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09.21.15

Dutch Report: EPO Suicides Possibly Caused by Working Conditions Imposed by EPO’s Management

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: More press coverage about the terrible situation at the European Patent Office

HR Praktijk, yet another Dutch site, joins at least a couple of newspapers with their reports in the country which houses EPO headquarters. Below we make our permanent record of a Dutch article with various translations. The English translation of the article is as follow:

11 September 2015, From: Jesper van Wijk, Via: De Volkskrant

EPOrg employee suicide possibly caused by poisoned working conditions

Staff union SUEPO is raising the alarm on the recent suicide of an employee of the European Patent Organisation (EPOrg) in Rijswijk. De Volkskrant reports that poisoned working conditions may have contributed to the suicides of five employees at the European organisation.

Staff representatives previously raised serious concerns on the policies of French EPOrg president Benoit Battistelli. SUEPO claims that under his reign, work pressures have been radically increased and that Battistelli has unilaterally forced through changes.

Social dialogue

The Netherlands and other members of the European Union have voiced concerns onhardened social climate within EPOrg. “Partly due to these signals, management and staff representatives have entered into a social dialogue,” State Secretary Dijksma of Economic Affairs wrote to the Dutch House of Representatives in July.

The situation has not improved since. In a letter to the 38 EPOrg country representatives who supervise the organisation, the union is now again raising the alarm on the death of an employee who worked at a location in Rijswijk. This is the fifth time in a little over three years’ time that EPOrg employee has committed suicide. In 2013, an employee from the Rijswijk office jumped from the seventh floor of the building during work hours. The other three incidents were of employees of the EPOrg headquarters in Munich, according to the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant.

Possible measures

On 26 August, the union wrote Battistelli a letter requesting a conversation on possible measures to improve the work situation, but so far he has refused. “It’s tragic that SUEPO is again trying to abuse a personal tragedy to stir up controversy in a situation that calls for sympathy,” Battistelli wrote to the union. “The parallel you seem to want to draw between the death of a colleague and recent reforms and the working atmosphere in general is wholly inappropriate.” SUEPO states that a direct link between the suicide and the working conditions has yet to be established, but that the labour inspectorate should be granted the opportunity to research the tragedy.

As we are going to explain later this month (despite us being on vacation), there are many actions in progress and this awareness campaign is even reaching television, not just radio and newspapers. The EPO’s management increasingly finds itself becoming the story. Not patents it grants are the story but the corruption of the management itself. The amount of public pressure has become proportional to the degree of repression and the more the EPO tries to suppress publication (or staff awareness of these issues), the worse it is getting. Some have already pointed out the sharp rise (an order of magnitude) in suicides — a fact that the bureaucrats will find incredibly hard to refute. It is merely a side effect or a symptom of the EPO going rogue. █

Links 21/9/2015: Tizen 3.0, Red Hat’s Results Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 1:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Microsoft’s wake-up call on software piracy

    With piracy-related lawsuits becoming a looming possibility, open-source software seems to be the answer

  • Exercising Software Freedom in the Global Email System

    In this post, I discuss one example of how a choice for software freedom can cause many strange problems that others will dismiss. My goal here is to explain in gory detail how proprietary software biases in the computing world continue to grow, notwithstanding Open Source ballyhoo.

    Two decades ago, nearly every company, organization, entity, and tech-minded individual ran their own email server. Generally speaking, even back then, nearly all the software for both MTAs and MUAs were Free Software0. MTA’s are the mail transport agents — the complex software that moves email around from one Internet domain to another. MUAs are the mail user agents, sometimes called mail clients — the local programs with which users manipulate their own email.

    I’ve run my own MTA since around 1993: initially with sendmail, then with exim for a while, and with Postfix since 1999 or so. Also, everywhere I’ve worked throughout my entire career since 1995, I’ve either been in charge of — or been the manager of the person in charge of — the MTA installation for the organization where I worked. In all cases, that MTA has always been Free Software, of course.

  • Open source ‘essential for heritage preservation’

    Working together on open source tools based on open standards is very important for those involved in the preservation of digital information, says Barbara Sierman, board member of the Open Preservation Foundation.

  • GNU/Linux Touted As Safe Replacement For Illegal Software In Bangladesh
  • FOSS the Solution to Piracy, Newspaper Says

    On September 9, a Bangladeshi English language newspaper, Dhaka Tribune, reported that the country’s Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Task Force and Copyright officials had seized 69 laptops with pirated Microsoft software and arrested two high ranking officials at Flora, one of Bangladesh’s largest computer retailers. The raid came after two years of newspaper ads sponsored by the country’s Copyright Office warning about the legal implications of selling pirated goods.

  • AT&T’s Chiosi: Unite on Open Source or Suffer

    The telecom industry needs to agree on how it wants the various pieces of open source to come together in a platform for the future, AT&T’s Margaret Chiosi said here Thursday. Otherwise, there is the risk of a splintered effort that will ultimately slow critical network transformation.

    Chiosi, a Distinguished Network Architect at AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) who is also president of the Open Platform for NFV Project Inc. and one of the original players in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) NFV ISG, explained why open source is critical to AT&T’s Integrated Cloud (AIC) architecture — its converged services platform moving forward — and outlined the numerous open source groups in which the telecom giant is participating, which span 700 different projects.

  • Google’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software uses Tesseract

    Google’s OCR is probably using dependencies of Tesseract, an OCR engine released as free software, or OCRopus, a free document analysis and optical character recognition (OCR) system that is primarily used in Google Books. Developed as a community project during 1995-2006 and later taken over by Google, Tesseract is considered one of the most accurate OCR engines and works for over 60 languages. The source code is available on GitHub.

  • Modest CEO on open source and acquisition by PayPal

    Professionally, Harper was CTO of Threadless and then CTO of Obama for America. He’s currently CEO of Modest, Inc., which was recently acquired by PayPal. I asked him what really drives him and he said, “I like to have fun and do interesting things.” Also, in a talk Harper gave in Sweden in 2014, he said that he strives to hire people who looked different from him. In this interview, I ask him more about that and his upcoming All Things Open talk.

  • Google, Twitter Forge Open Source Publishing Partnership

    Google will be coming late to the publishing party, having failed to challenge Facebook with its own social media platforms — the short-lived Google Buzz and the faltering Google+, noted SEO researcher Joshua J. Bachynski. Google’s inability to understand its user base has forced it to form an uneasy partnership with Twitter and others, he suggested.

  • Events

    • A Preliminary systemd.conf 2015 Schedule is Now Online!

      We are happy to announce that an initial, preliminary version of the systemd.conf 2015 schedule is now online! (Please ignore that some rows in the schedule link the same session twice on that page. That’s a bug in the web site CMS we are working on to fix.)

    • Software Freedom Day 2015 Phnom Penh

      The Digital Freedom Foundation is organizing our Software Freedom Day event in Phnom Penh together with the National Institute of Posts Telecommunications and ICT and the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications on September 19, 2015 at the NIPTICT Building. There will be 10 presentations and several lightening talks with topics covering free and open source software ranging from operating system, virtualization, drones, mapping, servers, to security. Here is the detailed schedule.

    • How will you celebrate Software Freedom Day?

      Software Freedom Day is a global celebration of free and open source software (FOSS). What will you to on September 19, 2015 to celebrate?

      We hope you can choose to do many of the options we listed in our poll to help celebrate FOSS on Software Freedom Day, but even if you can only do one that will be a great benefit to the community.

  • Web Browsers

    • Shopping for a Browser

      I remain deeply suspicious of Chrome, since it has been reported to be snooping on its users and reporting back to Google. And, sadly, the latest news from Firefox is discouraging. It’s possible that that adware and snoopware will be left out of Mozilla’s SeaMonkey browser, which I have recently installed.

    • Mozilla

      • The Firefox Is in the Hen House

        For a variety of reasons that nobody outside of Mozilla seems to completely understand, Mozilla ended its relationship with Google late last year to ink a deal with Yahoo. Some pundits are figuring that Yahoo offered better terms and that Mozilla stands to make more money now than before, especially since it’s now selling default search on a country-by-country basis instead of carte blanche for the entire planet. Others say the change in affiliation had little to do with money, but was brought about by ideological reasons, basically revolving around Mozilla’s Do Not Track system, which Google does not support. Reportedly, as part of the new deal, Yahoo has agreed to abide by Do Not Track requests.

        Whether Mozilla receives more income from Yahoo than it did from Google is questionable, even if a majority of Firefox users keep Yahoo instead of flipping the switch to Google search, which is doubtful. Certainly, a recent move by Mozilla might indicate that the new deal with Yahoo isn’t as fruitful as the organization had hoped and that it’s scrambling to create new revenue streams.

      • Announcing Rust 1.3

        The gear keeps turning: we’re releasing Rust 1.3 stable today! As always, read on for the highlights and check the release notes for more detail.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Dutch Standards Board mulls making ODF mandatory

      The Standardisation Board of the Netherlands wants to make the use of the Open Document Format mandatory for Dutch public administrations. ODF is one of the required ICT standards in the Netherlands, following a policy dating from 2007. However, the document format is ignored by most. This should change, said Nico Westpalm van Hoorn, the chairman of the standards board, speaking on Tuesday at the ODF Plugfest in The Hague.

    • Italian military to switch to LibreOffice and ODF

      The Italian military is transitioning to LibreOffice and the Open Document Format (ODF). The Ministry of Defense will over the next year-and-a-half install this suite of office productivity tools on some 150,000 PC workstations – making it Europe’s second largest LibreOffice implementation. The switch was announced on 15 September by the LibreItalia Association.

      The migration project will begin in October and is foreseen to be completed at the end of 2016.

      The deployment of LibreOffice will be jointly managed by the two organisations, announces LibreItalia. The NGO will help the ministry to ready trainers in different parts of the military, and the Ministry is to develop a series of online courses to help with the switch to LibreOffice. The material is to be made public using a Creative Commons licence.

      An agreement between the Ministry and LibreItalia was signed on 15 September in Rome, by Ruggiero Di Biase, Rear Admiral and General Manager of the Italian Ministry of Defence Information Systems and Sonia Montegiove, President of Associazione LibreItalia.

    • LibreOffice Installations In EU Governments Approach One Million

      The government of the UK, in its guidance on using ODF (Open Document Format) surveys usage of ODF and LibreOffice by EU governments. Usage is huge and widespread and profitable. Lately, The Netherlands is considering making ODF mandatory in government. That this was obvious to me 15 years ago but is now being acknowledged shows the depth of lock-in M$ has caused in the world but, in 2015, folks are now running on the sandy beaches instead of in neck-deep water. The world is finally being freed. Better late than never.

    • FSF turns 30, Italian Military Goes LO and ODF & More…
    • Italy’s Ministry of Defense to Drop Microsoft Office in Favor of LibreOffice
    • Making FLOSS The Default Option Helps Procurement For Government
    • ​Italian Ministry of Defense moves to LibreOffice
    • Forza open-source: Italian military to adopt LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • WordPress brings the freedom to the front

      About 75 million Web sites depend on WordPress. If you are one of its many users who recently upgraded to Version 4.3, you may have noticed something new. Recently, a coop worker-member, Pea, informed me that this version includes a new tab with a reference to the GNU General Public License. With some quizzical interest, I ran the upgrade on a WordPress instance I maintain.

      I eagerly waited for the upgrade to finish. When it loaded, what I saw was typical for a WordPress upgrade, a description of the version’s new features. Then I saw a tab prominently named “Freedom.” I clicked on it, and boom: right there were the four freedoms of free software, starting with Freedom 0. Take a look for yourself.

  • Business

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Public Services/Government

    • Swiss checklist to procuring open source

      A fifteen-point checklist to help public administrations to procure open source software solutions and services was published in August by Swiss open source procurement experts. The list helps to determine which procurement specifications take this type of software into account, and which criteria exclude open source.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • UK Cabinet Office Says “Hello, You Must be Going” to ODF

      Technological evolution is famous for obsoleting wonders created just a few years before. Sometimes new developments moot the fiercest battles between competitors as well. That seemed to be the case last week, when Microsoft announced its Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on…(wait for it)…Linux, the open source software assailed by the company’s prior CEO as a communist cancer.

      It also saw the UK Cabinet Office announce its detailed plans for transitioning to the support of the OpenDocument Format (ODF), a document format that was just as fiercely opposed by Microsoft in the most hard-fought standards war in decades. But at the same time, the Cabinet Office announced its commitment to work towards making document formats as close to obsolete as possible.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • Uruguay: Governing Coalition Rejects TISA Negotiations

      The executive branch will still make a final decision over the matter, to be presented in October.

      The ruling progressivist coalition Broad Front overwhelmingly decided to withdraw Uruguay from the negotiations on the supra-national trade-deal TISA (Trade in Services Agreement) in a vote on Saturday.

      With a 117 to 139 vote, the decision was backed by the Movement of Popular Participation (of former President Jose “Pepe” Mujica), the Communist Party, the 711 list (of Vice President Raul Sendic), the Party for the Victory of the People (PVP), the Great House (Casa Grande), the Federal League, and the Socialist Party (of current President Tabare Vazquez).

    • ‘Lesson 1: The enemy is always within’

      When YANIS VAROUFAKIS appeared at TUC Congress, he said the ‘magnificent’ Greek people were ready for the struggle with financiers — only to be betrayed by his own party. And he warned that fearful leaders could one day be the downfall of Britain’s people too. Joe Gill reports

      GREEK ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis brought some rock star glamour to the opening of the TUC Congress on Sunday in Brighton. He smiled for selfie shots with delegates at a 1,000-plus meeting. Delegates were high on the back of Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership battle the day before.

