people have started boycotting Elsevier. It turns out that Elsevier has become quite aggressive in its crackdown on Open Access [3-5], so even the people whose work Elsevier publishes are apparently of no value to Elsevier.
Boycott Elsevier. It’s really that simple. There is already a Facebook group (walled gardens ironically enough) called “Boycott Elsevier”, the New York Times has an article titled “Researchers Boycott Elsevier Journal Publisher” and Nature, a competitor, has an article titled “Elsevier boycott gathers pace,” so Elsevier must already be feeling the pinch. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
Randy Schekman says his lab will no longer send papers to Nature, Cell and Science as they distort scientific process
-
-
-
Either way as much as I can I will be avoiding Elsevier both for publication and peer review and hopefully impressing on my colleagues to do the same. They say all publicity is good publicity but I really don’t think Elsevier can push a positive spin on their previous conduct nor on their recent conduct. 2800 requests is 2800 pieces of research that have now become inaccessible to the public for no good reason. If one little (open, accessible, free) tweet can generate this amount of interest over a Friday and a weekend then just think how much interest and knowledge you can impart on the world by not publishing with Elsevier and making any articles that you have published with them available and free to access online. Hello Elsevier – leonard_et_al_2011 – *waves*!
-
In the academic publishing world, I’m not sure if there’s any company quite as hated as Elsevier. You may recall the big campaign by academics to boycott Elsevier over its opposition to rules that would make federally funded research publicly available at some time period (six months to a year) after the original publication. Or the time they removed free access to journals in Bangladesh (until academics made enough noise and Elsevier brought them back). Or, how about the fact that Elsevier had an entire division devoted to publishing fake medical journals that were used by big pharmaceutical companies to write ad copy which they could then pretend was from a prestigious medical journal that was really just junk science made to look nice. Oh, and then there was the time Elsevier was caught publishing ghostwritten articles by the pharmaceutical industry that were supposed to be “reviews” of all the research about certain treatments, but which instead played down the negative research and played up the positive kinds.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Action at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Net neutrality, or the principle that all traffic from everyone should be treated equally, is under attack not just from corporations but also from European and US regulators
Regulators are supposed to represent citizens’ interests while corporations and their lobbyists try to warp politics for personal gain/profit. But right now we find that not even so-called ‘regulators’ cannot speak for us.
In the US, Internet providers run amok [1] and bogus arguments [2] make it into the mouth of the new FCC head, who is somewhat of a mole. As FOSS Force put it with the words of another [3,4,5], “Wheeler (a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries) spoke positively about the [Open Internet] order but said he wouldn’t mind if Netflix has to pay for a faster lane to consumers while answering questions Monday after a policy speech at Ohio State University.” Tom Wheeler and his professional background are very telling. No need to speculate, it’s all out there in the open.
Things are not much better here in Europe, especially when even the famed Kroes parrots talking points from the lobbyists and is now part of a threat to net neutrality in Europe [6-8], reports Quadrature du Net, which needs support [9].
The fight for net neutrality has lost some of its momentum and this is being exploited not just by corporations and their lobbyists (even Google) but also regulators. It should be clear that net neutrality is a form of censorship, so inability to fight back will make censorship more of a norm in the West. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
The Internet is the world’s largest shopping mall, library, video store, post office and town square. When you turn on your computer, you’re in the driver’s seat, choosing what you want to read, watch, and hear.
-
A month or so ago, a PR person sent me a ridiculously misleading (to potentially dishonest) Forbes piece by Ev Ehrlich, former undersecretary of commerce for President Bill Clinton, arguing against net neutrality. The piece was so ridiculous that I asked the PR person whether or not Ehrlich, in his current job as a consultant/think tank person, was working with any broadband providers. The PR person said he didn’t know, and I figured I’d just ignore the piece. However, having now listened to a radio debate on KCRW about net neutrality that included Ehrlich making the same basic argument in a discussion with Tim Lee from the Washington Post, Harold Feld from Public Knowledge and Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, it seems worth highlighting just how confused and, well, wrong, Ehrlich is.
-
-
-
-
On Monday 9th December, the rapporteur Pilar del Castillo Vera (EPP – Spain) will present to the “Industry” (ITRE) Committee of the European Parliament her draft report on Neelie Kroes’ proposal for a Regulation on the Telecom Package. Citizens must urge MEPs to amend this report in order to accurately define what qualifies as ‘specialised services’ with ‘enhanced’ quality of service, and ensure that the Regulation will guarantee a genuine and unconditional Net neutrality principle.
-
On September 11th, the European Commission adopted an important legislative package geared to achieve the European Single Market of telecommunication and build thereby a connected continent.
-
A few days before the deadline for Members of the European Parliament to table amendments on the anti-Net neutrality Kroes’ proposal, within the ITRE committee, La Quadrature du Net sent them out its own proposal of amendments. From now and until December 17th, citizens must contact their representatives and urge them to alter Neelie Kroes’ proposal and ensure that European citizens can definitely benefit from a genuine and unconditional Net neutrality.
