02.28.14
Posted in News Roundup at 5:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest (past 24 hours) stories about eroding human rights (exploiting transitions to digital), especially privacy rights
GCHQ
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GCHQ documents say between 3-11 percent of Yahoo webcam chats contain ‘undesirable’ nudity.
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The government is spying on Yahoo users via their webcams and X-box, according to a report based on leaked Eric Snowden documents. Both the American and British governments are now accused of spying on citizens in their own home, sans either a warrant or just cause.
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• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
UK
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Techdirt followed the the saga of the hacker Gary McKinnon, whom the US authorities wished to extradite from the UK to face charges of causing damage to military computers, for some years before the UK Home Secretary blocked his extradition, and the case against him in the UK was dropped. That was a great result for McKinnon after a 10-year fight to avoid extradition, but it meant that the key issues that his situation raised were never addressed.
Reform/Legal
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“Once You Give Up Your Rights, You Can Never Get Them Back. Once You Turn On That Police State, You Can Never Turn It Off.”
Richard Clarke is one of the four White House panelists on NSA spying, and the former top counter-terror czar in the Clinton and Bush administrations.
Local Action
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While the NSA datacenter and its activities are in the national spotlight, local authority remains divided on how to treat it.
Algorithms
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Eavesdropping by algorithm is still eavesdropping, whether a human looks at your data or not. Real reform can’t abide by the spy dictionary anymore
Alexander
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In one of his final Capitol Hill appearances, Gen. Keith Alexander, the National Security Agency’s director, on Thursday called for a stronger strategy to deter cyberattacks, saying the line that would prompt a U.S. response against an adversary “does not yet exist.”
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Alexander says NSA could accept a change where agency would only be allowed to collect phone data related to terrorism
‘Metadata’
Amazon/CIA
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When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well. People would prefer to run software and store data on their own computers, the argument went, rather than host their operations atop outside services potentially compromised by the NSA.
Civil Rights
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If President Barack Obama gets his way, five American citizens will have become victims of announced “targeted assassinations” by the military and CIA. Coupled with disturbing statements by United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, it is evident that the principle of the rule of law has lost force in the past few decades, especially after 9/11.
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It was enshrined in the American, British and French Revolutions as sacred, and is an essential precept of liberalism.
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*Eliminate the National Surveillance Agency, the NSA; completely stop the enormous spying on the American people. Take the other 12 U.S. intelligence agencies and combine their functions into one. We have the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security to monitor imminent or longer term dangers to this country.
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Think of us as having two presidents. One, a fellow named Barack Obama, cuts a distinctly Clark Kent-ish figure. In presiding over domestic policy, he is regularly thwarted in his desires by the Republicans in Congress and couldn’t until recently get his most basic choices for government positions or the judiciary through the Senate. For the most minimal look of effectiveness, he has to rely on relatively small gestures by executive order. In the recent history of the American presidency, he is a remarkably powerless figure presiding over what everyone who is a media anyone claims is a riven, paralyzed, even broken government structure, one in which the Republicans are intent on ensuring that a Democratic president can do nothing until they take the White House (which is almost guaranteed to be never). What this president wants, almost by definition, he can’t have. He is, as Guardian columnist Gary Younge wrote recently, a man who’s lost the plot line to his own story and has been relegated to the position of onlooker-in-chief.
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There is one law for their terrorists and another for ours. “Theirs” kill a soldier in Woolwich and get slammed up for life. They get a verbal lynching from the red-tops, with Rot in Jail headlines and screams the rope would be too good for them, the filth and scum. “Our” terrorists get royal pardons and “letters of assurance”, even if, as may be the case, they slaughter four soldiers and eight horses in cold blood in Hyde Park. That is how it must seem to many people.
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The Untied States is the world’s biggest violator of human rights of non-American persons and has been strongly condemned for conducting surveillance and prisoner torture around the globe, a report on US human rights said Friday.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013 was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council, or the Cabinet, in response to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013 issued by the US State Department on Thursday.