    • EU Proposes New Corporate Sovereignty Court For TAFTA/TTIP; US Not Interested

      As we have reported, the most problematic aspect of the proposed TAFTA/TTIP trade agreement between the US and the EU has been the proposed corporate sovereignty chapter, formally known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The outcry over this was so great in Europe last year that the European Commission put negotiations of this topic on hold, while it carried out a public consultation on the matter — presumably assuming that the extremely technical questions about this complex issue would kill off any further interest by the public. Instead, an unprecedented 150,000 submissions were received, 145,000 of which said get rid of ISDS completely. In response, the European Commission merely promised to try to address the many concerns raised with a new and “improved” version.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • The BBC is Irredeemable

      The extent of BBC bias during the referendum campaign was breathtaking. I have worked, and specifically reported on the media, in dictatorships which had a less insidious and complete bias than the BBC has against Scottish independence. The relentless anti-Corbyn propaganda shows that the BBC exists to reinforce the neo-liberal narrative at all costs, both at home and abroad. Laura Kuenssberg achieved levels of disdain and ridicule in her report on Shadow Cabinet appointments this evening that ought to disqualify her forever from employment anywhere but Fox News. This was followed by ‘Reporting Scotland’ and a long propaganda piece against the idea of a second referendum, replete with lies about pledges of ‘once in a lifetime’.

    • Fox & Friends Sunday Is Very Concerned Stephen Colbert Wore A Black Lives Matter Wristband
    • Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind are cleared over “cash-for-access” allegations

      Former Foreign Secretaries Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Jack Straw were today cleared over lobbying allegations.

      The pair, who both stood down at May’s general election, were apparently caught offering their services for cash in separate hidden camera stings by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Telegraph.

      Standards watchdog Kathryn Hudson investigated claims they had broken strict lobbying rules.

    • Congress Is a Confederacy of Dunces

      Already we’re deep into September and Congress has reconvened in Washington, prompting many commentators to compare its return after summer’s recess to that of fresh-faced students coming back to school, sharpening their pencils, ready to learn, be cooperative and prepared for something new.

  • Censorship

    • Heightened Trade Secrets Restrictions Could Chill Global Speech

      Trade secrets are seeing a resurgence of attention by policymakers at home and around the world. While there can be legitimate reasons to keep commercially valuable information secret, particularly amongst those with whom it has been shared in confidence, the latest trade secrets push goes further, potentially entangling whistleblowers and journalists.

  • Privacy

  • Civil Rights

    • Moral Obligation = Conscience, Trump

      Further, what does it say about the GOP that their front-runner for candidacy has no conscience? This latest gaffe is not the only indicator. Trump also thinks it would be a good idea to just round up ~11million “illegal immigrants”. How many Jews/communists/opponents did the Nazis have to round up before they committed a crime against humanity? Trump also holds that being born in USA should not convey citizenship… Trump is insane and the GOP is either insane or about to fragment to avoid schizophrenia. That a huge fraction of USAian citizens might vote for this guy is frightening. It’s like 1930s Germany/Italy all over again. Whether Trump could make political deals or get the trains to run on time, he should be shunned in the political arena. If, in our worst nightmare, Trump should be elected, the world should immediately sever all relations with USA to keep him in check.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Presidential candidate Lawrence Lessig goes one on one with Ars

        Lessig: The question isn’t just what policies a candidate supports. If that were the question, we’d have climate change, a public option for health care, immigration reform, background checks on guns, etc., etc., etc. The question instead is also: What is the plan to get that policy enacted?

        What every presidency since Clinton teaches us is that presidents promise reform, and then fail to act on it. That’s not weakness. It’s structural. A regular president cannot take on Congress. It will take a president with a super-mandate. That’s what the referendum presidency is meant to achieve.

        Ars: Campaign finance reform clearly is not a bipartisan issue. How are you going to get the GOP interested in this issue? And is this why you are running as a Democrat? In fact, given your platform, why have you chosen a party?

        Lessig: Two words: Donald Trump. Until Donald Trump, it’s true that among GOP insiders in DC, corruption wasn’t an issue. After Donald Trump, it is as much a question for Republicans as Democrats: How can we have a Congress free to lead?

        I wish there were a way to run as an independent. But the two parties have made that essentially impossible—at least to win. No doubt I could split the vote of the Democratic Party, but I have no desire to Nader this election.

09.17.15

European Patent Office Expands Censorship and Intimidation Against Staff as Pressure Mounts

Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:15 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Chinese labour and Internet standards in Europe

Manchester

Summary: The management of the European Patent Office (EPO) continues to increase its repressive assaults on EPO staff, essentially blocking access to additional sites which explain what the EPO is really doing and why this is wrong

COINCIDING with staff protests/demonstrations (but not strikes) that took place on Tuesday, the muzzling of Florian Müller gets reported. “EPO leadership pressured SUEPO to remove link to my blog from its homepage,” he told me earlier this week, shortly after writing that “In July it became known that the EPO blocked examiners’ access to TechRights” (source), correctly adding that it merely invokes more backlash. The “recommended reading for whomever at the EPO [...] prohibit links to this blog: the Streisand effect.”

The EPO is possibly trying to block (censor) evidence of the censorship itself. That’s how pathetic they’re becoming now. Are they really willing to go down this rabbit hole?

“Document temporarily removed due to threats of reprisals from EPO management,” says SUEPO’s public page in numerous places (with slight variations). “SUEPO is taking appropriate action to counter the threats.”

Well, welcome to the European Union’s most corrupt organisation, where censorship is part of the plan to hide evidence of the corruption, and sites that cover the censorship are themselves being censored, too. China or Russia are where one might expect such behaviour, not the European Union.

So, the EPO is now censoring/filtering/blocking yet another blog, and for what? It’s not as though the staff cannot access these sites from their mobile devices or their homes. Not many staff would be ‘brave’ enough to access sites critical of the EPO from within the premises of the EPO anyway, especially now that widespread surveillance (including cameras and keyloggers) is common knowledge among staff.

It seems likely that Müller became a target of censorship and suppression after he had posted a letter or a bunch of letters which the EPO’s management does not want to be public, for it proves bad behaviour. It actually started in Techrights and as Müller put it on Tuesday: “Last week, the TechRights blog published a letter by the head of the EPO’s investigative unit to Elizabeth Hardon, the chairwoman of the Munich chapter of the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO), summoning her to a hearing last Thursday. I also blogged about this development because it shows that the promise of “union recognition” is just a carrot the EPO leadership has been dangling to staff without any genuine desire to improve the internal climate.

“Mrs. Hardon has probably never been at a greater risk of being fired, and the EPO is now not only talking about that scenario but additionally threatening “to take any other legal measures against [her]” over the alleged disclosure of the letter that was published last week.”

Any letter with threats in it is likely to spread sooner or later (at Techrights we never know the identity of our sources), so the EPO’s management must have been foolish to assume that it’ll never be leaked or sent out to a reporter at some stage. It merely proves that this management is incompetent. It believes that silencing opposition will work rather than continuously backfire and this is why after a relatively calm summer the management comes under fire again. Last week the Dutch media reported on the subject and we now have article translations [PDF]. These were published by SUEPO, which added: “Translations in English, French and German are available by scrolling through the document. The article was also published in the paper version of 10 September 2015.”

Here is the article’s text in English:

EPO President Benoit Battistelli. © ANP

Alarm about reign of terror at the European Patent Office after fifth suicide

The union Suepo has raised the alarm about the suicide of an employee at the European Patent Office (EPO) in Rijswijk. According to Suepo, poisoned working conditions may have contributed to the fifth suicide in three years at the Patent Office.

By: Anneke Stoffelen, 10 September 2015, 02:26

The European Patent Office employs around 7000 staff, spread over five offices in different countries, who evaluate patents for 38 affiliated member countries.

Staff representatives have previously raised the alarm about the reign of terror apparently being conducted by French EPO President Benoît Battistelli. According to Suepo, the work pressure has increased enormously under his leadership and changes to working conditions have been forced through by Battistelli unilaterally. Anyone who expresses criticism can expect reprisals.

Together with a number of other member countries, the Netherlands has expressed its concerns about the entrenched social climate within the EPO. In a letter to the Lower House in July, State Secretary for Economic Affairs Dijksma wrote: ‘Partly as a result of these signals a ‘social dialogue’ has been launched between management and staff representatives’.

A 42 year old employee in Rijswijk committed suicide in August, on the last day of his holidays.

However, the situation has not improved since then. In a letter to the 38 representatives of the EPO countries that supervise the organisation, the union has now raised the alarm about the death of the 42 year old employee at the Rijswijk office. He committed suicide in August, on the last day of his holidays.

It is the fifth time in just over three years that an EPO employee has committed suicide. In 2013 an employee jumped from the seventh floor of the office building in Rijswijk during working hours. The other three cases of suicide related to staff at the EPO head office in Munich.

France Telecom

In its letter, the union Suepo draws a comparison with the situation at France Telecom, which in 2008 and 2009 was afflicted with a wave of suicides amongst staff. The union wants the management of the EPO to assist with an independent investigation into the working conditions at the Patent Office.

On 26 August the union wrote a letter to Battistelli requesting a meeting about the potential measures for improving the work situation, however, so far the EPO President has refused to grant such a meeting.

“It is tragic that Suepo is once again abusing a personal tragedy and inciting controversy”, President Battistelli in a letter to the union.

‘It is tragic that Suepo is once again abusing a personal tragedy and inciting controversy, when condolences should be in order’, wrote Battistelli to the union. ‘The link that you appear to be drawing between the death of a colleague and recent reorganisations and the working atmosphere in general, seems totally inappropriate.’

Suepo says that a direct link between the suicide and the working conditions has not been demonstrated but that the Labour Inspectorate should be given the opportunity of
investigating this tragedy.

However, the EPO is not obliged to assist with such an investigation because as an international organisation it enjoys legal immunity. Consequently, the EPO management can also disregard a ruling by The Hague Court of Appeal with impunity. In February, the Court of Appeal ruled that the EPO was in breach of human rights by obstructing the activities of the union.

For other translations see the original PDF. █

09.14.15

Patents Roundup: Europe’s and India’s Software Patents Affair, US Continues to Demote Software Patents With Alice Case

Posted in America, Asia, Europe, Patents at 2:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Bridgewater Hall

Summary: A roundup of news of interest regarding patents, especially software patents whose impact on Free/Open Source software is exceptionally profound

THE NEXT couple of weeks will be quiet for this site because we’re taking a two-week break. Before we go, however, here are some important news from around the world.

Europe

There is an EPO demonstration tomorrow. It tackles issues that relate to human rights, not to software patents or the UPC, but nonetheless, those latter issues too are a growing threat to European interests. According to a lawyers’ site, UPC’s “new regime will sit alongside rather than replace the existing patent system and will therefore require businesses to make careful choices about how they intend to protect their inventions and enforce their patent rights.

“The decisions they take could affect their patent litigation strategy and exposure to risk for years afterwards.”

All one needs to know about it is that it is going to empower international/multinational companies and their patent lawyers. For everyone else it’s a slap on the face.

India

We have been writing a lot about India as of late, in relation to software patents. Dr. Glyn Moody has a good article on this subject, comparing what India is doing right now to what Europe has been doing in recent years (since the Alison Brimelow days). To quote Moody: “These are very similar to the exclusions listed in Article 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC), which governs patent law in Europe. And where the EPC uses the phrase “as such” when it comes to computer programs, the India exclusions contain the equivalent phrase “computer programme per se”. As Techdirt readers know, the inclusion of “as such” as a qualifier to the exclusion of computer programs from patentability has opened up a huge loophole through which clever lawyers have driven many thousands of software patents. The fear — quite justified — is that exactly the same will happen in India because of the new guidelines’ interpretation of what that “per se” phrase means…”

Indians will hopefully stand up and fight this injustice. It’s a form of colonialism in the patents sense, akin to what large pharmaceutical companies are trying to do in this vast market (many potential ‘customers’).

United States

A few days ago we learned about yet another defeat for software patents in the United States.”Five Blue Spike Patents Killed by Alice/101,” Patent Buddy wrote the other day, linking to this decision [PDF]. Notice the defendant; it’s a common target of Microsoft.

The patent maximalists from IAM are meanwhile reporting that ZTE, an Android player which we mentioned here recently for patent assaults on it (from Microsoft and its trolls), wants to “develop high-quality patent assets” (complete nonsense expressed using the language of patent propagandists). To quote the maximalists: “The average US consumer might not be familiar with the ZTE brand, but the latest figures from global intelligence firm IDC show that it has moved into fourth place in the American smartphone market, behind Apple, Samsung and LG. The Chinese company grabbed an 8% share of sales in the second quarter, up from just 4.4% at the start of 2014. ZTE has not exactly consolidated its gains yet, but its impressive growth offers a tentative success story for other would-be market entrants from China.”

The last thing ZTE needs in the world, including the lucrative US market, is more patents. Let’s hope that the US system will be healed over time, obviating the perceived need for such wasteful strategies that artificially elevate the price of products (lawyers’ tax).

“Let’s hope that the US system will be healed over time, obviating the perceived need for such wasteful strategies that artificially elevate the price of products (lawyers’ tax).”Reporting from the AAMA webinar, AAMA Info wrote: “The patent troll itself admitted that less than 3 percent of such lawsuits ever make it to trial,” adding that “97% settlement rate suggests a very good return on investment for the patent troll!”

Matt Levy wrote that he “was on a panel the other day discussing patent reform, and a funny thing happened. While we disagreed about a number of aspects of patent reform, basically everyone on the panel agreed that it’s ridiculous for one district (i.e., the Eastern District of Texas) to host so much patent litigation.

“Even those on the panel who didn’t like the current venue provision in the Innovation Act felt that it just needed some small tweaks in the language. They agreed with the basic approach of venue reform.”