-
Today we find ourselves at a crossroads: surveillance or privacy? Net neutrality or discrimination of our communications? “Copywrong” threatening the public or copyright reform to sanctuarize our cultural practices? These decisions will have a radical impact on our relationship with technology and power and affect society as a whole. We all know this. And we also know that without a concerted effort by citizens, the political and economic powers will take the line that will lead us to the worst case scenario.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
12.06.13
Posted in Action, Law at 11:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Putting in context the cycle of violence which the West uses to justify indefinitely detaining the domestic population, assassinating parts of it, and spying on everyone (even domestically, using loopholes)
TERRORISM is a real problem, although it’s exaggerated and a lot of it is the fault of the alleging victim. In Syria, for example, terrorists have been funded and assisted by the West for quite some time [1] in order to change the region [2] and, in that regard, some Western leaders can be accused of crimes similar to Assad’s [3].
Currently, the West helps recruitment of what it labels “terrorists” by illegally and unethically killing people without trial [4], expanding the scope of the kill lists [5], and then facing backlash even from CIA-bribed allies like Hamid Karzai [6] (reigning over a post-invasion country [7]). Now that Taliban leaders are being assassinated by CIA drones even when they try to establish peace [8] we should remember that a lot of it started when the CIA sent huge piles of weapons for the same people — including Obama Bin Laden — to fight the Soviets. Contrary to what officials claimed at the time, this was provocation against the Soviets, who had not invaded Afghanistan. People who were responsible for this now admit this as well.
The bottom line is that terrorism is often blowback and in order to stop blowback you cannot just assassinate more and more people, or else you end up looking no better than Assad and people turn against you. Illegal invasions by Western armies kill per year more than Assad killed overall.
“Terrorism” is a very big deal because those in power exploit it in order to crush dissent, journalism, activism, etc. Just watch today’s article, “British news staff may face terrorism charges over Snowden leaks” [9]. Also remember that Nelson Mandela was labelled “terrorist” by the US until 2008 and UK politicians such as those run the country right now called for his execution [10]. “Terrorism” no longer means what it used to mean. It’s an excuse, it’s a pretext, it’s a label to be used for political agenda. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
-
The civil war in Syria started in March 2011. And see this.
However, the U.S. has been funding the Syrian opposition since 2006 … and arming the opposition since 2007. (In reality, the U.S. and Britain considered attacking Syrians and then blaming it on the Syrian government as an excuse for regime change … 50 years ago (the U.S. just admitted that they did this to Iran) . And the U.S. has been planning regime change in Syria for 20 years straight. And see this.)
The New York Times, (and here and here) , Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNN, McClatchy (and here), AP, Time, Reuters, BBC, the Independent, the Telegraph, Agence France-Presse, Asia Times, and the Star (and here) confirm that supporting the rebels means supporting Al Qaeda and two other terrorist groups.
Indeed, the the New York Times has reported that virtually all of the rebel fighters are Al Qaeda terrorists.
-
Despite media pundits and political elites’ focus on “democracy versus dictatorship” and the international community’s “responsibility” to avert the “humanitarian crisis” in Syria, Nicola Nasser reports for Global Research that the real aim of US intervention in Syria was to protect the security of its ally, Israel.
-
-
The problems begin right at the top, where Robinson begins by conceding that “U.S. drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries may be militarily effective.” But, he asserts, “they are killing innocent civilians in a way that is obscene and immoral. I’m afraid that ignoring this ugly fact makes Americans complicit in murder.” Robinson does not compare the civilian deaths from drone strikes with those likely from other military options available to US forces to see whether they would be more or less “obscene and immoral”—or whether, indeed, drones might be the least bad option in terms of civilian casualties. He simply asserts that the use of a weapon that kills civilians as drones do makes us complicit in murder.
-
The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to “ensure” civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to “avoid targeting” civilians.
-
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has again accused the United States of killing civilians in a drone airstrike, this time in a Nov. 20 attack on a border area between two eastern provinces where Taliban insurgents maintain strongholds.
In a statement released on his presidential website late Wednesday night, Karzai condemned the United States for an alleged drone strike that he said killed seven civilians, including women and children, in Nuristan province on the border with Kunar province near the Pakistan frontier.
-
Jones touches on the process involved with the military and how they cover up the deaths of soldiers…
-
The murder by a drone of a Taliban leader conducting peace negotiations with Islamabad has caused widespread protests in Pakistan. Fearing for the lives of its truckers, the U.S. has stopped the export of U.S. military cargo from Afghanistan through Pakistan. The U.S. denies that the use of drones is a violation of the international law.
-
-
Soon we will be inundated with heartfelt speeches – but we mustn’t let those who opposed Mandela’s struggle pretend they didn’t
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA