03.24.14

Document Freedom Day 2014 Imminent and ODF is Doing Very Well

Posted in Office Suites, OpenDocument at 2:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: It is becoming hard to deny that ODF is the one and only standard for exchange of editable documents

OpenDocument Format, or ODF, has been enjoying a renaissance of sorts. Registration has been open for Document Freedom Day 2014 [1] (in recent years this annual event was largely neglected), European politicians are now entertaining ODF [2-4], and here in the UK ODF is becoming a standard, perhaps the de facto standard in government (more on Microsoft’s response to it will be covered later this week). New software is now supporting ODF [5,6] and LibreOffice, which makes the press still [7,8], is replacing Microsoft Office in more and more places [9]. I happen to know about places that are quietly migrating to LibreOffice, without ever announcing it. Even Apple, which had helped Microsoft with OOXML (Apple is in Microsoft’s camp for a lot things), was pressured last week to move to ODF [10]. Wait and see how ODF changes the world and takes us into an era of sharing, collaboration, exchanges etc. that are truly independent from Microsoft’s monopoly. Prepare for a world where there are no “DOC” (or “DOCX”) files exchanged inside E-mails. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2014

   Today registration opens for Document Freedom Day 2014 events. This year the campaign day is March 26th, when people who believe in fair access to communications technology and Open Standards will again present, perform, and demonstrate. Event organisers can now register on the re-launched documentfreedom.org website.

2. Advocacy: “Governments should choose ODF”

   Governments should choose the Open Document Format (ODF) as the default option for all editable government documents, says OpenForum Europe, an organisation advocating the use of open standards in ICT. “ODF has clear superiority in terms of independence from proprietary influence or dependency on proprietary technology.”

   [...]

   Writing on his weblog, the FSFE President called on the EC to “run open, competitive calls for tender based on functional specifications rather than brand names — something it has refused to do for two decades.”

3. MEP Tarand: “EU should switch to ODF standard”

   The European institutions should switch to using the Open Document Format ODF as their internal default document format, says Member of the European Parliament Indrek Tarand. Speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament’s Free Software User Group (Epfsug), last week Wednesday, MEP Tarand said: “Moving to ODF would allow real innovation, and real procurement.”

4. European Union in talks to move to the Open Document Format

   A member of the European parliament, Indrek Tarand, openly favoured ODF at the European Parliament’s Free Software User Group (Epsfug) meeting. He is also the founder of the Free Software User Group. He said, “Our work is done the day the EU authorities switch to using the ODF standard. The European Parliament should also be able to use its own free software distribution.” It’s noteworthy to add that the adoption of ODF is normally followed by the adoption of the open source software.

5. HoudiniEsq Adds Open Document Format Support

   Innovator and leader in Legal Practice Management Software-as-a-Service for enterprise, LogicBit Software Corp. announced today that it has added support for the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument to its core product HoudiniEsq.

6. WebODF Making Good Progress, Aims For More

   WebODF is an AGPL-licensed JavaScript library that provides Open Document Format support on the web with collaborative editing capabilities. In the four years the project has been around, it’s been making great success but they have even more plans going forward.

7. Freshly Stable

   With the release of our new LibreOffice 4.2 version and the new website, people have noticed a small yet quite visual change in the way we label the versions of LibreOffice. You now have the choice between downloading LibreOffice “Fresh” or “Stable”.

8. Zorin OS Cubed, “Fresh” LibreOffice, and Year of Linux

   In today’s search was two Zorin OS reviews and a recommendation. The Document Foundation released the second update to the 4.2 branch of their popular office suite. Jamie Watson got a new Acer laptop and test drove several popular distributions on it. Computer Weekly online has published an article on Unix to Linux migrations and Simon Phipps put out a new post titled 2014 is the year of the Linux desktop.

9. Breaking Microsoft’s Chains by Moving to LibreOffice

   Vignoli is one of the founders and a member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice, where his duties include marketing and communications as well as being an international spokesperson for the project. Before helping start The Document Project, he spent over six years on the marketing team for OpenOffice.org, which was the original code base for LibreOffice. In other words, this is a guy who knows his stuff and who has “been there/done that” when it comes to large enterprise level migrations from MS Office to LibreOffice or OpenOffice.

10. Open document standards will cure Apple’s bit rot

    Reports emerged this week of a problem for Apple users opening presentation files created in Keynote. The latest update of Keynote — in fact, all of iWork ’13 — won’t open files created with versions before iWork ’09, instead prompting users to find a copy of iWork ’09 and open the file with that.

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Richard Stallman on YouTube and Video Formats Issues

Posted in TechBytes Video at 12:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Direct download as Ogg

Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, talks about restrictions that exist when it comes to many Web-based videos

Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense

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03.23.14

More Drones Debate, Espionage Against China

Posted in News Roundup at 12:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Drones

• Death of traumatised boy sparks outrage at US drone strikes in Yemen

  Opposition to the deadly US drone strikes in Yemen has gained momentum after the death of a boy who was psychologically affected by a strike in 2012 in the port city of Shiher in Hadramout province.

• The drone lobby’s image problem

  That war technology has uses beyond war doesn’t justify the funding of technologies whose core mission is war.

• Drones are a Crime against Humanity and Responsible for Worst Human Rights Violations

  Global human rights violators have found a large loophole in International Law and International Humanitarian Law. Exploiting this loophole they have developed armed drones to kill civilians with impunity. For the sake of the continuation of the human race, these vile killers must be condemned and stopped.

• What’s a Logical Drone Strikes Policy? Hint: Not the Current One.

  President Obama said last May that he was placing limits on the use of drones in foreign countries, and senior administration officials have said the United States cannot exist in an inchoate state of war against terrorists everywhere (the sort President George W. Bush fantasized about) But there’s still no cut and dry, publicly available legal framework setting out when and where the government can launch drone strikes.

• Brimstone Completes Drone Test Trials

• US Boycotts Pakistan’s Push For Greater Transparency On Drone Strikes

  The United States is refusing to participate in UN Human Rights Council talks about greater accountability for human rights violations in covert drone wars.

• The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism

• NYT Fawns Over Obama’s ‘Catholic Roots,’ Ignores Rev. Wright’s Conspiratorial Rants

Censorship

• Shocker! The more people use the Internet, the less they like Web censorship

Civil Rights

• Freedom After 30 Years on Death Row

  Ford was quickly convicted. At the sentencing phase of his trial, the lack of competent defense counsel again played a factor. The best mitigation witnesses who might have testified for him lived out of state—but Ford’s lawyers were unsure about the process for subpoenaing them to testify in Louisiana. It took that all-white jury less than three hours to recommend a sentence of death for the man they believed murdered Isadore Rozeman.

  [...]

  Just before Glenn Ford walked out of prison late Tuesday afternoon, the state of Louisiana—which had wrongfully charged, convicted, and incarcerated him for 30 years—gave him a $20 dollar debit card for his troubles. (As recently as 2011, the state gave only $10 to inmates leaving prison.) When you combine the debit card with the balance in Ford’s prison account, the total he received upon his departure from Angola was $20.04. He left, too, with some photographs and with his medicine, all in two small boxes. He left behind his headphones.

Venezuela

• Venezuela: This is a revolt of the rich, not a ‘terror campaign’

  Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it.

  I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the right-wing protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city.

Ukraine

• Russia, U.S. Trade Sanctions over Ukraine; EU Leaders Sign Deal with Ukraine Gov’t

  Russia and the United States have each imposed new sanctions on the other over the crisis in Ukraine. President Obama made the announcement on Thursday.

• Who In Ukraine Will Benefit From An IMF Bailout?

Espionage Against China

• NSA spied on Chinese govt and telecom giant Huawei – Snowden docs

  The new portion of revelations from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, published by Der Spiegel and The New York Times, has exposed the great interest of the US secret service in obtaining data from China.

• SA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm

• Slides Describe Mission Involving Huawei

• NSA targeted Chinese telecoms giant Huawei – report

• China’s Huawei condemns reported NSA snooping

  Chinese telecom and internet company Huawei defended is independence on Sunday and said it would condemn any infiltration of its servers by the U.S. National Security Agency if reports of such activities by the NSA were true.

• U.S. NSA infiltrates servers of China telecom giant Huawei – report

  The U.S. National Security Agency has infiltrated servers in the headquarters of Chinese telecommunications and internet giant Huawei Technologies Co, obtaining sensitive information and monitoring the communications of top executives, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

  The newspaper said its report on the operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was based on NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former agency contractor who since last year has leaked data revealing sweeping U.S. surveillance activities. The German magazine Der Spiegel also reported on the documents.

Privacy

• Podcast: Why Is British Government Stripping Individuals of Their Citizenship & How Is US Responsible?