We are still hopeful and very much positive about the US patent system because it seems to be moving more in the direction of hostility towards software patents, whereas India and Europe go the other way. █

‘New’ Microsoft: One of Several Architects of Microsoft’s Patent War on GNU/Linux Gets Promoted Even Further, Gates is Lobbying China’s President After Linux Adoption

Posted in Apple, Asia, Bill Gates, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung at 2:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Voyager

Summary: Microsoft continues its long journey towards ‘Linux tax’ (or Microsoft tax on Linux) as the ‘standard’ while trying very hard to derail Android and prevent nations from moving to Free/libre software

THE bubble of ‘good’ Microsoft is being burst on a daily basis because the company keeps — and sometimes even enhances — its hostile behaviour, having just taken away software from Android [1, 2], engaged in yet more “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics against Android, and then started recording Android users remotely (always on), as reported by Mary Jo Foley and other Microsoft propagandists (Microsoft’s special relationship with the NSA notwithstanding). Based on this new article from IAM, there is also a monopoly being shielded here, with the prospect of litigation against Google and others (for royalties or product removal). “A new study by technology consulting and litigation support firm iRunway,” says IAM, “has analysed the patent landscape around speech recognition technology, finding that Microsoft and specialist company Nuance lead the way. The report highlights the growth in patent filings over the last 10 years as companies have made significant strides in the development of technology in this area.” Just watch how Apple has been suing Samsung. It is still pursing high royalties through a settlement. It wants “hundreds of millions of dollars”, as an Apple proponent/Android foe put it. Much of that is for software patents and it is the same strategy Microsoft has been sticking to for much longer than Apple.

Make no mistake about it. There is no 'new' Microsoft except a Microsoft that engages in patent racketeering against Linux and Android. There are only faceplate changes, site changes, logo changes, etc. The company is as aggressive as ever before.

“Make no mistake about it. There is no ‘new’ Microsoft except a Microsoft that engages in patent racketeering against Linux and Android.”Several years ago we noted that Microsoft had promoted Horacio Gutierrez, who is now a Microsoft Vice President. Microsoft was emphasising a litigation route, making it abundantly clear that patent extortion against Linux was a growing strategy. Anti-Linux patent men are once again being promoted inside Microsoft as Smith becomes President. Recall all the anti-Linux rhetoric from him and mind the “astroturf in the comments,” as noted by our reader iophk. Smith is an aggressor, so the way we interpret the news is, anti-Linux litigation is only further promoted (not demoted) as the strategy. Watch what Microsoft has been doing with Tuxera, putting and reinforcing patent tax as part of the ‘standard’ inside Linux. Here is a new press release from Tuxera and partners — a statement which says:

iWedia, a leading provider of software solutions for TV devices to service operators and Consumer Electronics manufacturers, today announced that it has integrated its Linux-based Teatro-3.0 Set-Top Box (STB) software solution for IP-connected zappers with the AllConnect streaming technology of Helsinki-based Tuxera, the market leader in embedded file systems, network storage and streaming technologies.

Well, Tuxera is a Microsoft partner and it pays Microsoft. This is the sort of GPL-hostile future Microsoft is after. Microsoft is trying to make Linux its own cash cow. Yes, cash cow! It’s an assault on the very heart of Free software. It impedes distribution rights.

Speaking of underhanded tactics such as these, the Gates Foundation is being used as a Trojan horse by Bill Gates, who is now an integral part of Microsoft’s management and according to this report China’s “President Xi is set to also have a private dinner with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates before leaving Seattle for Washington.”

Another report says “President Xi will also be visiting and meeting with Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, even before he visits Obama in Washington.”

“That makes Xi look very weak,” iopkh wrote to us. It’s not the first time that this happens. The same kind of story was reported here almost decade ago, back in 2007.

“Yes,” iopkh noted, “it’s happened with other presidents of China. It makes them look very foolish, to keep it polite.”

Our worry is that China will lift its ban (in government) on Office and Microsoft Windows, maybe after some ‘sweet’ (behind closed doors) deal with Gates, who is now officially back at Microsoft (in functional terms). At the moment, China is rapidly moving to GNU/Linux at many levels, not just when it comes to mobile devices but also when it comes to servers and desktops. We wrote a lot about it. China not only explored Free software, but also began moving to it en masse. It’s the world’s largest market and trend setter.

Don’t believe for even a moment that Microsoft has changed for the better. It’s just more discreet about its constant attacks on Free software. █

09.13.15

Links 13/9/2015: Enlightenment 0.19.10, Linux 4.3-rc1

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Inkscape workshop for Linux statt Windows

      Internet is this nice technology, who makes it possible to give a workshop even without being at a place. So yesterday I gave a workshop from Cambodia in Germany. But I had interesting expiriences with in Mumble did not work well, even its lighter and has good latency handling but Google hangout did work, I think Google has some priority in the network here, what is strange. But all participants from https://linux-statt-windows.org had fun in the workshop and learned something on the end.

  • Web Browsers

    • Firefox, Chrome & Opera Block Access To Routers

      Due to a heavy-handed approach to security Firefox, Chrome and Opera are causing problems. They block access to routers with inadequate SSL reporting the cryptic message, “Server has a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman public key”.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Gets Its First Partners for Ads in Firefox

        Mozilla wants to keep Firefox profitable, and one of the means to do that is with ads. They can’t just slap them all over the place, so they are going to be shown in the tiles, where they should be the least problematic.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Drawing with LibreOffice

      LibreOffice Draw will not let you redesign a picture of a posing model so that it may go to print in a magazine. I doubt you will design the next generation of Airbus planes with it. But I can tell you it will go a long way in enabling you to draw charts, complex industrial schemas for plans and processes, and more simply, design graphical stuff anyone needs at some point in a business or a household (cards, menus, branding elements, process mapping, etc.)

  • Education

    • Computer Science Courses that Don’t Exist, But Should
    • Great Ways for Kids to Learn the Art of Coding

      We are surrounded by coding (often known as programming). That’s why all the cool kids are coding, or they should be. However, computer classes in the UK are dictated by the national curriculum, with students limiting their computing activities to learning applications such as Word and PowerPoint, and using the internet to help with their school work. However, learning how to use Microsoft Office is often of little or no interest to kids. They are motivated by interactive activities such as programming, as they like to make things to find out how they work.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Video: Blender’s new short film and ffmpeg vp9 test

      About a month ago the Blender folks released a new film project named Cosmic Laundromat.

      Two days ago the ffmpeg folks released version 2.8. I saw one of the changes was that for webm they are now defaulting to using the vp9 video codec and the opus audio codec. Previous releases defaulted to webm with vp8 and ogg.

    • Internet Big Bounty for security, Munich’s commitment, and more news

    • Open Access/Content

      • Finally My Province, Manitoba, Gets FLOSS

        Well, FLOSS as textbooks anyway. Instead of post-secondary students paying >$100 per copy of a textbook they may only use for a year, they will be able to use on-line texts for the cost of access to the Internet. Indeed, Manitoba will forgo interest on students’ loans.

        Now, if only they figured out that taxpayers’ money could be saved by using FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) in IT… They have opened their eyes to see a bigger picture in education; perhaps IT will follow.

  • Programming

    • Google open-sources language-agnostic, scalable software tool

      Google’s latest open source offering, Bazel, automates the building and testing of software, along the lines of Ant or Maven.

      But Bazel, now out in beta, surpasses those solutions. It’s also language-agnostic, highly scalable, and able to generate builds that are bit-exact on both a developer’s machine and the build cluster.

    • Java reigns, but Go language spikes in popularity

      Languages like Scala and Go are benefiting from a tweaking of the Tiobe Index algorithm this month intended to eliminate spikes in rankings.

      Tiobe assesses language popularity via a formula that analyzes searches in popular search sites, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. The improved algorithm addresses the number of outliers — “statistical noise” — per search engine, Tiobe said in its monthly report for September.

    • Python 3.5 Released, Adds Major Features

      Python 3.5.0 was released this morning with a number of major new features and other changes.

      Python 3.5 has improved zip application support, a new operator for matrix multiplication, a new mechanism for loading extension modules, coroutines with async and await syntax, and much more.

    • Node.js Foundation Releases First Joint Code
    • Weblate for translating everything

      Weblate is not only useful for translating software, it can help in translating any content. Let’s look where our users are using it.

      Software translation is the most usual use case. This is actually where Weblate was used for first time and still provides great support for that. As an example (and oldest project hosted in Weblate) you can look at phpMyAdmin, where Weblate also helps to keep in sync translation for different maintenance branches. It can also help you in using same terminology in command line utility and graphical one like it is done in Gammu and Wammu translations.

Leftovers

  • Philly ambulance driver caught texting while transporting patient

    A Philadelphia ambulance driver will face discipline after he was recorded texting while driving an injured patient to a hospital, according to the Associated Press.

  • What porn site statistics can tell us about the worldwide console wars

    Still, YouPorn statistics seem to bear some resemblance to overall console popularity worldwide. Overall, YouPorn’s stats show 51% of visits coming from PlayStation, 39% from Xbox, and 10% from Wii systems. That’s decently close to the 50%/29%/20% split for PS4/XB1/Wii U sales in our latest analysis. The Wii’s poor showing makes sense when you consider that the Wii’s younger demographic may be underrepresented in porn site stats (The statistics also seem to lump together legacy systems with their current generation counterparts, so visits from the limited browsers on the Xbox 360, PS3, and original Wii could throw off current generation numbers).

  • The Shepherd’s Crown: A quiet end to the Discworld series

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • Records: Energy Department struck by cyber attacks

      Attackers successfully compromised U.S. Department of Energy computer systems more than 150 times between 2010 and 2014, a review of federal records obtained by USA TODAY finds.

    • Security bods jab pins at encrypted database system balloons

      Developers of encrypted databases and security researchers are at loggerheads – and it’s over a study that claims property-preserving encrypted databases may be vulnerable to attack.

    • More Jeeps recalled as Fiat Chrysler faces new wireless hacking vulnerability

      A further 7,810 US-market Jeeps have been recalled following Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ (FCA) after a new hacking exploit was found in the 2015 Jeep Renegade sports utility vehicle (SUV).

      FCA recalled vehicles affected by a software bug that provides a wireless entry point for hackers looking to take control of the vehicle.

    • Meet the Millionaire Ex-Fugitive Running for President

      In a presidential field full of big personalities, John McAfee may be the most colorful candidate yet.

      The anti-virus software tycoon announced Tuesday he would run for President under his newly created Cyber Party, making cyber security and government surveillance the key tenets of his campaign.

    • China warns against hacking sanctions prior to Xi’s visit

      On the other hand, a raft of Chinese policies have emerged in the last two years that are meant to wean the country off foreign technology, and Internet blocks have kept out companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter.

    • libselinux is a liar!!!

      On an SELinux enabled machine, why does getenforce in a docker container say it is disabled?

  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

    • When Should the 9/11 War End?

      On this fourteenth anniversary of 9/11, the day is best memorialized by reflecting on those 2,977 lives lost and pledging to do more for those survivors and first responders who remain. Much less fitting of a memorial is the 2001 AUMF, passed in the nation’s darkest hours, that still determines so much of American foreign policy today. Although the attacks must never be forgotten, the war must one day be ended. It is our job to begin thinking about what comes next.

    • The United States After 9/11: 6 Things That Have Changed Since 2001

      Another controversial byproduct of the attacks has been 9/11 tourism in New York City. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum in Manhattan has received millions of visitors, while guided tours of lower Manhattan are also daily events. The Freedom Tower and the recently opened One World Observatory, built on the site of the twin towers that were destroyed on 9/11, are also popular tourist destinations.

    • Silencing a Whistle-Blower, Gladio B and the Origins of ISIS. Sibel Edmonds

      Ms. Edmonds went to work for the FBI in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. While under the employ of the State Agency she uncovered ongoing criminal operations implicating foreign nationals and high level US officials. When she tried to report on these revelations, she was told to shut up and eventually dispatched from the agency.

      Edmonds has reported instances of FBI foreknowledge of 9/11. For example, a disclosure by a long-term FBI informant to two FBI agents and a translator, which indicated a terrorist attack in US cities involving airplanes to take place within a few months. After the disclosure was forwarded to the Special Agent in Charge of Counter-terrorism at the Washington Field Office, no action was taken, and following 9/11, the agents and translator in question were told to keep quiet about the issue.

    • Visas for Al-Qaeda, Part 1: A Sordid Tale

      Having just joined the “real” Foreign Service, I was assigned to Jeddah. There, I learned the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a mysterious and exotic place — but nowhere near as exotic and mysterious as the American consulate general on Palestine Road.

      Upon arrival, I found, as a new visa officer, I was expected to winnow more than one hundred applications a day, separating them into “issuances,” “refusals,” and what turned out to be “free passes for CIA agents.”

      However, none of the clean-cut young fellows at the consulate, or even the pudgy, “been around too many blocks” types, bothered to clue me in on this special class of applicants.

      One day, Eric Qualkenbush, the CIA Base Chief, stopped me while I was walking on the consulate’s huge compound. He had a request. Could I issue a visa to one of his agents, an Iranian whose family owned an Oriental rug store? Eric said, “Mike, make it look good (wink, wink). We want him in Washington for consultations.”

      Flabbergasted, I said, “Sure.” Up to that point, I had had almost a daily battle with Jay Freres, the Consul General, along with other CIA officials, who demanded visas for peculiar people, that is, people whom law and regulation required me to refuse.

    • Visas for Al-Qaeda, Part 2: Treachery

      Michael Springmann was, to all appearances, your run-of-the-mill junior level consular employee, but he was not in a usual place, nor in a usual time. His government sent him to Saudi Arabia right as it was preparing for a battle royale with the USSR in Afghanistan. In this excerpt from his book, Springmann describes a consulate teeming with CIA personnel, and reveals how, as head of the American visa bureau, he was ordered not to follow his best instincts but instead to approve visas for all manner of dubious individuals. In retrospect, he realized he was witnessing the mujahideen pipeline — the flow of young fighters to take on the Soviets — the same people who later became al-Qaeda.