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China has hit back at the US over the human rights debate alleging the “world judge of human rights” has serious question marks hanging over its own record.
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Washington has long “made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks” on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions again in its just-released reports, the Chinese report says.
“However, the US carefully concealed and avoided mentioning its own human rights problems,” it adds.
Chinese ally Russia has also repeatedly said the United States has no right to claim a mantle of moral leadership. Moscow has criticized Washington sharply over human rights, pointing to secret CIA jails abroad and treatment of inmates at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and elsewhere.
Drones
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Mr. Shami, a militant who American officials say is living in the barren mountains of northwestern Pakistan, is at the center of a debate inside the government over whether President Obama should once again take the extraordinary step of authorizing the killing of an American citizen overseas.
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European Union Members of Parliament condemned the use of drones in targeted killings in a vote of 534 to 49. The vote proposing a ban referred to the drone strikes as “unlawful.”
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Activists of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf, led by cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan, had blocked the route from the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar for the past three months in a protest over U.S. drone strikes.
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Increased European research on unmanned aircraft is making the European Parliament nervous.
Military
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Proposed cuts to defence spending would shrink US army to smallest size in 74 years
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An influential U.S. senator says the Obama administration’s response to the Benghazi attack was so fraught with inaccuracies and misleading testimony in the weeks preceding the 2012 presidential election that it warrants a new and thorough investigation by a joint Senate committee.
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The very first act of the western-backed insurrectionists which represent a small percentage of the population and have managed to overthrow the government was to attempt rob Russian speakers in Ukraine of their language.
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Hunt will be giving advice to startups in his new role at the San Francisco-based investment firm as they seek out profitable deals from the federal government. He told VentureBeat in an interview, “I’m taking my understanding of the intelligence space and scouting out the opportunities.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Recent news about hardware that can be modified and it permissive in that regard
SkyNet
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At the former Wired editor’s start-up, 3D Robotics, open-source robots take to the skies
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In the meantime, he’s hard at work on a new project called SkyNet Firmware, which will run on the open source Arduino circuit boards, devices you can use to build all sorts of computerized gadgets. “The idea is that you can load SkyNet Firmware on any Arduino compatible device or board,” he says. “The Arduino connects to SkyNet and just waits for commands.” This would let you attach almost anything to SkyNet.
3D Printers
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At the forefront of the 3D printing boom for consumers is MakerBot, whose Linux-based Replicator printers sell for between $1,300 and $3,000 and are small enough to sit on your desktop. Their MakerWare design software runs on any platform and the Thingiverse online community allows more than 13,000 users to download or upload designs in an open source, collaborative model for do-it-yourself manufacturing, according to a sponsored post in The Atlantic.
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So far, in short, I can describe 3D printing as: Building an object, by depositing layers, and creating every layer by drawing it with melted plastic. The key to understanding 3D printing, and thus learning how to do it better, is to think about the objects as a stack of layers. Then, consider how the layers will look like as they are being stacked.
Charles Babcock’s Series of Articles
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References to Linux come up naturally because it is one of the most successful, sustained, and adopted open-source software projects. New releases of the Linux kernel now appear every 70 days. Each contains up to 10,000 updates and patches, a rate of change that equals 7.14 an hour. Linux’s fame rests not on the fact that it’s frequently modified. Rather, it’s frequently modified and also respected as having a long-term future in the enterprise datacenter. The way things are shaping up, it also very likely has a permanent place in cloud architectures.
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Facebook, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and other leading IT users think the open-source movement is ready to shake up the hardware industry the way Linux did in software.
Misc.
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Intel announced a Developer Program for IoT, which will offer 5,000 Arduino-compatible Galileo SBC-based IoT development kits, plus hackathons with prizes.
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AS you may know, just few weeks ago OSHWA published the results from 2013 Open Hardware Community survey. You can find original datasheets and everything here. Despite raw data is good, I thought it was good to spend some time looking at the data trying to gather more insights, when possible, still keeping in mind that the survey samples a very limited and polarized (OSHWA centric) chunk of the community. But we need to start from something in a way.