• Tech giants to press Obama on NSA reform in private White House meeting

  Executives from Facebook, Google and Yahoo invited to Oval Office discussion amid continued frustration over lack of action

• Obama meets tech giants to discuss concerns over NSA surveillance

• Google shows the NSA how to make surveillance socially acceptable – with a £30 TV Dongle

  Do read the press cover on the launch of the new Google Chromecast TV dongle . In my blog entry on the breaking of the “Social Contract” that underpins public acceptance of the way the Internet works, I mentioned the reaction at a CTF meeting when we learned that smart TV licenses require you to give permission to transmit data on your viewing habits to anywhere in the world. The gathering pace of the convergence of the worlds of the TV, mobile phone, personal computer and Internet, often with no off-switch to protect against 24 by 7 surveillance, is now truly transformative.

• Obama Allays Fears of CEOs of Facebook, Google and Netflix on NSA

  US President Barack Obama has reassured internet and tech CEOs that his government is committed to protecting the people’s privacy, as he tried to allay their growing concern about the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency.

• Why We Need To Worry About Every Other Country’s NSA Too

  With the troves of extremely valuable personal information collected by social media giants, it’s likely—if not already occurring—that foreign spies have infiltrated several Silicon Valley companies in the hopes of accessing your/our data, according to leading cyber security strategist Menny Barzilay.

• Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators

  Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.

• US judge slams surveillance requests as “repugnant to the Fourth Amendment”

  Federal Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola denied a US government request earlier this month for a search and seizure warrant, targeting electronic data stored on Apple Inc. property.

• Theresa May warns Yahoo that its move to Dublin is a security worry

  Internet firm is known to be unhappy about snooping and would be under no obligation to hand over material under Irish laws

• Attorney General’s new war on encrypted web services

  Australia’s Attorney-General’s department wants new laws to force users and providers of encrypted internet communications services to decode any data intercepted by authorities.

  The proposal is buried in a submission (pdf) by the department to a Senate inquiry on revision of the Telecommunications Interception Act.

• Navy database tracks civilians’ parking tickets, fender-benders, raising fears of domestic spying

  A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.

• Obama meets tech giants to discuss concerns over NSA surveillance

• Exile: Sarah Harrison On Paying The Price For Helping Edward Snowden

  She points out that she is not alone in suffering from the UK government’s absurdly broad definition of “terrorism”: Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained for nine hours at London’s Heathrow airport, and Snowden’s lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, was interrogated there too. But the knock-on effects for journalism in the UK are particularly serious:

  If Britain is going to investigate journalists as terrorists take and destroy our documents, force us to give up passwords and answer questions — how can we be sure we can protect our sources? But this precedent is now set; no journalist can be certain that if they leave, enter or transit through the UK this will not happen to them.

  One likely consequence of this is that international journalists will avoid passing through the UK on the way to their final destinations. More seriously, they may be unwilling to enter the UK to visit. Sadly, given the UK’s increasingly besmirched reputation as a beacon of civilization with a free and effective press, that’s likely to be viewed by the government there as more of a feature than a bug.

• Petition to install Eric Schmidt as US CEO hits the White House

  A PETITION that asks for the entire US government to be removed and replaced with technical people and Eric Schmidt as CEO is not very close to its 100,000 target.

• Indian journalist beats Snowden to win Google Digital Activism Award

  Journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary is the winner of the 2014 Google Digital Activism Award. Choudhary is the mind behind CGNet Swara (Voice of Chhattisgarh), a mobile phone service allowing people to post and listen to local reports in their local language using basic cellphones.

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03.21.14

Confirmed: US Government Pays Microsoft to Violate Users’ Privacy

Posted in Microsoft at 12:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Everyone “Scroogled” by Microsoft

Summary: Microsoft is working against citizens of the United States, at the expense of citizens of the United States, according to new leaks

AT THE end of last year it was revealed that the CIA had paid companies like Microsoft (plus telecoms) for illegal surveillance on law-abiding citizens. It’s not just about the NSA, which is very close to Microsoft. Some correctly point out that the panic over NSA helps distract from an even worse offender, which is the FBI, maker of CIPAV for Windows. The FBI uses DDOS and malware against US citizens, essentially cracking and doing online what it did back in the days of COINTELPRO.