    • Visas for Al-Qaeda, Part 3: Backstabbing

      I saw, but didn’t recognize, what was taking shape at Jeddah. Now we’ve all learned what happens when the intelligence services control foreign policy and diplomacy: The same “assets” they assembled aided in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, the destruction of Iraq, the collapse of Libya, and the on-going savaging of Syria.

    • Guatemala presidential frontrunner’s ‘war criminal’ ties revealed

      THE leading candidiate in Guatemala’s presidential election has links to an alleged war criminal, the country’s media has revealed.

      With almost 80 per cent of polling stations having reported, National Convergence Front candidate Jimmy Morales (below) was leading the field of 14 candidates yesterday with 26 per cent of the vote.

    • TIFF: Michael Moore Teaches America Lessons from Abroad at ‘Where to Invade Next’ Premiere

      Oscar-winning doc maker Michael Moore on Thursday took aim at the problems he sees impacting America by looking to Europe and other liberal cultures for answers.

      “What if we showed fellow Americans that what we don’t have, and others do,” Moore said as he discussed his politically charged film Where to Invade Next at its world premiere during the Toronto Film Festival.

      His comic doc showed Moore completing “invasions” of mostly European countries to bring back to the U.S. solutions like better elementary school meals from France, free education in Slovenia, decriminalizing drug use as in Portugal and putting more women in power.

    • Russian hackers hijacking satellite internet links to hide Turla cyber espionage data siphoning

      Security researchers have discovered that a Russian cyber espionage group has been hijacking satellite-based internet links to hide their activities, which include stealing information from diplomats and government agencies around the world.

      According to security firm Kaspersky Lab, a sophisticated group of hackers from Russia called ‘Turla’ has been quietly using satellite-based internet links to conduct their business, as it is much easier to avoid detection.

    • Trust Kaspersky to Root Out Russian Spyware
    • Letter: Hoping for a less adversarial future

      Yes, I think the accord with Iran, whose goal is to stop that country from ever getting a nuclear weapon, is a good one and I applaud our congressman, Seth Moulton for backing it. This accord is the result of two years worth of negotiations and it is not a bilateral but a multi-lateral “deal,” hammered out between Iran and Russia, China, France, the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany. To be against this agreement is to say that all six countries negotiating with Iran are making a mistake. I don’t think so.

    • New Report Debunks Conservative Media Myth That Iran Will Inspect Itself
    • Nuclear Deal Victory Secured as Democrats Block Veto Attempt
    • Conservative Media Use 9/11 Anniversary To Stoke Fears That Iran Nuclear Deal Will Lead To Terrorism

      Conservative media seized on the fourteenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks to stoke fears that the Iran nuclear agreement will create new opportunities for terrorist attacks. But experts have pointed out the deal keeps in place “sanctions related to Iran’s human rights abuses and support for groups linked to terrorism,” and that terrorists would actually benefit more if the agreement were rejected.

    • Rep. Raul Ruiz: Why I support the Iran nuclear deal

      Moving forward, we must begin the essential job of restoring trust between patriotic supporters and equally patriotic opponents of this agreement.

    • Obama wins ugly on the Hill

      This flexible strategy, Obama’s version of former President Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy, if you will, has paid solid dividends. This week, Senate Democrats blocked a disapproval resolution of the Iran nuclear deal, an accord that might be Obama’s most significant foreign policy achievement of his second term. In June, Congress gave him authority to negotiate a series of trade deals at the center of his economic agenda.

    • ‘This Deal Affirms the Peaceful Nature of the Iranian Nuclear Program’ – CounterSpin interview with Nima Shirazi on Iran deal
    • GOP lawmaker tries to slow Iran vote
    • Fox Reporter Repeats Debunked GOP Claim That Obama Is Withholding Iran “Side Deals” From Congress

      But the arrangements made between Iran and the IAEA are “standard operating procedure” and are confidential, as is “every such agreement the IAEA has with other countries” — and those agreements are not subject to congressional approval. Reporting on the the House of Representatives’ vote to reject the Iran nuclear deal, network reporter Doug McKelway repeated the GOP’s debunked claim without noting this, saying that “What’s lacking is this side deal, the two side deals between the IAEA and Iran, which nobody in this legislature has yet seen.”

    • Ink beats spilling US blood

      In the early 1980s, I was stationed in Geneva, Switzerland, handling legal affairs for my employer in the Middle East and Africa. It was a period of many enlightening experiences that have given me some perspective on recent events.

      My first task was to prepare a claim against the Islamic Republic of Iran, seeking compensation for the 1979 nationalization of my company’s assets. Later I negotiated with Iranian representatives at the Iranian Embassy in Vienna, Austria, to settle the claim. Iran’s chief negotiator wore casual western clothes and was educated in Texas. Many Iranians were educated in the U.S. in the 1970s.

      Our European businesspeople in Geneva were not enthusiastic about making this claim. Iran was the most populous country in the region; they just wanted to do business there.

    • Does It Matter Who Is Elected President?

      Untold amounts of money will pour into the presidential race. That’s because the governmental system that we now have in the United States — a welfare-warfare state — is a money-making racket for hundreds of thousands of people who are on the dole, either directly or indirectly. Much of the big money that will pour into the presidential campaign coffers will be accompanied by the hope of getting a share of the trillions of dollars of welfare-warfare state largess that is provided by the taxpayers.

    • Ashes in Our Hair: 9/11 Never Ended

      Osama bin Laden had a story, as well. It’s a story about the US teaching him in Afghanistan many years ago how to upend and defeat a superpower, about how he used that training against his teachers, about how he facilitated our entry into two fruitless and costly wars that decimated our economy while shredding untold millions, and about how his actions created the crass impetus to make us abandon our freedoms and our constitutional privileges in the name of fear. Were he still among the living, his story would be two words long: “I won.”

    • Wild Guesses About ISIS Fuel US Official Hysteria

      It could be ISIS. Maybe.

      US spy chief James Clapper, best known for lying to Congress about NSA surveillance, is now riled up about refugees “descending on Europe,” saying that even though there’s no evidence of it, he’s super, super worried that those refugees might turn out to be ISIS fighters just sneaking in.

      Which is a great story for scaring people, but makes zero sense. In addition to not being backed by any evidence, it vilifies the people fleeing from ISIS and the war surrounding its rise.

    • Remember When Stephen Colbert Hilariously Roasted George W. Bush? His Little Bro Might Be Next

      I’m certain that there are plenty of moments during his eight-year presidential tenure that George W. Bush would love to forget. Somewhere near the top of that list would likely be the comedic trouncing he got in 2006, when Stephen Colbert slammed him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Presidents always receive perhaps more than their fair share of intense scrutiny via jokes, and another Bush is about to enter Colbert’s politically whip-smart comic hand. Jeb Bush, presidential candidate and younger brother to George W., will be the first guest on the new Late Show hosted by Colbert on Tuesday. And Colbert is not likely to pull any punches.

      Colbert will likely have plenty of fodder for his meeting with Bush, as he’s recently fallen significantly in the polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire. According to Yahoo News, Bush now stands at only six percent in Iowa, and did not even make it into the top three in the polls in New Hampshire. (Trump leads, followed by John Kasich and then Dr. Ben Carson.) Colbert went after President Bush in 2006 for his 32 percent approval rating, saying that if you think of it as the glass being only 2/3 full, there is still liquid in the glass — but he wouldn’t drink it, because the last third of a drink is “mostly backwash.” So what will Colbert make of Bush’s six-percent-full glass?

    • Labour’s Bitter Lemons

      Very, very funny. 95% of the people in that room believe in nothing whatsoever that Corbyn believes in. He should beware polonium in his tea. BBC man saying he had just been told by a “senior Laboour figure” Corbyn could be ousted within a year.

    • People’s Quantitive Easing

      The media is astonishing today in its barrage against Jeremy Corbyn.

    • Congratulations to Jeremy Corbyn

      I am unreservedly delighted at Jeremy Corbyn’s election. He made a quite excellent speech, specifically rejecting an attack on Syria, marketization in the NHS and the new anti-union legislation. Hopefully the scale of his victory will give pause to the Blairites who will realise they are not as all-important as they thought.

    • Jeremy Corbyn sets to work on Labour shadow cabinet

      Jeremy Corbyn has started work on putting together his shadow cabinet after his dramatic landslide victory in the Labour leadership contest.

      The veteran left winger – who has never held a formal position in the party before now – must also prepare for his first Commons clash with David Cameron.

      The new Labour leader has promised to “unite” the party after getting 60% of the votes in the leadership contest.

    • New Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn Faces Special Guilt-by-Association Standard

      For the past month Jeremy Corbyn, the British MP and democratic socialist who just won the election to lead the UK’s Labour Party in a landslide, has been vociferously accused across the British media of associating with political figures who are anti-Semitic.

      “The problem,” according to the Community Security Trust, a UK Jewish organization, “is not that Corbyn is an anti-Semite or a Holocaust denier — he is neither. The problem is that he seems to gravitate towards people who are, if they come with an anti-Israel sticker on them.” Similarly, political journalist James Bloodworth wrote in the Guardian, “While I genuinely believe Corbyn does not have an anti-Semitic bone in his body, he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do.” The right-wing Telegraph got so excited it falsely claimed that another Labour MP had accused Corbyn himself of using “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”

      Corbyn was forced to repeatedly respond in several venues. Beyond addressing the specific issues, he’s made several statements such as, “I’ve spent my life opposing racism. Until my dying day, I’ll be opposed to racism in any form … Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, far-right racism is totally wrong and absolutely obnoxious and I’ve made that absolutely clear to everybody who will listen to me on this subject.” And Corbyn’s spokesman said that anyone found by the Labour Party’s procedures committee to be responsible for anti-Semitism should not be allowed to vote in the leadership election.

    • Confirmed: The CIA’s most famous ship headed for the scrapyard

      The ship, now called GSF Explorer, had been retrofitted for oil drilling and exploration since it left US Navy service in 1997. But with the price of oil falling worldwide, its owner Transocean has decided to scrap it, along with several other vessels.

    • Narcotics and Covert Intelligence: How the CIA Commandeered the “War on Drugs”

      The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the Twentieth Century, the turning of the matter from public health to social control, coincided with American’s imperial Open Door policy and the belief that the government had an obligation to American industrialists to create markets in every nation in the world, whether those nations liked it or not.

    • The CIA and the Pentagon against Daesh in Syria

      The newspaper notes that the CIA and the Pentagon kill the leaders of Daesh by bombing them with drones. It observes that this new CIA mission seems to contradict President Obama’s precedent directives, which state that the CIA should concentrate on espionnage and leave military matters to the Pentagon alone.

    • MI6 ISIS Rat Line And The Threat To India – Analysis

      Reports were cited that MI6 had cooperated with the CIA on a “rat line” of arms transfers from Libyan stockpiles to the Syrian rebels in 2012 after the fall of the Gaddafi regime.

    • Concern mounts over UK role in Pakistan drone attacks

      UK military personnel are suspected of having participated in the CIA’s controversial drone war in Pakistan, which has resulted in thousands of fatalities.

      The Ministry of Defence has declined to answer a Freedom of Information request that would confirm whether its personnel have been embedded with US military teams operating drones in the skies above the country. The MoD said that it would neither confirm nor deny the situation because it might jeopardise “international relations”.

      However, it insisted that the UK had never conducted its own drone flights over Pakistan. When pressed, an MoD spokesman said: “UK personnel embedded with the US air force have only flown remotely piloted aircraft systems in support of operations in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq.”

    • Drone Self-Defense and the Law

      Last month, a Kentucky man shot down a drone that was hovering near his backyard.

      WDRB News reported that the camera drone’s owners soon showed up at the home of the shooter, William H. Merideth: “Four guys came over to confront me about it, and I happened to be armed, so that changed their minds,” Merideth said. “They asked me, ‘Are you the S-O-B that shot my drone?’ and I said, ‘Yes I am,’” he said. “I had my 40 mm Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, ‘If you cross my sidewalk, there’s gonna be another shooting.’” Police charged Meredith with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment.

      This is a trend. People have shot down drones in southern New Jersey and rural California as well. It’s illegal, and they get arrested for it.

    • New Information Released In Death Of Md. Man Killed In Drone Strike
    • AP sources: CIA asking whether or not it missed imagery of Md. hostage in Pakistan
    • CIA May Have Missed A Chance To Identify US Hostage
    • Did CIA Miss Chance to Save US Hostage We Killed?
    • CIA may have missed chance to monitor Western hostage: Report
    • Officials Push Back Against Claim CIA Saw and Missed American Held Hostage
    • CIA accused of failing hostage
    • Officials fear CIA missed opportunity to identify Western hostage
    • AP sources: CIA asking whether it missed imagery of hostage

      The CIA’s inspector general is examining whether an agency drone picked up an image of an American hostage in Pakistan months before he was accidentially killed by a CIA drone strike — and whether the agency therefore missed a chance to save him, U.S. officials briefed on the matter say.

    • Family of Hostage Slain in U.S. Drone Strike Feels ‘Deceived’ by Administration
    • Defense intelligence chief says Iraq and Syria may split into parts, with Kurds independent

      Iraq and Syria may have been permanently torn asunder by war and sectarian tensions, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency said Thursday in a frank assessment that is at odds with Obama administration policy.

      “I’m having a tough time seeing it come back together,” Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart told an industry conference, speaking of Iraq and Syria, both of which have seen large chunks territory seized by the Islamic State.

      On Iraq, Stewart said he is “wrestling with the idea that the Kurds will come back to a central government of Iraq,” suggesting he believed it was unlikely. On Syria, he added: “I can see a time in the future where Syria is fractured into two or three parts.”

    • FOREIGN POLICY BLOWBACK

      What’s REALLY behind this shift of the masses? The latest “self-induced” calamity, the “refugee crisis” as it is called, is simply more “blowback” from some really bad U. S. foreign policy decisions made post 9/11. And not surprisingly as with most international crises, the globalist elites running this planet have their fingerprints all over the events leading up to this debacle.