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02.27.14
Posted in GNU/Linux, Google, Samsung at 12:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Samsung’s proximity and increasing control of Tizen is another reason to avoid Tizen, not just Samsung
LONG before Samsung was really into Linux there were numerous efforts to bring Linux to mobile. It’s a shame that one of the largest such efforts is now controlled by Intel/Samsung but officially steered by the Linux Foundation, which is funded by those companies that help Microsoft. By far the biggest player, however, remains Android, which is also based on Linux (some journalists don’t seem to know that Android has Linux in it [1] and others overlook the contribution of Alien Dalvik back in MeeGo’s days [2]). There are numerous articles about Samsung’s adoption of Tizen as an important platform [3-5], but none of them offers a critical take on Samsung’s special relationship with Microsoft.
CBS had a lot of coverage regarding the latest Samsung phone [6-8] which increasingly involves the likes of Intel [9]. The coverage in Muktware [10,11] focused on the features and release date, but there too there was no criticism of Samsung, which increasingly imitates the bad side of Apple.
The bottom line is, Samsung has too much control of Tizen and only to a lesser degree of Android. This is not a good thing; Samsung never cared about freedom, instead emphasising DRM and other such negative aspects of technology. This issue merits an open discussion. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Tizen has a long road ahead in terms of matching Android in apps or popularity. Quite frankly, that happening is very unlikely. Of course, many would have said BlackBerry was unbeatable years ago, so never say never.
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With a simple click, the Polaris App Generator software is able to wrap an Android APK and convert it to a Tizen OS executable file. This means developers don’t have to pour additional resources into manually porting their apps.
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The long wait for a major Tizen OS device is finally over, and it’s a…smartwatch? At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Samsung skipped the unveiling of its first Tizen smartphone, and instead rolled out a trio of Tizen-based wrist computers: the Gear 2, Gear Neo, and Gear Fit. Due to ship in April, the devices are lighter and more stylish than Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Gear.
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The Korean electronics giant unveiled three new software development kits to make it easy to create programs that work with its new wearables and its Galaxy S5.
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The much-anticipated Galaxy S5 is finally here! After months of rumors and leaks, Samsung unveiled the successor to the Galaxy S4 at a press conference at Mobile World Conference (MWC) 2014 in Barcelona. Though it’s a minor evolution of the Galaxy S4, the new phone packs a sharp 5.1-inch screen, a faster, 2.5GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM and a 16-megapixel camera. Taking cue from the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, the smartphone is also waterproof. It features a new fingerprint scanner similar to the iPhone 5S.
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We’ve waited for this moment for quite some time, but now the S5 has officially been revealed. Samsung’s latest offering comes with a 5.1″ 1920 x 1080p screen, 2GB of RAM, 16 or 32GB of storage plus the ability to host a Micro SD card. Android 4.4.2 is on board as expected, and it sports a 2.5Ghz quad-core Snapdragon process (not sure of 800, 801 or 805).
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Portal 2 is now available to Linux users – in beta form. Valve has recently released a public beta for the latest version of its bestselling sequel, which you can opt-in to via the Portal 2 properties in your Steam Library. Valve is getting pretty keen on this Linux business and welcomes your bug reports via Github.
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MegaGlest is a 3D real-time strategy game, completely free and open-source, taking place on a wide range of maps and including seven different factions. MegaGlest is a fork of Glest, which stopped being developed a few years ago.
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Zigfrak is a single player space-based action RPG, featuring missions, exploration, and crafting. It is also now DRM free on FireFlower Games, on other stores it uses a one-time activation key, so I hope this version comes to other stores too.
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The survival game Rust from the dudes at Facepunch has been updated today, featuring a whole bunch of new kit.
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Humble Indie Bundle 11 adds another three games plus Valve announces the release of the Portal 2 beta for Linux!