Yesterday we wrote about Microsoft's censorship and privacy being worse than China's, citing the fact that Microsoft staff gets access to users’ data and abusing this access (here is another new article about it). Also consider how Microsoft ‘research’ is now behaving like the NSA, drawing connections between everyone and making it public too.

According to this new explosive report, the “Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) hackers have reportedly obtained documents that reveal how much money the FBI pays Microsoft each time agents try to obtain or view an individual customer’s communication information.”

In other words, Microsoft is profiting from privacy abuse. To quote further: “While the public now has a basic figure showing how much taxpayer money is dedicated to surveillance, these numbers only include Microsoft – whereas the taxpayer cost for companies like Verizon, Google, and others are almost certainly in the millions as well.”

But we don’t know about all those other companies, do we? Microsoft is the company which goes out of its way to facilitate mass surveillance, as PRISM leaks helped prove. █

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Symantec and (In)’Security’ Firms Still Kings of GNU/Linux FUD

Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, Security at 12:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Articles about GNU/Linux and “malware” are more like misinformation that the press is awash with this week

AFTER some exaggerated panic over GnuTLS we hear a lot of noise about some Windows malware that’s claimed to be coming from UNIX and GNU/Linux servers. One ‘minor’ fact that the likes of Symantec (Symantec and others) always fail to point out is that lazy/negligent people (worse than human error) are to blame, not GNU/Linux.

SJVN wrote this good response (“Linux and botnets: It’s not Linux’s fault!”) which points out: “With Darlloz, which tends to attack devices such as small office/home office (SOHO) Internet routers, it’s one way of infection is to try 13 combinations of the default user names and passwords on a device. If the gadget’s owner has done the bare minimal of security: Change the blasted default user ID and/or password, they can’t be infected. That’s it!”

Don’t relay baseless reports which leave out the real security problem, which is Windows, the operating system with back doors (by design). █

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DRM Watch: Impact on the Web, TPM, Lockdowns, and Games

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

• What I wish Tim Berners-Lee understood about DRM

  After Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s keynote talk at SXSW, he answered a question about the controversial plan to add DRM to next version of HTML. HTML 5, a standard currently under debate at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the latest battleground in the long-running war over the design of general-purpose computers. Berners-Lee defended the proposition, and claimed that without it, more of the Web would be locked up in un-searchable, unlinkable formats like Flash.

  Some in the entertainment industry have long harboured fantasies about redesigning computers to disobey their owners, as part of a profit-maximisation strategy that depends on being able to charge you piecemeal for the right to use the files on your hard-drive.

• A clear-eyed guide to Mac OS X’s actual security risks

  Apple does not support the Trusted Platform Module [9] that Microsoft will require all PC makers to support starting next year…

• Keurig’s next generation of coffee machines will have DRM lockdown

  Keurig is setting itself up to attempt a type of coffee “DRM” on the pods used in its coffee-making machines, according to a report from Techdirt. Keurig’s next-gen machines would be unable to interact with third-party coffee pods, thus locking customers into buying only the Keurig-branded K-cups or those of approved partners.

• The day the Mario Kart died: Nintendo’s kill switch and the future of online consoles

  Nintendo fans, mark your calendars for May 20, 2014. As Nintendo announced yesterday, that’s the last day you’ll be able to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection to play hundreds of online games on the Wii and Nintendo DS. Single-player modes for those games will still work, of course, but any parts of the games that require an Internet connection will be completely non-functional in a matter of months.

• House Passes Cellphone Unlocking Bill While New Provision Causes Withdrawals

  The Unlocking Consumer Choice Act (H.R. 1123), which was introduced in March by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, was widely supported by members on both sides of the aisle.

• The Reason Some Games Are Delayed For Linux In Humble Indie Bundles

  Humble feel it would harm their reputation to ask a developer to sit out and wait for the next bundle for the sake of a Linux version.

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Internet Under Attack: Latest News Stories

Posted in News Roundup at 11:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Censorship

• Twitter shut down in Turkey amidst rising tensions

Traffic

• We’ve Entered The Age Of ‘Fiber To The Press Release’

  While Google Fiber has managed to get ISPs to compete in the areas it’s deployed, the project has also managed to spawn a new, misleading but entertaining phenomenon I’ve affectionately labeled “fiber to the press release.” In a fiber to the press release deployment, a carrier (usually one with a history of doing the bare minimum on upgrades) proudly proclaims that they too will soon be offering 1 Gbps broadband. The announcement will contain absolutely no hard specifics on how many people will get the upgrades, but the press will happily parrot the announcement and state that “ISP X” has suddenly joined the ultra-fast broadband race. Why spend money on a significant deployment when you can have the press help you pretend you did?