      Two key events orchestrated by the elites to accomplish this enormous human dislocation catastrophe were the 2003 Iraq War and the 2011 Arab Spring. The former destroyed Iraq’s government and infrastructure, thus paving the way for future terrorist groups including ISIS. Iraq split into three warring factions after the removal of Saddam Hussein; Sunni, Shia and Kurd. The Arab Spring facilitated the take down of Libya and several other African nations. Had it not been for the intervention of the Egyptian military, Egypt would have been in total chaos also. The foregoing events created massive nation state destabilization in North Africa and the Mid-East. And this destabilization caused the present “refugee crisis”.

    • Using Terrorists To Fight Terrorists: The New Petraeus Doctrine

      The problematic suggestion made recently by former CIA Director Gen. Petraeus to use al-Qaeda to fight the Islamic State is yet another example of the basic flaw in the thinking of some senior American officials. Traditionally, US strategists have always preferred “good terrorists” who supported their policies against “bad terrorists”.

    • Why We Went to War Against Iraq: Re-Writing History Again

      Some Republican presidential hopefuls—plus Colin Powell—are trying to shift responsibility for the Iraq War away from Bush administration politicians by blaming the U.S. intelligence community. This is only part of the real story. The rest, which the hoary old intelligence argument is meant to shove off-stage, involved a pre-war PR campaign led by Bush administration hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. This robust effort to create a case for war involved intelligence that was only partly flawed. It also involved, pushing the envelope on WMD intelligence that was flawed, ignoring solid intelligence on terrorism (including 9/11) not linked to Iraq, and creating their own lurid terrorism pseudo-intelligence to replace the real thing.

      Back in May, Jeb Bush conceded, “knowing what we know now…I would not have gone into Iraq.” However, much like President George W. Bush in his 2010 memoir Decision Points, Jeb placed the blame on faulty intelligence. Republican candidates Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina also have said that defective intelligence drove the war. Because of years of such deception, many Americans still accept this flawed narrative.

      Powell supported this canard on last Sunday’s Meet the Press when he said: “But the intelligence community, all 16 agencies, assured us that it was right.” Setting the record straight on Powell’s claim is important because he generally has more credibility than most other former Bush administration officials and current Republican presidential hopefuls.

    • GUYANA: CIA meddling, race riots and a phantom death squad

      In 1973, the overseas vote was again padded; proxy and postal voting gave the dead, under-aged, and fictional a say, while disenfranchising real people. Fatal violence also scarred that election. In Berbice, a PPP stronghold of rice farmers, fishermen, and cane cutters, a skirmish erupted when party activists tried to escort ballot boxes to counting stations. The army shot dead two Indo-Guyanese poll workers, who became known as the “Ballot Box Martyrs.” In atelegram, U.S. Embassy officials told the State Department that boxes had likely been stuffed while at army headquarters: “As U.S. had in past devoted much time, effort and treasure to keeping Jagan out,” it read, “we should perhaps not be too disturbed at results this election.”

    • Osama bin Laden got what he wanted: 9/11 and the birth of the national security state

      Since the World Trade Center bombings, our democracy has come undone. The terrorists accomplished their mission

    • 14 years after 9/11, secrecy shrouds many records

      Seven weeks after the end of the massive cleanup at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan in 2002, a legal investigator for the families of 9/11 victims requested a copy of an arrest warrant issued by Interpol for fugitive al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

      Here’s the reply she got from the Justice Department’s Interpol-U.S. National Central Bureau:

      “Release of information about a living person without that person’s consent generally constitutes an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy in violation of the Freedom of Information Act. You must submit an authorization [privacy waiver] signed by Osama bin Laden, consenting to the USNCB’s release to you of any record that it may have pertaining to him.”

    • A thousand 9/11s

      The extent of Pakistan’s complicity in bin Laden’s extremism was documented in a secret addendum to the 9/11 Commission Report, requested by executive director Philip Zelikow three months before publication, but which arrived too late for inclusion.

      Based on sensitive Pakistani sources, the addendum concluded that senior ISI officers had known in advance about the 9/11 attacks, were protecting bin Laden in Pakistan, and that Pervez Musharraf had personally approved his renal treatment at a military hospital near Peshawar.

      Like the classified 28 pages, these findings remain suppressed by the US government.

      Why then, even as the US unleashes new 9/11s around the world, does it support the very regimes behind the 9/11 attacks?

      Because the “War on Terror” is a colossal fiction. In reality, terror is the price of business as usual: and the US is all too willing to pay.

    • The Truth behind 9/11: Who Is Osama Bin Laden?

      Also on September 12, less than 24 hours after the attacks, NATO invoked for the first time in its history “Article 5 of the Washington Treaty – its collective defence clause” declaring the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon “to be an attack against all NATO members.”

      What happened subsequently, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is already part of history. Iran and Syria constitute the next phase of the US adminstration’s military roadmap.

    • Salvador Allende, the CIA and the other 9/11: a playlist

      For many Chileans, September 11th had become a day of tragedy decades before our own 9/11. In 1973, the Chilean army flew fighter jets over Santiago and bombed its own presidential palace during a coup to overthrow its own legally elected president, Salvador Allende.​ Augusto Pinochet, who Allende had appointed to Commander-in-Chief of the army, seized power, put all political parties “in recess” and killed, tortured, disappeared and forced into exile thousands of Chileans. This was supported by the CIA, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. Pinochet would remain in power until 1990.

    • Daughter of The Revolution
    • The Day Chile and the Rest of Latin America Remember as Their 9/11

      There are two 9/11’s: one that we all know of and a second, older and neglected aerial assault that took place on Santiago, Chile, when Air Force jets bombed the La Moneda presidential palace and replaced an elected president with a military dictatorship that lasted close to two decades.

      The September 11 attack of 1973 ended with the death of Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first elected Socialist president. Three years earlier, Allende, a talented athlete in his youth and a trained doctor, had narrowly won the presidential elections after three unsuccessful attempts at the head of the Popular Unity coalition that included Socialists of many hues, Communists and breakaway Christian Democrats.

    • Chile’s 9/11: Remembering Pinochet’s Rise to Power and End of Chile’s Democracy

      Sept. 11 of course marks the terrible anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City by al-Qaida. The attack resulted in 3,000 deaths and several wars. However, many in Latin America alive in 1973 will remember the date 9/11 for another reason.

      Forty-two years ago in Chile, armed forces overthrew the sitting president Salvador Allende, which led to the immediate rise of the right wing dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Allende, a promoter of socialism, subsequently committed suicide under suspicious circumstances inside the presidential palace of La Moneda.

    • Clinton stresses Israel bond in Iran speech

      Hillary Clinton backed the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal during a speech in Washington on Wednesday, but did so by taking a cautious tone she defined as “distrust and verify.”

    • John Oliver Says U.S. Students Learn Virtually Nothing About Africa

      If my own educational experience is any indication, Oliver is right. I graduated from a public high school in Michigan knowing very little about Africa. This proved to be something of a problem when I moved to Cape Town, South Africa, to cover the 2010 World Cup and began traveling around the continent as a reporter.

      Five years and many stories later, I’ve filled much of my knowledge gap. So, to my fellow undereducated Americans — especially you students — here is a crash course in Africa. It’s the basics, plus some trivia that will prove your worldliness at future cocktail parties.

    • Russia to Deliver Advanced Anti-Tank Missile Systems to Foreign Customers

      Russia is to deliver the Kornet-EM long-range anti-tank guided missile systems to international customers.

    • What ‘targeted killing’ has done to, for America

      Shane also points out ironies. Awlaki’s elimination made clear that Obama, who had campaigned against the Bush administration’s terror-war tactics, had accepted such “targeted killing.” And though that drone strike did kill Awlaki, it didn’t end Awlaki’s radicalization of others; his online calls to jihad influenced the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing and the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France, among others.

      Incorporating information from scores of interviews — with Awlaki’s family, acquaintances and tribal leaders in Yemen, and with current and former U.S. officials and experts on terrorism, radicalization and drone warfare — “Objective Troy” provides much to ponder about how the terror war has affected America, its people and others around the globe.

    • Turkey: Warplanes hit Kurdish rebels after militants ‘kill 31 soldiers’
    • US to investigate strike that kill 11 Afghans

      The US military said it would launch an investigation into an airstrike last week that Afghan officials say killed 11 members of Afghanistan’s elite counter-narcotics police force.

    • Prime Minister Tony Abbott issues warning to IS Aussies on air raids
    • Deal with Assad necessary to defeat IS
    • UK plans more Syria drone strikes, power transition that includes Assad
    • Tragically Ironic: Military Planes That Put People in Graveyards Have Their Own Cemeteries

      They are called “boneyards” by military personnel, but they aren’t human ossuaries. Instead, they are graveyards for machines that kill.

      After the military-industrial complex’s life-destroying aircraft complete their mission of death and decimation, they are replaced by newly designed Molochs of the sky. The multi-billion dollar equipment that is being phased out has to go somewhere – and most US military planes end up in what are nicknamed “boneyards.” Generally, these are enormous swaths of desert in the Southwest of the United States.

    • Yvette Cooper: Britain should take more than 4,000 refugees a year

      The Labour leadership candidate and shadow home secretary said the Prime Minister’s promise to accept 20,000 Syrian refugees by May 2020 drawn from camps around the war-torn country paled in comparison to historic British efforts.

    • Germany to Accept 500,000 Refugees Yearly, Calls for EU-Wide Action
    • Israelis overwhelmingly opposed to absorbing Syrian refugees — poll
    • Fox’s Tucker Carlson On Accepting Syrian Refugees: “What Does The United States Get Out Of This?”
    • Air Force wants owners to give up Nevada bombing range site

      The U.S. Air Force is giving an ultimatum to owners of a remote Nevada property now surrounded by a vast bombing range including the super-secret Area 51: Take a $5.2 million “last best offer” by Thursday for their property, or the government will seize it.

    • Ice Spy: US Builds Up Arctic Intelligence Network

      The United States seems to have finally understood that it is losing something in the Arctic; but instead of mobilizing its resources for the development of the region, it has opted to build up its spy network there to watch and listen to what the others are doing, especially Russia.

    • Ban lethal autonomous weapons

      LETHAL AUTONOMOUS weapons — robots that can select, attack, and destroy targets without human intervention — have been called the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. While some ridicule the notion of killer robots as “science fiction,” more knowledgeable sources such as the British Ministry of Defence say they are “probably feasible now.” We are not talking about cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones, but about, for example, flying robots that search for human beings in a city and eliminate those who appear to meet specified criteria.

      [...]

      Autonomous weapons are completely different from human soldiers and would be used in completely different ways — as weapons of mass destruction, for example. Moreover, even if ethically adequate robots were to become available, there is no guarantee they would be used ethically.

    • CIA Kept U.S. Agencies in Dark about Investigation into Possible Diversion of Uranium from U.S. to Israel
    • Discord Apparent in Nuclear ‘Diversion’ Probe

      The CIA kept other agencies in the dark about its investigation into whether Israel received uranium from a U.S. company, records given to a researcher show.

    • CIA releases files about Illegal weapons-grade uranium diversions from US to Israel – IRmep

      Many of the file memos record CIA briefings in the late 1970s to members of Congress inquiring whether the diversion was a covert CIA operation. Arizona Democrat Morris Udall asked bluntly on August 23, 1977 “Is it possible that President Johnson, who was known to be a friend of Israel, could have encouraged the flow of nuclear materials to the Israelis?”

    • CIA Cover-Up Thwarted FBI’s Nuclear Diversion Investigations

      According to formerly top-secret and secret Central Intelligence Agency files (PDF) released August 31 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit (PDF), the agency’s long retention of key information ultimately stymied two FBI investigations into the 1960s diversion of weapons-grade uranium from a Pennsylvania-based government contractor into the Israeli nuclear weapons program.

      The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) was a nuclear fuel processing company founded by legendary chemist Zalman Mordecai Shapiro and financed by entrepreneur David Luzer Lowenthal. According to the Department of Energy, during Shapiro’s reign at NUMEC, the company lost more weapons-grade uranium – 337 kilograms after accounting for losses – much of a particularly unique and high enrichment level than any other U.S. facility. Losses only returned to industry norms after Shapiro, who later unsuccessfully tried to get a job working on advanced hydrogen bomb designs, was forced out of NUMEC.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Mantra for 9/11

      Fourteen years of wars, interventions, assassinations, torture, kidnappings, black sites, the growth of the American national security state to monumental proportions, and the spread of Islamic extremism across much of the Greater Middle East and Africa. Fourteen years of astronomical expense, bombing campaigns galore, and a military-first foreign policy of repeated defeats, disappointments, and disasters. Fourteen years of a culture of fear in America, of endless alarms and warnings, as well as dire predictions of terrorist attacks.

    • ‘Blind Spots and Inefficiencies’: The CIA Before and After 9/11

      On a Friday night last June, the CIA quietly released an internal accountability report focusing on the lead-up to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

      The declassified report was not new. Titled “Office of Inspector General Report on Central Intelligence Agency Accountability Regarding Findings and Conclusions of the Report of the Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001,” it had first been released in 2007 in a heavily redacted state. The version released last June, however, had far fewer redactions — and also included never-before-seen rebuttal letters from then-CIA Director George Tenet.

    • Who Won the War on Secrecy?

      Almost half a century ago, Ralph Nader declared that “A well-informed citizenry is the lifeblood of democracy; and in all areas of government, information, particularly timely information, is the currency of power.” These days, there is almost universal support for this view on the left, right, and center of the political spectrum.

      The phrase “a right to know” dates back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. But, according to Michael Schudson, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, the concept “has not always been accepted, let alone applauded.” In The Rise of the Right to Know, Schudson argues that disclosure was a key component of public policy in the 1960s and ’70s – and that despite the hazards of transparency, “its expansion has made our politics more worthy of the name ‘democracy.’”