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Reven recently announced the team has reached its Kickstarter funding goal, bringing some more awesome 2D platformer goodness to the Linux platform. Varia games also plans on bringing the title to OS X, as well as the Wii U. Monthly updates are planned to be broadcast on the popular gaming video platform, Twitch.tv. A public demo and eta keys should show up in the next few months.
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Leadwerks has come a very long way since the initial Kickstarter campaign, there is now a 3rd beta available for certain backers.
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WThe Humble Indie Bundle 11 is here!
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Stencyl is an interesting toolkit that enables you to create games without traditional programming, and they have just released the big 3.0.
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The overview includes only games which are completely free, with a permissive license for both the code and their content. I could not include here games like Urban Terror or Warsow, since their assets are not free, nor Steam games.
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Digital Tribes got in touch with us recently to get the word out about QBEH-1: The Atlas Cube the prequel to QBEH a game which sadly has no Linux version, but this one will.
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Standing for TINT Is Not Tetris, that’s exactly what it is. A terminal-based tetris clone with highscore saving and 9 levels. Among the tetris clones for Linux, TINT is one of my favorites. Use J to move pieces left, L to move them right, K to rotate and SPACE to accelerate. Press Q to quit. On Ubuntu at least, there seems to be a problem when saving highscores due to permissions not allowing it (Error creating /var/games/tint.scores). You can fix it by doing something like this: sudo touch /var/games/tint.scores && sudo chown $USER:$USER /var/games/tint.scores.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Qemu 2.0 is looking to be released on April 4. Ubuntu 14.04 closes on April 10, with release on April 17. How’s that for timing. Currently the qemu package in trusty has hundreds of patches, the majority of which fall into two buckets – old omap3 patches from qemu-linaro, and new aarch64 patches from upstream.
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Neovim is a new open-source text editor project that advertises itself as “vim’s rebirth for the 21st century”, a more modern version of the incredibly popular vim editor.
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Other Photocrumbs niceties include the ability to add descriptions to each photo (either by entering text into the UserComment EXIF field or by creating an accompanying .php file), and support for basic EXIF info. For each photo, Photocrumbs displays key info like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and timestamp.
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This release is a significant milestone for us as it marks the first release we consider to be production ready. It features a wide variety of improvements to container security, a consistent set of tools, updated documentation and an API with multiple bindings.
Over 60 people contributed their time to this release, making it the best LXC release yet! The result of all that work can be seen used in areas as diverse as individual laptops, cellphones and cloud instances. And we are confident that with LXC 1.0, we will see LXC’s usage expand even more and be used for a lot of new and exciting projects.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Apache Tomcat is an opensource webserver product of Apache Foundation like Apache HTTP server. It is used to deploying Java Servlet and JSP applications. To deploy any application in Tomcat we can simply create a war file and deploy them. For more details about you can visit apache official site http://tomcat.apache.org/ .
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It’s been months, and I’m still dealing with a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on my server—an attack that I can see is coming from China, but there’s not really much I can do about it other than try to tweak firewall settings and so on.
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Posted in Bill Gates, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 7:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Secret deals and racketeering techniques elude journalists who are passing allegations as ‘facts’, damaging Linux for the most part
SOMETHING fascinating has been happening in the corporate press over the past few years (starting 2010 with HTC). Unlike with the Novell deal (Microsoft SUSE), when it comes to Android the press seems eager to push the “Android is not free” line. Even some pro-FOSS journalists are doing it, only to face opposition. To quote Pogson’s response to one of them: “I don’t often disagree with SJVN but I think his argument that M$ makes $billions from Android/Linux taxes is extreme. If that were happening, there would be some mention of it in M$’s SEC filings.”
Not only is this not happening based on any concrete evidence; the sources which make these claims are quoting some arbitrary analysts with Microsoft connections or Microsoft boosters/lobbyists who cite such people. Trace it all back to the source and it looks like make believe. It’s like a big lie that needs to die, at least until or unless there’s some kind of proof.