• Al Franken: Don’t let Comcast “manipulate Internet traffic”

Europe

• Europe’s telecom tie-ups signal big shakeup

  In what some industry observers are calling a “Back-to-the-Future” moment, the need for faster and wider pipes to deliver video and other data-intense applications is driving a raft of tie-ups between mobile and cable operators that is only expected to accelerate.

• EU net neutrality vote would let ISPs charge for Internet “fast lane”

• iophk: “It’s not so much that it would create a fast lane, but that it creates artificially slow lanes which make once normal service look fast in comparison. Can the proposal be pruned of noxious riders or is it a poison pill for the otherwise consumer-friendly proposal?”

• EP vote would threaten principle of net neutrality

• iophk: “Looks like certain interests are learning now to use riders on legislation.”

Control

• Lexingtonians Consider Municipal Network Options in Kentucky

  Community leaders in Lexington are the latest to stand at a fork in the broadband road. In September, the franchise agreement between the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and Time Warner Cable expired, resulting in a month-to-month agreement continuation. As they negotiate a new contract, local citizens have called for consideration of a municipal network.

• No, the U.S. Isn’t ‘Giving Up Control’ of the Internet”

  On a sleepy Friday afternoon last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce dropped what seemed, to many, like a bombshell: It intends to transition its coordinating role over the Internet’s domain name system—those web addresses you type into your browser—to the global Internet community.

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End of Week News: Mass Surveillance, Drones, Oversight Failure, Ukraine…

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Mass Surveillance

• The Greatest Social Network of All Time

  In breaking the cycle, the implications of a true decentralized social network are profound.

• Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in LA Are Under Investigation

• You Can’t Opt Out: 10 NSA Myths Debunked

  The debate Edward Snowden envisioned when he revealed the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying on Americans has taken a bad turn. Instead of a careful examination of what the NSA does, the legality of its actions, what risks it takes for what gains, and how effective the agency has been in its stated mission of protecting Americans, we increasingly have government officials or retired versions of the same demanding — quite literally — Snowden’s head and engaging in the usual fear-mongering over 9/11. They have been aided by a chorus of pundits, columnists, and present as well as former officials offering bumper-sticker slogans like “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” all the while claiming our freedom is in direct conflict with our security.

• ‘Arrogant’ Snowden putting lives at risk, says NSA’s deputy spyboss

  Ledgett said the NSA’s core problem was that it was lousy at PR, rather than that it was invading innocent people’s privacy. The bigwig said that the former US President James Madison, one of the key writers of the US Constitution, “would be proud” that the checks and balances he helped install still worked in today’s digital age.

• NSA strikes back at Snowden for putting ‘people’s lives at risk’

• NSA ‘hunted sysadmins’ to find CAT PHOTOS, high-level passwords

  Staff at the United States’ National Security Agency reportedly “hunted” system administrators because they felt doing so would yield passwords that enabled easier surveillance.

  So says The Intercept, which claims this document came its way thanks to one E. Snowden, late of Moscow.

• NSA targets sysadmin personal accounts to exploit networks

  The latest revelation from the cache of Snowden documents shows that the NSA targets sysadmins to gain access to the infrastructure that they are responsible for.

• How and Why the NSA’s Been Hacking Sys Admins Worldwide

  A new report from The Intercept reveals that the NSA has been hunting and hacking system administrators the world over in order to gain access to the networks they control.

• US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency’s top lawyer insists

  NSA general counsel Rajesh De says big tech companies like Yahoo and Google provided ‘full assistance’ in legally mandated collection of data

• NSA ‘Can Record Every Call In Foreign Countries’

  The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording every phone call made in a foreign country, according to new leaks by Edward Snowden.

• Rand Paul denounces NSA surveillance in fiery speech to Berkeley crowd

• Obama to Meet Tech CEOs Concerned By NSA Snooping

• Don’t Fall For Misleading Story Being Spread By NSA Suggesting Tech Companies Lied About PRISM

  I’m seeing a bunch of folks passing around a story by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian, claiming that tech companies lied about their “denials” of PRISM. The story is incredibly misleading. Ackerman is one of the best reporters out there on the intelligence community, and I can’t recall ever seeing a story that I think he got wrong, but this is one. But the storyline is so juicy, lots of folks, including the usual suspects are quick to pile on without bothering to actually look at the details, insisting that this is somehow evidence of the tech companies lying.