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange interested in publishing drone attack details

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange claimed that the group has not released any information that can help the Islamic State group but emphasised that he would not pass up an opportunity to publish drone attacks information in Syria if available. Furthermore, the Australian said that poor media coverage is one of the reasons the terror organisation grew as it is at present.

      Assange’s statement came following the announcement of British Prime Minister David Cameron about the killing of British ISIS Reyaad Khan. The Royal Air Force drone killed the individual in Syria last August. Cameron maintained that the strike was more of an act of self-defence rather than an attack. He also said that Khan was connected to “barbaric” attacks in Britain.

    • WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange wants to publish drone attack info

      WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the whistleblowing group hasn’t published anything to assist the Islamic State group (IS) but he would “absolutely” publish leaked information on drone attacks into Syria if offered it.

      The 44-year-old Australian on Tuesday partly blamed poor media coverage for the rise of the terror organisation.

      The comments came a day after British Prime Minister David Cameron said a Royal Air Force drone had killed British jihadist Reyaad Khan in Syria last month.

    • Snowden hits out at Hilary Clinton for exposing national intelligence

      He says that Clinton really should have known better, suggesting that “anyone who has the clearances that the Secretary of State has, or the director of any top level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled”.

    • USTR So Transparent It Takes Three Months To Reveal Names Of TPP Chapters

      Negotiators had hoped to conclude the big Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement at the last negotiation round, thinking that since the US had finally granted fast track, all the obstacles were moved out of the way. That didn’t happen, leading many to wonder if the entire agreement is doomed. However, as EFF recently explained there’s still a ton going on behind the scenes (or, rather, behind closed doors). That discussion notes that the USTR has appointed one of its own top lawyers, Tim Reif, to be the USTR’s new “chief transparency officer.” Of course, giving lawyers new titles and actually being transparent are two very separate things.

    • CIA: Hillary Clinton’s emails contained Top Secret information

      A CIA official claims Hillary Clinton’s personal emails included information about North Korean nukes, but Clinton insists she ‘did not send or receive any information marked classified.’

    • CIA review reportedly finds ‘Top Secret’ info in Clinton email

      According to a report from The New York Times, a special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Clinton received as secretary of state backs the inspector general finding that the emails contained highly classified information.

      The special review conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency found that the emails, sent in 2009 and 2011 were “Top Secret.” The Clinton campaign and State Department responded to the initial finding from the inspector general by questioning if the emails had been overclassified arbitrarily.

    • Ex-CIA Agent Blames PTSD for Sex Abuse

      A former CIA high flier convicted of drugging and sexually abusing a Muslim woman in Algeria sued the agency for not treating his PTSD, a condition he blames for his conduct.

    • Convicted ex-CIA officer sues agency, Leon Panetta over exposure

      A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who pled guilty to drugging and sexually assaulting a local woman while he was stationed in Algeria is suing the spy agency and former CIA Director Leon Panetta for invasion of privacy.

      Lawyers for Andrew Warren filed the suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, alleging that Panetta violated the Privacy Act and his duty to protect the identity of CIA officers when–in response to a question at his confirmation hearing in 2009–he acknowledged Warren’s employment by the agency.

      The suit, which seeks at least $4 million in damages, asserts that the public identification of Warren as a CIA officer caused him to receive threats.

    • CIA to release Kennedy, Johnson intelligence briefings

      The CIA announced Wednesday that it will be releasing previously classified President’s Daily Brief (PDB) articles from the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.

    • Reporters Face Subpoenas In Case Over CIA Head’s Resignation

      A couple suing over leaks in the federal investigation that led to CIA Director David Petraeus’ resignation intend to subpoena at least two journalists in an attempt to compel testimony about their sources, The Associated Press has learned.

      That legal strategy was driven by a judge’s decision in July to quash efforts by lawyers for Scott and Jill Kelley to question Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who was the Defense Department’s general counsel at the time of the investigation.

    • Pentagon chief wants ‘unvarnished’ truth in intelligence reports
    • Pentagon investigating complaints of manipulated ISIS intelligence

      A top U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating complaints that senior officials manipulated intelligence reports to create a more optimistic narrative on the fight against ISIS.

      Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), said Thursday that “the investigation will play itself out” and help “figure out if we did something wrong.”

    • Former CIA director under Obama: ‘Someone needs to lose their job’ if reports about ISIS intelligence are true

      Trouble is brewing at US Central Command (Centcom), the Pentagon’s agency covering security interests in nations throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Why are old Green Line trolleys wasting away in rural Pennsylvania?

      In a rural town in western Pennsylvania, a set of vacant tracks leads to a cluster of trains, still and abandoned. Some are from Philadelphia and Cleveland, and others are shorter, green trolleys. Weather and time have covered them in rust, and trespassers have left their mark with spray paint, but if you look closely, you can still read their destination: North Station. They’re the Green Line cars that once ran up and down Commonwealth and Huntington avenues. The old trains sit in rows with no place to go, their wheels still in line with the tracks, trapped.

    • At least 12 killed by monster sandstorm that can be seen from space

      A blanket of thick black dust has covered Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and Cyprus killing at least eight people.

      The choking air is causing respiratory problems and it is believed that more than a thousand have been hospitalised.

      Drone footage shows the thick blanket of dust looming over the holiday paradise of Cyprus.

      Expats say the “horrific” thick cloud has swallowed the mountains and the sea, and made it difficult to see any distance ahead.

    • Molting seals in California are shedding toxic fur

      Annual spikes in mercury along the California coastline have been puzzling scientists for over two decades. Now, researchers think they know what’s causing these toxic increases: the fur of molting elephant seals.

  • Finance

    • The New Money-Laundering Sting: Come to the U.S., Get Arrested

      This new front in the long-running battle against money- laundering is opening as part of a broader U.S. crackdown on tax evasion. Taxpayers who seek amnesty under Internal Revenue Service disclosure programs are snitching on the incorporators, as well as naming Swiss banks and the bankers who aided them.

      More than 50,000 U.S. taxpayers have avoided charges since 2009 in the offshore tax evasion crackdown; the program required them to disclose which banks and advisers helped them hide assets, according to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

      “Leads have been pouring into the government with respect to offshore constructs that are available to help people do money laundering, and securities fraud and tax evasion, and all kinds of misdeeds,” said Miriam Fisher, global chair of Latham & Watkins LLP’s tax controversy practice and a former adviser to the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s tax division.

    • Rickards: Conversation with a spy

      My conversation with General Hayden focused on my own specialty, market intelligence (MARKINT), and the ongoing financial wars between the U.S. and Russia and Iran. Hayden agreed with me that financial war will be a primary means of warfare in the twenty-first century. He referred to financial sanctions as “the PGMs of the twenty-first century;’” a reference to Precision Guided Munitions. In effect, asset freezes would replace cruise missiles as a way to disable an enemy.

    • Deputy director of CIA to speak at Cornell

      From 2011 until 2015, Cohen (Cornell ‘85) was the Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. He was the driving force behind the U.S. Treasury Department’s increasingly sophisticated use of financial warfare against terrorists and the application of financial and trade sanctions against nations, including Russia and Iran, who are threatening vital interests of the United States and its allies. He also led the Department’s efforts to combat money laundering and financial crime.

    • Is Capitalism Broken? FTM Daily Interviews Professor Wolff
    • Commuting is ‘work’ and employees should be paid for it, European court says

      Wouldn’t it be great to get paid for commuting? A European court just made that wishful thinking a reality for some workers in Europe.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • One good thing about Donald Trump’s campaign: it’s ruining Jeb Bush’s

      Trump’s penchant for insulting anyone in his path is now well-known (and often deplorable and sexist), though most candidates usually have to deliberately poke the bear for Trump to engage in his usual charade. But just about every day, Trump will go after Jeb unprompted – whether on Twitter or at campaign events or in interviews with journalists – with a voracity virtually never seen in primary politics. Oftentimes it’s substantive and other times it’s not, but it’s almost always delightful to watch.

      Trump will attack Jeb for his support for the Iraq War, but if Bush lightly criticizes George W Bush, Trump questions why he would throw his brother under the bus. Trump attacks Jeb for his record in Florida, rips him for his $1.3m “no show job” at Lehman Brothers after he left the governorship. He calls Jeb out for being “100% CONTROLLED” by his wealthy donors, and when a few donors recently left Jeb’s campaign, Trump made fun of him for that too.

    • Countering Russian Disinformation: Europe Dusts Off ‘The Mighty Wurlitzer’ – Analysis

      Europe appears ready to dust off the Mighty Wurlitzer. In early June, the Czech daily Hospodářské Noviny was first to report the European Union was forming “a special group to fight Russian propaganda.”[8] Based in Brussels, the group will include experienced journalists and press officers who are fluent in Russian. It is charged with promoting the EU more effectively and strengthening its media presence, with special attention to Russian-language media.

  • Censorship

    • Singapore’s social media abuzz ahead of election

      For a country whose press freedom ranks alongside the likes of Libya, Belarus and Iraq, Singapore is enjoying a surprisingly vibrant media debate ahead of the city-state’s general election on Friday — aided by the growing reach of social media.

    • New Zealand’s censorship gives birth to a must-read
    • New Zealand: Censors ban award-winning teen novel Into The River by Ted Dawe
    • Book ban represents totalitarian state censorship
    • Book ban could set ‘incredibly unhelpful’ precedent
    • Kiwi censorship’s most infamous moments

      The original Mad Max movie was banned in New Zealand until after the sequel had screened.

    • Scrap the censorship Act?
    • Opinion: We need to talk about sex and censorship
    • Michael Putlack: Censorship in NZ shocking to me

      I’m an American who moved to New Zealand…

      [...]

      Before moving here, I assumed most or all countries in the western world had their own equivalent to the First Amendment in the US which guarantees Americans the right to free speech and expression. This is why the censorship here is so shocking to me.

    • Student reading lists: technology and censorship

      Today, technology is being used frequently as a censorship tool as well as a way of getting around censorship. The technology and censorship reading list combines a number of articles released over a twenty-year period on the interference technology can have on free expression and the technological advances meaning censors are being more easily evaded. Includes Bibi van der Zee on the impact of Twitter in driving global political change.

    • Umida Ahmedova оn the Burden of Censorship and Being a Female Artist in Uzbekistan

      Many see her film The Burden of Virginity as shining a light on women’s issues the world over, not just in the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan, where it was made.

      Umida Ahmedova, a filmmaker and photographer, prefers to describe herself not as a dissident living in one of the region’s most repressive states, but as an artist with 20 years of creative success to her name.

    • The Humpty Dumpty Censorship of Television in India

      It is tempting to think of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) attack on Sathiyam TV solely as another authoritarian exhibition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s intolerance of criticism and dissent. It certainly is. But it is also another manifestation of the Indian state’s paranoia of the medium of film and television, and consequently, the irrational controlling impulse of the law.

    • Your Call: The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom

      He writes, “We’re so deluged by information that we fail to see the ways in which censorship and repression are actually creating gaps in the essential knowledge that we need.”

    • YouTuber Nicole Arbour claims ‘censorship’ after ‘Dear Fat People’ video taken down

      Nicole Arbour earned a heated reaction for her “Dear Fat People” YouTube video, and apparent censorship on the part of the video-sharing company.

      The YouTube personality posted the six-minute-long video to her page on Thursday, Aug. 3. In it, the Canadian comedian used humor and “trolling” to try to inspire overweight people to lose weight. With over 700,000 views, the video upset a number of people, including vlogger Meghan Tonjes.

    • YouTube ‘Martyr’ Nicole Arbour Is Wrong About Fat-Shaming
    • Fat-shaming video causes YouTube row

      A comedian who criticised overweight people has sparked a row over censorship on YouTube.

    • South Africa Might Get the Worst Internet Censorship Law in Africa

      Since 1994, South Africa has been hailed as one of the African countries where civil liberties are enshrined and protected by a progressive Constitution. However, recent draft legislation proposed by the Film and Publication Board (FPB) which would regulate online content has left many people stunned by the degree of poorly-defined yet draconian and far-reaching censorship provisions for online content.

    • Fight censorship with the new Humble Bundle full of Gaiman rarities
    • Humble Bundle Offering Neil Gaiman Rarities, Including Unfinished Graphic Novel
    • VPN services blocked in China as Astrill warns of ‘increased censorship’ following WW2 parade
    • China Continues Its Crackdown On VPN Services

      China is showing no sign of letting up on internet users who seek to hurdle its censorship system after it began imposing new restrictions on a popular censorship avoidance service in the country.

    • Statement from the creative team behind Homegrown

      At the beginning of this year the National Youth Theatre approached us with an idea for a show – to create a large-scale, site-specific, immersive piece looking a the radicalisation of young British Muslims. The original commission was intended to use the Trojan Horse affair as its lens, although very early in our process that angle was abandoned in favour of something more nuanced. Homegrown was intended to be an exploration of radicalisation, the stories behind the headlines and the perceptions and realities of Islam and Muslim communities in Britain today. It’s important to state, however, that we had a number of reservations about making a play about ‘British Muslims going to join ISIS’. Throughout our careers, we have resisted playing to the logic of the entertainment industries and their particularly crude game of identity politics. Homegrown wasn’t to be FUBU – For Us By Us. We weren’t force-feeding our views to mindless young people, but exposing an astute and thoughtful young cast to the full spectrum of voices who are currently having that very conversation about radicalisation. We were giving them certain tools – a language, really – and then allowing them to work their way through it all. Over six months of assembling our enormous cast and workshopping ideas, we were very clear about exactly what we were making, and that the drive behind this was to create a piece of theatre which unsettled all the preconceived ideas people would come with to this subject matter.