Those of us who see journalists perpetuating and spreading the claims that Microsoft makes billions of dollars from Android should respond to the authors/editors by equating them with so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ who throw around unsubstantiated claims. Microsoft has long been manufacturing dirt and lies, only to be caught some time later, after much damage had been done to the subject of libel. Bribed journalists often play a role in such big lies and nobody demonstrates this as well as the Gates Foundation, which is basically a lobbying and investment shell (masquerading as a charity and bribing the press to maintain this illusion). As Jamie Love put it yesterday: “The few reporters that have written about the trade disputes over cancer patents are not on the Gates payroll. [...] Gates has effectively aligned itself with Merck, Novartis and others, against cancer patients. Sometimes, discretely. [...] WHO is quite cautious on the IPR issues these days, because of fears that Gates will complain. [...] Gates Foundation funding of health news reporters, most health NGOs, contributes to lack of criticism of Obama’s actions on cancer patents” (we wrote about cancer patents before, including their impact on death). Remember that Gates received got a huge amount of money last year from this patent profiteering (gains of about 15 billion dollars). He is still all about patents and monopolies. Gates is also investing in patent trolls and collaborating with the world’s biggest patent troll, which he helped create (the head of this trolling entity is one of Bill Gates’ best friends).
As Joe Mullin put it the other day, frivolous litigation with baseless patents is still worthwhile in the US because the plaintiff never assumes the financial burden of the cases. This works well for trolls such as Microsoft, Bill Gates, and the world’s biggest patent troll which he created. It’s deterrence against defence. As Mullin puts it: “The American judicial system has long held to a general principle that each party in a dispute should pay for its own legal fees, win or lose.”
Microsoft is a patent troll based on its actions, signing secret deals using useless patents, knowing that the burden of a legal case would be put on the victim. As long as this kind of system prevails the corruption of the industry and the media (which cannot gain access to these secret deals) will continue.
Microsoft corruption is an immensely powerful phenomenon which now transcends the software industry. One way to address this issue is to work on changing the patent system (which is hard). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Surveillance, assassination, coups, and human rights abuses (some of the very latest bits of news on these subjects)
Privacy
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Mike Lofgren’s exceptional essay, “Anatomy of the Deep State,” delivers the roadmap that bewildered Americans need to navigate the past year’s glut of news about mass surveillance. The term “Deep State” aptly conveys how the private security industry has melded with government. It is soldered by plutocracy, perpetual war, reduction of industrial capacity, US exceptionalism and political malfunction. Lofgren is a credible and welcome interpreter of how these factors combine to exert control over us.
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Last month, I had a chance to talk with John McAfee, the founder of the popular McAfee computer security programs.
We talked about how people usually don’t read the terms and conditions of the smartphone applications that they download onto their phones.
But McAfee did read the terms and conditions of the Bank of America smartphone application, and what he saw was pretty shocking.
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Deutsche Telekom plans to launch an app for smartphones that encrypts voice and text messages. The move is the latest step taken by the firm to address users’ privacy concerns following NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden’s, mass surveillance revelations.
The cloud-based app will encrypt each voice or text exchange between two devices using a unique code, Reuters cites Deutsche Telekom as saying in a statement.
PRISM
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WhatsApp was already bad before Facebook acquired it. But at least now people woke up and are considering alternatives. Yes, this move could have come earlier, but I do welcome the new opportunity: its the first time wide spread encryption actually has a chance in the consumer market. So for most of the people out there the question is more “which alternative should I use” instead of “should I use one”. Right now I do not have the faintest idea what alternative will make the break through – but you could say I am well prepare.