• NSA: Snowden does disservice to whistleblowers (Update)

  The deputy head of the NSA spying agency accused fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Thursday of displaying “amazing arrogance” in revealing US eavesdropping techniques.

• ​German legislators vote to investigate NSA, ‘Five Eyes’ surveillance

  The German Bundestag announced it will investigate surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency and its foreign partners, as well as whether any German officials knew of the spying that targeted the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

• German parliament to inquire into NSA

  Germany’s Bundestag is taking a close look at Western spying activities in Germany. Spectacular results are not expected from the parliamentary inquiry, as witnesses are likely to stonewall.

• NSA targets email IDs, not keywords: Officials

• Orange Gives All Of Its Data To France’s NSA

  Orange has been cooperating allegedly illegally for years with France’s main intelligence agency (the DGSE). According to a newly found report by Edward Snowden and an investigation by Le Monde, the DGSE was given access to all of Orange’s data (not just metadata).

• Facebook Firmly Denies That It Was ‘Fully Aware’ Of NSA Surveillance

• Facebook Disputes NSA Claims That They Were Aware Of Data Collection

• Activists Aim to Cut Off the Water to Dry Up NSA Surveillance

  Thankfully, there are some Americans willing to stand up and do something to slow the National Security Agency’s (NSA) construction of the surveillance state.

  In Utah, for example, a group of activists is working to cut off the supply of water to the NSA’s massive Utah Data Center located near Bluffdale.

Drones

• Obama’s Team Shuns U.N. Human Rights Council Drone Talks

  The United States apparently wants nothing to do with a United Nations Human Rights Council discussion on whether the country’s drone strikes may violate international human rights law.

• Telecoms contractor could be called to account for drone deaths

  The revelation comes from a high-level review of a complaint that the £23m BT communications line supported drone missions that had accidentally killed between 426 and 1005 civilians in the last decade in the course of strikes on suspected insurgents, according to estimates of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

• What Can “Forensic Architects” Tell Us About Drone Strikes and Genocide?

  A woman dressed in a black hijab is highlighted by the glare from a computer screen as she works with forensic architects in digitally recreating her home, the scene of a drone strike in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, Pakistan where five men, one of them her brother-in-law, were directly hit and killed on Oct. 4, 2010. This is the spot where she had laid out a rug in the courtyard, she explains, and where her guests sat one evening when the missile dove into their circle, leaving a blackened dent in the ground and scattering flesh that later, she and her husband had to pick up from off of the ground so they could bury their dead. Morbidly, the reconstruction of a drone strike is similar – the gathering of flecks of information when nothing else is available: through satellite imagery and video, the length of a building’s shadow, the pattern of shrapnel marks on a wall, and the angle of a photo, can help forensic architects determine where a missile struck and determine how it led to civilian deaths.

• PolitiFact Muddies Truth on Drone Strikes Comment

  With drone strikes, not only is collateral damage recognized as a possible likelihood; it has become an accepted part of our foreign policy. Not only is America firing on citizens of sovereign nations, but they do so knowing that innocent people who had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time are going to die. The old saying about the path of good intentions comes to mind.

• Domestic Drones Are Inevitable

  As the weekly – sometimes daily – news stories never tire of telling us, domestic drones are coming. And as ABC News reported on March 17, they are arriving faster than the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) can suss out the rules over their use. Though it’s technically illegal, and the FAA may issue fines if they catch you, ABC reports that commercial use of drones is starting to happen whether or not the government approves – as long as it doesn’t notice.

• Locations of drone attacks changing to Afghanistan and Yemen

• US’ use of armed drones complies with international law – State Dep’t lawyer

  The Pakistani draft, which was obtained by Foreign Policy, urges states to “ensure transparency” in record-keeping on drone strikes and to “conduct prompt, independent and impartial investigations whenever there are indications of any violations to human rights caused by their use.” It also calls for the convening of “an interactive panel discussion” on the use of drones.

• Power Isn’t Funny

  For all of the nonchalant assurances that he is neither a “dictator” nor an “emperor,” Barack Obama is certainly trigger-happy with the power jokes.

• Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope – it’s a drone stealing your identity

• Camus in the Time of Drones

  Lucien rises from bed in the early morning. He dresses quietly, careful not to awaken his wife and infant son. He walks briskly across the city of Algiers in the pre-dawn light to a square that is already thick with people, their gaze fixed on a wooden platform and rising from it the stark outline of a guillotine.

  [...]

  Camus’ essay on the barbarity of the death penalty was written in 1956, against the backdrop of the executions of hundreds of dissidents during the Soviet crackdown in Hungary, as well as the execution of Algerian revolutionaries condemned to death by French tribunals. He notes that by 1940 all executions in France and England were shielded from the public. If capital punishment was meant to deter crime, why hold the killings in secret? Why not make them a public spectacle?

Venezuela

• Kerry’s Lonely Crusade Against Venezuela

  Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it. With a wide variety of sources and people on the ground to talk to, I thought I was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But even I was not prepared for what I saw in Caracas: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city. I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.

Secrecy

• Cohen’s SAC hires CIA-backed Palantir to strengthen surveillance

  SAC Capital Advisors, the hedge-fund firm that agreed to pay a record fine to settle insider-trading charges, moved to boost surveillance by hiring Palantir Technologies, a Central Intelligence Agency-backed software maker.

• We need Congress to fix the FOIA

  The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a critical law for making sure the public has a fighting chance to get copies of records the government might not want it to see. For more than 40 years, people have used the FOIA to uncover evidence of government waste, fraud, abuse and illegality. More benignly, FOIA has been used to better understand the development and effects – positive and negative—of the federal government’s policies.

• Udall: Release report on CIA

  Sen. Mark Udall called on the White House again Thursday to declassify a report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program during the war on terror.

• U.S. Senate leader orders probe of alleged CIA computer hacking

• Details of Illegal Torture That the CIA Doesn’t Want You to Know About

  Senate staffers say the agency tortured prisoners in ways that went beyond what the Bush-era DOJ approved, according to an Al-Jazeera America report.

• Nancy Pelosi: When Legislators Take on the CIA, ‘They Come After You’

  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s remarks in support of fellow legislator Dianne Feinstein, who is embroiled in a dispute with the CIA, ought to be the sort of thing that alarms everyone. After all, another powerful member of Congress claims that the spy agency she is charged with overseeing illegitimately resists checks on its autonomy.

• Justice Dept. Is Cautious on Joining C.I.A. Fight

  Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee believe that laws may have been broken in their bitter dispute over top secret documents relating to the C.I.A.’s detention program and who has the right to read them.

• The CIA Spying Scandal, Watergate and the Decay of American Democracy

  In the nine days since Senator Dianne Feinstein revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency had spied on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers investigating CIA torture programs, the issue has been all but dropped by the political establishment and the media.

Ukraine

• Deconstructing Putin

  Putin was strongest in his accusations of western hypocrisy. His ironic welcoming of the West having suddenly discovered the concept of international law was very well done. His analysis of the might is right approach the West had previously adopted, and their contempt of the UN over Iraq and Afghanistan, was spot on. Putin also was absolutely right in describing the Kosovo situation as “highly analogous” to the situation in Crimea. That is indeed true, and attempts by the West – including the Guardian – to argue the cases are different are pathetic exercises in special pleading.

  The problem is that Putin blithely ignored the enormous logical inconsistency in his argument. He stated that the Crimean and Kosovo cases were highly analogous, but then used that to justify Russia’s action in Crimea, despite the fact that Russia has always maintained the NATO Kosovo intervention was illegal(and still refuses to recognize Kosovo). In fact of course Russia was right over Kosovo, and thus is wrong over Crimea.

  [...]

  The attempt to downplay Russia’s diplomatic isolation was also a bit strange. He thanked China, though China had very pointedly failed to support Russian in the Security Council. When you are forced to thank people for abstaining, you are not in a strong position diplomatically. He also thanked India, which is peculiar, because the Indian PM yesterday put out a press release saying Putin had called him, but the had urged Putin to engage diplomatically with the interim government in Kiev, which certainly would not be welcome to Putin. I concluded that Putin was merely trying to tell his domestic audience Russia has support, even when it does not.

• Crisis in Ukraine: Russia Extends its Control over the Black Sea and Strategic Waterways

• Crimean Tatars Asked to Vacate Land, Regional Official Says

  Ukraine’s breakaway region of Crimea will ask Tatars to vacate part of the land where they now live in exchange for new territory elsewhere in the region, a top Crimean government official has said.

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