    • Facebook’s Nudity Rules Still Make No Sense

      Her story seemed like the kind of thing that anti-censorship organization might want to share with its readers– perhaps even on, say, Facebook. But after we did that, someone at Facebook had a problem with that. After receiving a complaint from a user– “I feel that this post is sexually explicit and should not be on Facebook”– our post was removed and we received this notice:

      We removed the post below because it doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards.

      This was not our first time this has happened to us, and there are numerous artists who have run into the same problem.I

    • Council accused of “censoring” the views of city carers

      GLASGOW City Council has been accused of “censoring” the views of desperate carers protesting against plans which they believe could jeopardise vital support services.

    • Censorship by Murder

      On September 2, 2015, four eminent personalities, including Chittagong District Court’s Additional Public Prosecutors Ashok Kumar Das and Chandan Bishwas; the Vice-Chancellor of Premier University, Chittagong, Dr. Anupam Sen; and International Crime Tribunal’s Prosecutor Rana Dasgupta received death threats in the form of SMS text messages from the banned terrorist formation, Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT, Volunteer of Allah Bangla Team).

    • Bangladesh High Court rejects petition challenging Islam as state religion
    • Award-winning Turkish journalist charged with ‘insulting’ Turkey’s President

      Prosecutors filed a case against Today’s Zaman columnist Yavuz Baydar on Saturday for “insulting” the president in two recent columns.

      “This is the latest in a number of cases of journalists being targeted and charged for insulting the president, which in turn forms part of a wider crackdown on a free and independent media in Turkey,” said Index chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.

    • “Don’t read the comments”: The trolls, racists and abusers won — reasonable online feedback is a thing of the distant past

      To those of you who,after you read stories, write responses in the comments and offer an enlightened, sane take — whether you agree with the author or not — I salute you. To those who read the comments because you find the conversation there informative and intellectually challenging, mazel tov. As for everybody else, forgive me, but I strongly suspect you’re trolls, masochists, or both. That’s why I’m with Jessica Valenti, who this week in the Guardian questions why we still have comments sections at all.

  • Privacy

    • NSA Chief Says Iranian Cyberattacks Against U.S. Have Slowed
    • Iranian hackers ease off on US after friendly nuke chats, says NSA

      Speaking at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal [paywall] reported him saying there had been “significant Iranian activity” related to cyber-attacks against US financial firms a couple of years ago.

      [...]

      Of course, when it comes to cyber-attacks the US has a much better track record than Iran.

      In 2011 the Stuxnet worm crippled Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, repeatedly attacking five industrial plants inside Iran over a 10-month period.

      The stealth of the attack was so effective that Iran didn’t even seem to be aware that the damage was the result of an attack until the media started reporting the story.

      The US and Israel have never formally admitted to being behind the worm, having refused to discuss it on record.

    • EFF Provides Evidence to Courts of Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T Participation in NSA Spying

      This week EFF presented evidence in two of its NSA cases confirming the participation of Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T in the NSA’s mass telephone records collection under the Patriot Act. This is important because, despite broad public acknowledgement, the government is still claiming that it can dismiss our cases because it has never confirmed that anyone other than Verizon Business participated and that disclosing which providers assist the agency is a state secret. This argument was successful recently in convincing the D.C. Circuit to reverse and remand the case of Klayman v. Obama.

      EFF filed requests with the courts in two lawsuits, Smith v. Obama and First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA, asking that they accept as evidence and take into account government filings in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that were recently made public. The filings confirm that AT&T, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint participated in the NSA’s programs since they report on a “compliance incident” involving those companies.

    • Former NSA Director’s Md.-based Cybersecurity Startup Raises $7.5M

      The security startup may be better defined as a star-studded consultancy firm that produces security software. The majority of the company’s clients are in the financial sector, Bloomberg reported in 2014.

    • NSA whistleblower James Bamford profiles Edward Snowden

      Bamford was the first-ever NSA whistleblower, whose bravery led to the Church Commission…

    • Philly Journalist Dustin Slaughter Sues NSA, CIA Over Occupy Philly Surveillance

      Slaughter, who lives in Mt. Airy, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday naming the two government agencies as defendants. According to the suit, Slaughter made Freedom of Information Act requests with the NSA and CIA last December, asking for any information pertaining to surveillance of Occupy Philly. He points to articles in the New York Times that confirm that the government was actively spying on the overall Occupy movement, and he wants to know about any such activity in Philadelphia.

    • Occupy Philadelphia protester sues for records of government spying

      Lawyers for an Occupy Philadelphia activist have sued the National Security Agency and the CIA in federal court for records of any spying the agencies may have conducted on the group during the 2011 protests.

      The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, cites media reports that Occupy Wall Street protesters were subject to government surveillance.

      Dustin Slaughter, an online journalist who participated in Occupy Philadelphia, filed Freedom of Information Act requests in December with both the NSA and CIA for records involving the Philadelphia protesters.

    • Surveillance selfies at the Stasi Museum

      During a recent trip to Germany, I embarked on what I half-jokingly called a surveillance sightseeing tour in Berlin. More than at any other destination, the city’s vast collection of Cold War–related sites and history offers a wide array of surveillance-related attractions.

    • Top German Spy: We Made Mistakes Working With NSA

      German intelligence agencies made a number of mistakes while cooperating with their US colleagues, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service said in a media interview on Monday.

    • CIA had access to German telecom data – report

      The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had direct and possibly unfiltered access to telecom data from Germany in a secret operation with the German intelligence service (BND), Spiegel.de reports. As part of the operation “glotaic”, telephone and fax traffic of the US provider MCI was surveyed at its German site in Hilden between 2004 and 2006. According to a confidential paper of the German intelligence service BND, audio data of tapped calls were “directly routed to the US” so the “audio function would work without interruptions”.

    • Is Germany Building the Next NSA?
    • German Spies Building Empire to Match NSA Amid Criticism

      Despite an ongoing investigation into the controversial mass surveillance program run by the German intelligence agency, BND, in co-operation with the US National security Agency (NSA), the BND is facing criticism for expanding its operations.

    • Trevor Paglen Photographs the Underwater Telecommunication Cables Tapped by the NSA

      When I met the artist Trevor Paglen to talk about the surveillance state, I found him crouched in the back of a metal bar called Rasputin. He was in Istanbul for an arts and culture festival where he was giving a lecture on government secrecy, a major theme in his work. We’d spent the last few days at a hotel that used to be a hangout for American spies, and it felt fitting that we left the onetime spook house to discuss the NSA in an antiestablishment bar named after a mystic tied to the downfall of the Russian monarchy.

    • TREVOR PAGLEN with Hunter Braithwaite
    • Klayman salvages NSA lawsuit by adding plaintiff who used Verizon Business

      The conservative lawyer challenging the National Security Agency’s bulk phone data collection program is acting on a federal judge’s suggestion to beef up his case against the government by adding another plaintiff who used the cell-phone network that the government has publicly admitted to tracking.

    • What Does Latest Court Ruling On NSA Telephone Metadata Program Mean? – Analysis

      On August 28, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in Obama v. Klayman, ruled for the government in the ongoing litigation over the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) telephone metadata program (PDF). The Klayman ruling, while arising out of the context of the government’s foreign intelligence gathering powers, did not opine on the constitutionality of the NSA’s program. Instead, the decision focused on the procedural prerequisites necessary for a federal court to exercise jurisdiction over the case in the first place. Specifically, the appeals court ruled that the Klayman plaintiffs lacked standing to obtain a preliminary order barring the NSA from continuing the telephone metadata program.

    • NSA’s illegal surveillance soon will stop
    • Push to stop NSA spying moves forward
    • US trade watchdog to FBI: ‘You think the crims won’t know about the backdoor too?’

      The security world was set abuzz on Friday when the NSA finally revealed the details on its zero day policy. Well, “revealed” might be something of a stretch.

    • Government Releases Policy on Vulnerability Discovery and Disclosure
    • Now We Know a Little Bit More About How the NSA Uses Software Vulnerabilities

      EFF says it is contemplating challenging some of the redactions. “We [still] don’t know how this process squares with the government’s claims that in the vast majority of cases it discloses vulnerabilities to the public rather than holding on to them for intelligence or law enforcement purposes,” EFF wrote.

    • A Bizarre Twist in the Debate Over Vulnerability Disclosures

      The ongoing battle between researchers and vendors over the public disclosure of security vulnerabilities in vendor products took a bizarre turn yesterday in a new case involving two security firms, FireEye and ERNW.

      In a blog post published Thursday, ERNW revealed that FireEye had obtained a court injunction to prevent its researchers from publicly disclosing certain information around three vulnerabilities they discovered in a security product made by FireEye.

    • Delayed European Legal Opinion On Facebook NSA/PRISM Coming Later This Month

      A European legal opinion regarding Facebook’s alleged data-sharing co-operation with the NSA/PRISM dragnet surveillance program that’s due to be issued by the Advocate General (AG) of Europe’s top court is now slated to be delivered on September 23.

      The AG had originally been scheduled to deliver the opinion in June. The delay has not been explained by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

    • Angry Austrian’s Facebook safe harbour case to be seen by Bot

      The top advisor to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will give his opinion on the so-called Europe versus Facebook case on 23 September.

      The ECJ revealed on Monday that Advocate General Yves Bot’s opinion would be given later this month after it was postponed in June.

      The case involves “Angry Austrian” Max Schrems, who complained to the Irish Data Commissioner that Facebook had passed his personal data on to the US National Security Agency in breach of his data protection rights. The Irish data protection authorities (DPA) refused to investigate on the grounds that Facebook is signed up to the so-called safe harbour agreement.

    • Would Prefer to Live in My Own Country, Says NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden

      Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Saturday criticised Russia – the country that has granted him asylum – calling its crackdown on human rights and online freedom “fundamentally wrong” and said he would prefer not to live in exile.

    • Snowden slams Russia in Norway awards

      NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden criticised Russia’s treatment of gay people and the internet as he accepted a Norwegian free speech prize.

    • NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden attacks Russia for human rights abuses

      Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden – who has been granted asylum by Russia – criticised the country’s crackdown on human rights and online freedom on Saturday as “wrong… disappointing and frustrating”.

    • Ex-NSA contractor Snowden appears at Norwegian prize ceremony via video link
    • NSA leaker Edward Snowden receives Norwegian freedom of expression honor
    • Snowden: web restrictions are ‘wrong in Russia, would be wrong anywhere’
    • Snowden receives Norwegian freedom of speech award
    • Snowden Pans Russian Federation for Approach to Internet and Homosexuality
    • Edward Snowden criticises Russia for crackdown on internet freedom, homosexuality
    • Edward Snowden: Russia was last resort for me
    • Hot Air Criticism on NSA Misses the Mark

      In fact, the facility in Bluffdale serves only as a massive data storage facility. It would have no useful purpose if the agency was not engaged in mass, warrantless, dragnet collection of data – the very thing Rand said he wants to stop. The Bluffdale facility does not play any role in the actual gathering of signal intelligence.

    • US Reliance on Too Much SIGINT and Too Little Spycraft Is Dangerous and Expensive

      How can the United States spend upwards of $50 billion a year on intelligence, and still be surprised by something like the Russian invasion of Crimea?

      Anonymous intelligence officials are trying to blame Edward Snowden—as if Vladimir Putin had no idea until this summer that the U.S. was trying to eavesdrop on him.

    • A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption

      But last October, cryptographers at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, posted an enigmatic paper online that called into question the security of some of the most efficient lattice-based schemes. The findings hinted that vulnerabilities had crept in during a decade-long push for ever-greater efficiency. As cryptographers simplified the underlying lattices on which their schemes were based, they rendered the schemes more susceptible to attack.

      Building on the GCHQ claims, two teams of cryptanalysts have spent the past year determining which lattice-based schemes can be broken by quantum computers, and which are safe — for now.

    • Library Will Vote On Giving Patrons Access To Anonymous Tor Browsers

      Homeland Security picked a fight with the library in New Hampshire

    • DHS Uses Local Law Enforcement To Shut Down Tor Access For Library Patrons

      Nearly everything in our society has been or will be exploited by criminals: cars, cellphones, hatchets, cleaning solutions, tape, boats, aircraft–the list is virtually endless. It’s part of living with and in a free society, and the feds don’t come knocking on 3M’s door every time a criminal uses their tape to facilitate a break-in or other criminal act. But federal agencies like DHS and the FBI are literally on an anti-encryption, anti-privacy crusade with respect to consumer electronics and software–especially high-quality, publicly audited and effective anonymization technology like Tor. The Kilton Library’s internet freedom project has just become the federal government’s latest victim in that misguided campaign.

    • Stop using difficult-to-guess passwords, UK’s spying agency GCHQ recommends

      The British spying agency, found to have been conducting wholesale surveillance on UK citizens, has recommended that the public make their passwords less complex.

      In a brand new document called ‘Password guidance: simplifying your approach’, the company gives a range of guidelines to keep consumers safe. That includes rolling back previous guidance “that complex passwords are ‘stronger’” — instead recommending that people simplify their approach.

      The agency gives a range of hints to those working in IT as well as normal consumers.

      Those include warning people to change their default passwords, to make sure that accounts can be locked out if they’re under attack and avoid storing passwords as plain text files that can be read by anyone.

    • Infrared Portraits Capture Counter-Surveillance Dissidents

      American hacker and privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum is primarily known as a former WikiLeaks spokesperson and persistent thorn in the side of governments worldwide. But he also has an artistic streak.

    • Hacker Jacob Appelbaum’s new tool in the fight for digital freedom? Photography

      Jacob Appelbaum is an American hacker, a privacy activist and an artist with a new show, his first solo photography exhibition in his chosen city of Berlin. Had things gone differently, he could even have been a Communications Security Establishment (CSE) agent.

      According to Appelbaum, he was invited to talk to students about privacy online a few years ago in, if he remembers correctly, Ottawa. It’s something he often does as a member of the Tor project, a free software network providing online anonymity.