Snowden
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Many commentators following the NSA scandals have been eagerly awaiting the recommendations of the US government task force on the matter, and the proposed reforms to be implemented by President Obama to bring the spy agency under control. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you can watch the president’s recent speech and nod your head approvingly when he talks about the “tradition of limited government” in the United States, and the constitutional limits his government is at pains to respect. Oh, and just for good measure, while you’re listening to this magnificent oration being replayed to you on YouTube, the NSA will be recording your internet browser history, or possibly even hacking your computer.[1] If you decide to click on the “like” or “dislike” buttons at the bottom of the video, that little nugget of political information can be added to their “metadata” archives, along with the rest of your internet activities. In fact, in the 42 minutes it will take you to watch the president’s speech, the NSA will have hoovered up around 40 million records of internet browsing from around the world.[2] Perhaps yours will be among them.
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Attorney general says he is aware of particular cases on the basis of intelligence briefings but will not reveal the information
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The main problem with hacktivism “remains with the legislators and officials who fail to see things in analog-equivalent terms,” said Piratpartiet’s Rick Falkvinge. “If getting documents to a reporter was OK in the pre-Internet age as part of our checks and balances on power, then it has to be OK in the digital age, too.” Yet “many powerholders freak out at the slightest occurrence of pentesting.”
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Perhaps one of the most striking and revelatory aspects about the latest NSA surveillance news story, this one published Sunday by The Bild am Sonntag newspaper in Germany, was that it was not based on leaked documents from the now famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
What the paper reported, based on information provided by a “high-ranking NSA employee in Germany,” was that the U.S. spy agency—after being outed for spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel—responded to an order to refrain from spying directly on Merkel’s phone by intensifying its monitoring of other high-level officals her government.
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During a day-long conference at the Georgetown University Law Center, Dr. George Ellard, the inspector general for the National Security Agency, spoke for the first time about the disclosures made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
NSA
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When the NSA sweeps up your telephone data, including who you call, when you call them, and for how long, they don’t keep that data forever. The deal with the secret FISA courts gives them five years to hold on to your data, then they’re supposed to delete it.
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Obama’s first change to the NSA phone records is to keep more of them – as evidence against the NSA
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Are you worried that you are personally under surveillance?
Yes, 100 per cent: I’m a target. If the FBI tried to get a warrant on my computer based on the fact that I have worked with Snowden documents then the odds they would get it are 100 per cent. And I do take pains. But look at that NSA Tailored Access Operations catalogue from 2008. The fact that I’m running an air-gapped computer is irrelevant – if the NSA wanted in, they would get in.
The reason they are not is because they know that if it ever got out that they attacked US journalists, the shit-storm would be ginormous. I do think the NSA tries to follow the law, and the Attorney General has said [the US government] is not going to prosecute the journalists.
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Tom Engelhardt has a lengthy article in TomDispatch that explores the depth of the US national security state. He argues that people are deluded to think that whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and Julian Assange revealed the depth of spying in the US.
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We just received notice that SB1156, the Arizona 4th Amendment Protection Act will have a rules committee hearing and vote on MONDAY at 1pm.
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The NSA has taken snooping to a new level with the news that the Orwellian big brother of the U.S. Government wants to create a “national license-plate recognition database.”
The Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the database “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals.”
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A lawsuit challenging domestic military spying against citizens engaged in antiwar activism and acts of civil disobedience obtained a public record that further confirms the United States Army was involved in targeting “leftists” or “anarchists” as domestic terrorists in 2007.
Also, according to a “Democracy Now!” interview, one of the activists was pressured by the military officer, who infiltrated groups in the state of Washington, to become more interested in guns and to even publish an article in a magazine that was written from the perspective of hijackers behind the 9/11 attacks.
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If you thought NSA snooping was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet: online criminals have also been watching and should soon be able to copy the agency’s invasive surveillance tactics, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.
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Now surveillance by governments has been exposed, has the NSA scandal affected your trust for leading Internet brands?
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Richard Clarke, the first cybersecurity czar at the White House, said Tuesday that “terrible” internal cybersecurity at the National Security Agency was responsible for allowing former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to download about 1.5 million classified documents.
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The number of attacks exploiting a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in Internet Explorer has increased dramatically over the past few days, indicating the exploit is no longer used just in targeted attacks against particular groups of people.
The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 9 and 10 and was publicly revealed on Feb. 13 by researchers from security firm FireEye who found an exploit for the flaw being served from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) website. Security researchers from security firm Websense later reported that the same vulnerability was being exploited from the compromised website of French aerospace association GIFAS (Groupement des Industries Francaises Aeronautiques et Spatiales).
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Was the National Security Agency exploiting two just-discovered security flaws to hack into the iPhones and Apple computers of certain targets? Some skeptics are saying there is cause to be concerned about recent coincidences regarding the NSA and Apple.
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The Obama administration has been presented with four wide-ranging options on how to reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) phone data collection program — including doing away it altogether — according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. Citing officials close to the matter, the Journal reports that intelligence officials presented the options ahead of the March 28th deadline that President Barack Obama set forth in a speech about NSA reform earlier this year.
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Jaffer, who argued the Supreme Court case on behalf of the plaintiffs, said that questions remain about how the Justice Department arrived at its initial policy. “They don’t actually explain how they could have concluded that it was lawful to conceal the role that the FISA Amendments Act played in criminal investigations,” he said. “They haven’t explained their prior policy or how they arrived at it.’’
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The government is notifying some defendants accused of terrorism that it used more National Security Agency surveillance than it disclosed during their court proceedings.
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Art Coviello says security company’s relationship is strictly above board as he calls for the breakup of the NSA into separate organisations
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After long debate over whether to give the NSA Data Center a $6 million tax break on its electric bill, the Senate passed a bill Tuesday that keeps the authority to tax the center intact, but makes it unlikely the state will ever actually levy the tax.
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The slogan “Amazon and you’re done” may have just taken on a whole new meaning — at least for enemies of the state.
Privacy advocates and media watchdogs are challenging a contract between Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, calling it a potentially “ominous” convergence of mass surveillance and perpetual war.
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In the months since Edward Snowden revealed the nature and extent of the spying that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been perpetrating upon Americans and foreigners, some of the NSA’s most troublesome behavior has not been a part of the public debate.
This behavior constitutes the government’s assaults on the American legal system. Those assaults have been conducted thus far on two fronts, one of which is aimed at lawyers who represent foreign entities here in America, and the other is aimed at lawyers who represent criminal defendants against whom evidence has been obtained unlawfully and presented in court untruthfully.
GCHQ
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Mike’s coverage of leaks showing the NSA and GCHQ using the internet to “manipulate, deceive and destroy reputations” (as reported by Glenn Greenwald at firstlook.org) hit the front page of Reddit yesterday, generating lots of traffic for Techdirt. This traffic truly should have gone to firstlook.org, but never made it there. A look at the top comments on our coverage show why…
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The Internet has provided a forum for average people throughout the world to disseminate, share and debate information unattenuated by gatekeepers in the mainstream media and their politically connected friends. New media outlets like Personal Liberty Digest™ have, for years, been warning readers that the well-connected and ruling elite, displeased by this newfound proletariat freedom, have been prolific in attempts to undermine and marginalize information provided by any media outlet unwilling to obey the same unspoken rules that govern the content choices of major media outlets.
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The leaks just don’t stop from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, with Glenn Greenwald reporting on his latest leak that US spy agencies manipulate and control online behavior in more ways than one.
Assassination by Drones
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Kareem Khan’s brother and son were killed in a Pakistan drone strike in 2009. Now he is in the UK to meet MPs and tells Channel 4 News “most drone strikes are killing innocent people”.
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A draft resolution sponsored by the Green group of MEPs and enjoying cross-party support will be debated today (26 February) and voted on tomorrow between 12 and 2pm. The resolution condemns the extrajudicial killings resulting from drone strikes, notes an increase in strikes in recent years in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and demands full transparency from those Member States that possess drones technology (including the UK).
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Human Rights Watch issued a 28-page report investigating the attack in December 2013 on a wedding procession in Yemen. The attack killed at least 12 men and wounded at least 15 others including the bride.