    • The Red Web: In Putin’s Russia, Internet watches you

      Review: Veteran Russian reporters show the Kremlin relies on “threat and intimidation.”

    • Cybersecurity Pros Knock Congress as Security Bill Stalls
    • Security experts mostly critical of proposed threat intelligence sharing bill

      This fall, the Senate is expected to take another look at the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, but many security experts and privacy advocates are opposed.

    • Congress floats an even worse version of CISA

      Amendments attached to the proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) make an “already awful cybersecurity bill” worse by making worrying changes to the years-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned recently.

      Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse introduced amendments to CISA, which, if approved, would make sweeping changes to the CFAA. Instead of helping harden computer systems or protect people from malicious actors, the new provisions would give prosecutors “more power to threaten more people with more prison time,” Cindy Cohn, EFF’s executive director, warned in a recent blog post. CISA, with 20-odd amendments, is on the docket for a full vote in the Senate this year.

    • Library Suspends Tor Node After DHS Intimidation

      The Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is not unusual in its commitment to the freedom to read in privacy. That commitment is shared by libraries all over the world, and written into the basic character of librarianship through documents like the American Library Association’s “Freedom to Read Statement.” What’s exceptional about Kilton, though, is it was selected by the Library Freedom Project and The Tor Project as the pilot location for a program to install Tor relays, and eventually exit nodes, in public libraries all over.

    • US Demand for Unrestricted Email Access Threatens Democracy – Whistleblower

      NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe claims that providing US authorities with the right to access any individual’s email account around the world would undermine democracy by equipping the government with the means to crush any political opposition.

    • The disappointing truth regarding data privacy and security

      There are a number of examples of regulatory challenges facing enterprises that want to adopt cloud computing. The US Patriot Act stipulates that the US government may collect data from US-based cloud companies regardless of the data’s physical location. As part of the PRISM program, the NSA secretly collects Internet communications from major US Internet companies, including Google and Microsoft.

    • Beware Vodafone’s Draconian “Acceptable Use Policy”

      Is it just me or have ISP (Internet Service Provider) terms and conditions gotten a lot more one-sided about what you can’t do and what they can do?

    • EU and US sign law enforcement data pact

      A separate 15-year-old data transfer agreement to “ensure an adequate level of [data] protection” whenever the personal data of EU nationals is transferred to firms based in the US is also under review.

      Known as Safe Harbor, the pact underpins a multi-billion euro industry dominated by giants like Google and Facebook, but is riddled with problems. The European Parliament last year voted to have it scrapped.

      Over 3,000 US companies have signed up to the self-certification scheme but a study in 2013 found that hundreds had lied about belonging to the data protection arrangement.

      The US Federal Trade Commission, tasked to enforce it, did little to crack down on the companies.

      The European Commission, for its part, issued 13 recommendations to the Americans to improve it. That was almost two years ago.

      The Americans are refusing to budge on the pact’s national security exceptions.

      But Jourova now says she is confident the work on safe harbor “will soon conclude”.

    • Cellphone Surveillance Gets New Federal Regulations And Guidelines

      When Edward Snowden dropped the NSA/government surveillance bomb on the world, many Americans, as well as countries around the world, started taking privacy a lot seriously. Some began to question just how far reaching the US government had become. So much so in fact, that the government cut NSA surveillance funding and promised to implement new measures for how it goes about procuring such information.

    • FBI Agents Attended Burning Man To Collect Intelligence, Documents Show

      As thousands of revelers start making the trek home from the Burning Man festival in Northern Nevada, newly released documents reveal the FBI spied on the event a few years ago.

      Documents obtained by the journalist Inkoo Kang, and posted to the website MuckRock, reveal that the event has been under FBI surveillance since at least 2010. That’s when the agency concluded that Burning Man is “considered a cultural and artisan event, which promote (sic) free expression by the participants.”

    • Viewpoint: A post-9/11 adolescence

      This progression to a surveillance state made it easier for our country to impose structure and accountability, but such constant policing posed its own problems. We became accustomed to a culture lacking privacy, such that we addictively share all aspects of ourselves through social media. Afraid to be alone, we’ve embraced constant connectivity. Ultimately, an attachment to sleepless keepers — both NSA watchmen and phone companions — developed. This attachment diverts and stunts personal growth. It created a stifling order with no room for introspection on issues such as war, loss of life and moral principles. It is in this stifling order that I see what was fundamentally lost by our nation: solitude. This loss was a shift in our nation’s consciousness.

      Privacy and anonymity now feel criminalized, as if we must account for every action and thought.

    • The ‘Crypto Wars’ of the 1990s are brewing again in Washington

      A debate over data security is brewing in Washington. On one side, law enforcement officials warn that new deployments of encryption, the technology that protects our communications and stored data from prying eyes, is leaving the government without the insight it needs to track down criminals and terrorists. On the other, privacy advocates and tech companies say efforts to build ways for law enforcement to access protected communications will leave everyone less secure.

      But for many longtime techies, this isn’t anything new — it’s a repeat of the “Crypto Wars” of the 1990s. In fact, former Clinton tech policy official Michael Nelson said in a recent op-ed published by the Hill that it is giving him a bad case of “digital deja vu.”

      Nelson, who now works on public policy at CloudFlare, was the Clinton administration’s point person on the Clipper chip — a government-backed piece of technology from the early 1990s designed to give authorities a way to wiretap encrypted phone calls.

    • Privacy, Security, and the Legacy of 9/11

      Q. You’ve been teaching privacy law at UConn School of Law since 2003. Have you seen a change in the way your students view their privacy rights?

      A. At the beginning of the first class of each semester, I begin by telling my students, “Welcome to the Right of Privacy. We will spend the next 15 weeks studying that which you do not have.” I used to smile when I made that little joke. I don’t anymore. I also begin the first class by asking my students to think about whether privacy is an absolute or relative value. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that most people are willing to trade away their privacy for something else of value. We give out personal financial information when we buy something we want on the Internet; we reveal highly personal information about our bodies to doctors so that they can make proper diagnoses, etc. The question is whether we can trust the people and entities with whom we share this information to protect it.

      When I started teaching in 2003, Facebook was in its infancy and YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter did not even exist. Social media has fundamentally transformed the way the youth of the 21st century think about and value individual privacy. They share so much information about themselves, and they do so via platforms that make that shared information accessible to thousands, if not millions, of people.

      So, to answer your question directly, have I seen a change in the way my students view their privacy rights? Oh yea. You betcha.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Vienna Commercial Court quashes Austrian law on private copying levies

        Is there any topic in the copyright world that is more appealing and exciting than private copying and related levies? Following Eleonora’s post earlier this week on the recent Opinion of the European Copyright Society in a reference for a preliminary ruling currently pending before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), this being HP Belgium v Reprobel, today the IPKat is delighted to host a guest contribution by Dr Ulrich Börger (Harte-Bavendamm) on a recent Austrian case on the very topic of levies, in which he acted for one of the parties to the proceedings .

      • Early YouTube Musician Explains How Signing Major Label Deal ‘Nearly Destroyed My Career’

        Digital Music News has an unfortunate story that we’ve heard too many times before: that of an independent musician successfully building a following… only to do a deal with a major label and see it all come crashing down. What’s interesting is that the artist, Terra Naomi, was willing to lay out all of the details. It’s worth a read, as it’s a story that is pretty common. That is not to say that signing a major label deal is necessarily a bad thing. For some artists it may be the right decision. But the way that major labels work is that you’ll only get enough attention for the label to determine if you’re “the next big thing” where all its revenue will come from for the next few years… and if things don’t seem to be going that way, you’ll be pushed aside quickly. The standard stat given is that 90% of major label deals “fail.” That does not mean they are not profitable for the label. The way RIAA accounting works, the labels can make out like a bandit on many of those record deals, while the artist gets hung out to dry. That appears to be the case with Naomi as well.

      • ‘Citizenfour’ to be screened in open air
      • Peace Center fall series to begin with Snowden film

        The Amesbury Friends Peace Center will open its fall program on Sept. 16 with the showing of the Oscar-winning film “CitizenFour.”

        This film is about Edward Snowden, the high-level government computer expert whose theft of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency represents the most serious intelligence breach in U.S. history. His action exposed the vast extent of U.S. government surveillance programs both in the U.S. and abroad.

      • ‘Citizenfour’ Director Laura Poitras Launching Documentary Unit (EXCLUSIVE)

        “Citizenfour” director-producer Laura Poitras is teaming with AJ Schnack and Charlotte Cook to launch Field of Vision, a documentary unit that will commission and create 40 to 50 episodic and short-form nonfiction films each year.

        Field of Vision was developed in collaboration with The Intercept and First Look Media. The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, is a website “dedicated to producing fearless, adversarial journalism.”

        Field of Vision will launch at the 53rd Annual New York Film Festival on Sept. 27 with Poitras’ “Asylum,” a short-form series tracking WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as he publishes diplomatic cables and seeks asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy.

      • Citizenfour: a victim of the DVD waiting game

        Director Laura Poitras has created an incredible documentary about Edward Snowden but its ham-fisted release strategy has lost a huge potential audience

IRC Proceedings: August 30th, 2015 – September 12th, 2015

Posted in IRC Logs at 1:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IRC Proceedings: August 30th – September 5th, 2015

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

IRC Proceedings: August 6th – September 12th, 2015

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#techrights log

#boycottnovell log

GNOME Gedit

GNOME Gedit

#boycottnovell-social log

#techbytes log

Enter the IRC channels now

09.12.15

EPO Staff Suicides Estimated to Have Grown Tenfold Under Current Regime — Claim

Posted in Europe, Patents at 12:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

But Battistelli continues to deny there is a problem and won’t fall on his sword (no joke/entertainment but an idiom)

Ruined church

Summary: Instead of EPO staff driving away the corrupt management, it’s the management crushing staff unions and driving away the staff (causing brain drain), or driving some to suicide

THE SELF-DEFENCE we often hear from the EPO, including from Battistelli in person, is that the number of suicides at the EPO is not statistically unusual. Some EPO apologists say the same thing, often without checking and actually comparing statistics.

Dutch newspapers have written about the suicides in recent days (they deem it worthy of a mention, not opportunism or a distortion of facts) and over at IP Kat, having read the automated translations of these articles, “Merpel urges the Administrative Council (AC) to act, and to act quickly. Discussions about whether the Office has immunity from employment law or is exempt from the prevailing standards of employee care throughout the EU are not only immaterial, they are repugnant in the present circumstances. Each AC delegate should take individual responsibility to ensure that the next time such a personal tragedy occurs, nobody thinks it newsworthy and nobody links it to the EPO as a place of employment.”

A lot of new information (however unverified) can be found in the comments. One commenter wrote: “I am not sure that SUEPO did the right thing, making the matter public, but the reply of the President is shameful as well. Even if the death cannot be linked directly linked with the working conditions, claiming that everything is honky dory is a blatant lie. That he respects the dignity of staff is just laughable. ”

SUEPO did not make the matter public, it was first reported in Techrights last month and all along we tried hard to protect the identity of the person in question (the first person to mention the name in correspondence was the EPO’s Ciaran McGinley, PD Patent Administration, and later Battistelli). Even in private correspondence with Battistelli SUEPO consistently abstained from name-dropping, even after Battistelli had done that.

“The suicides don’t surprise us at all given the management’s bullying, euphemistically called “interrogation” (maybe we should dub it Battistelligence).”IP Kat has many comments that are interesting because some of them add new information and the posters often come from within the EPO (both the management and those below the management). One person shares this story: “I know the widow of one of the EPO suicided colleague. She really wanted an independent investigation. Then the EPO informed her that such request of investigation is inappropriate. Such behavior will postpone the payment of all the allowances. (+/- 4 years of procedure for the internal appeal, then +/- 4 additional years for the appeal at the ILOAT).

“The direct consequence: the widow and her children would be left without money and without social security for 8 years.

“This wife was desperate by the dead of her husband. She couldn´t face additional money problems and she had to cooperate with the EPO.”

Here is some unverified bunch of historical statistics about suicides at the EPO: “I believe that what is striking here is the INCREASE of the suicide rate at the EPO, which were 3 (three in total !) in the more than 30 years between 1977 and 2009.

“This means that the suicide rate changed in 2010 from 1 every 10 years to 1 every year.”

The suicides don’t surprise us at all given the management’s bullying, euphemistically called “interrogation” (maybe we should dub it Battistelligence). It’s militarised. Maybe one day we will expand on what exactly happens behind closed doors and who is doing that.

“Nothing is done to lower the work pressure,” one person writes, “on the contrary + nothing is done to stop the brutal management methods on the contrary = further suicides among the weakest staff are likely to soon occur at the European Patent Office.”

It would not shock us at this stage. The EPO is now bullying even staff representatives. How dumb a move.

One person correctly pointed out: “The point is surely that such tragedies demand a proper investigation. Precisely because of its claim to blanket immunity, the EPO is in loco the state for many aspects of its employees’ lives. In the outside world a suicide IS investigated by a coroner’s court in the UK (I am not sure about what happens in continental law), and such investigations sometimes lead to recommendations for prevention. On a large scale the epidemiology of suicide is studied by governments as a basis for preventive policies. The exclusion of suicides by EPO employees from any such investigation is completely unacceptable.”

SUEPO has meanwhile shared this Dutch interview from NPO Radio 1, titled “Verziekte arbeidsomstandigheden bij Octrooibureau in Rijswijk” (it’s all in Dutch).

To quote SUEPO, “Ms Liesbeth Zegveld, SUEPO lawyer and Mr John Kerstens, Member of the Dutch House of Parliament (Tweede Kamer PvdA) were interviewed on 10 September 2015 on the Dutch channel Radio 1 over the “unhealthy working environment” in the European Patent Office.”

We would really appreciate translations from Dutch to English. These would broaden the reach of this scandal and allow MEPs whose Dutch is zilch to become better informed. █

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