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President Obama should be justly haunted by the slaughter of innocents, especially the ones he has personally condemned to death on untested evidence. But it’s hard to imagine him actually being haunted by any of his lethal failures, perhaps least of all by innocents condemned by the mere turning down of his imperial thumb in these or any other circumstances. The Nobel Peace Prize winner hardly sounds haunted when he’s quoted saying, “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”
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On Feb. 10, mass media were embroiled with an intense debate. The debate was about the United States government’s possible drone strike on a U.S. citizen who lives abroad. The target is not just an ordinary U.S. citizen, but a terrorist affiliated with al-Qaeda who happens to hold a U.S. citizenship due to his original place of birth.
My question is: Why would the government even discuss conducting such an extreme measure? Why wouldn’t they just send some UDT/NAVY SEAL teams to capture him and bring him to American soil for judicial proceedings? Under what authority and right can the government of the United States attempt to kill an American citizen by bombing without a trial or judicial review, ignoring fundamental human rights, not to mention the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? What happened to “due process” and “right in judicial proceedings?” There are so many questions to be answered, and I would like to narrate several points mentioned from a CNN debate, and past statements of government officials.
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On my way to work one morning this week, I was listening to Fox News on Sirius. Bill Hemmer was interviewing Ralph Peters, a retired lieutenant colonel. The two were complaining the Defense Department was proposing cuts to our troop levels. Currently, they said, our army has 520K members, but now defense is proposing cutting it “about a 100K down to 440K-450K.” They then stated how Turkey will have a bigger army than us.
I knew this was untrue. When I got to work and looked up the numbers, I found that Turkey has 450K active duty and 378K reserves. We have 1.4 million active and 850K reserves. The report was beyond misleading as it was comparing just our Army to Turkey’s full force. I could say we have a smaller force than Cambodia if I only counted our Coast Guard. This wasn’t misleading, it was outright deceitful.
We also spend more than the next 10 countries combined in our military. And sorry, but I don’t think one Turkish soldier is equal to an American soldier. We have the best jets, tanks, ships, carriers, soldiers, seamen, airmen, and let’s not forget the Marines.
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On a different note, but one rarely discussed: Do we think the Iraq War, Afghanistan War, Gitmo and drones make us more safe or are terrorist organizations using these as propaganda to recruit more terrorists?
Torture
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What the British state did to me for opposing their torture programme was bad enough, but nothing to what Moazzam suffered. Yet he is much less embittered than I am.
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Lisa Hajjar, a sociologist from University of California, Santa Barbara, presented a lecture Feb. 24 discussing her research about the military commission trial at Guantanamo Bay for the men responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“Let’s Go to Guantanamo! An On-the-Ground Perspective on the 9/11 Trial” was an in-detail discussion of 9/11 accountability, the issue of secret prisons and CIA torture.
Benghazi
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In an op-ed piece in the online Wall Street Journal on Wednesday night, Rove, once President George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, said it would be too difficult for Congress to get National Security Adviser Susan Rice to testify under oath — and he blasted her expressed lack of regret Sunday for having said at the time that the siege was a result of protests against an offensive video denigrating Islam.
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Ukraine
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The award-winning journalist Max Blumenthal is exactly right to suggest, as he does in his recent AlterNet piece, that the U.S. has ties to Nazi and fascist protesters in Ukraine. The CIA agrees with him, and so did George Bush Sr. The only difference in their appraisal is the use of the term Neo-Nazi , rather than Nazi. It is just too hard for anyone to fathom that large communities of World War II Nazis not only survived, but have thrived and been protected all these years in Lviv (a city and provincial district in western Ukraine), the USA, and Canada.
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American neocons helped destabilize Ukraine and engineer the overthrow of its elected government, a “regime change” on Russia’s western border. But the coup – and the neo-Nazi militias at the forefront – also reveal divisions within the Obama administration, reports Robert Parry.
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The US and the EU are supporting the formation of a coalition government integrated by Neo-Nazis which are directly involved in the repression of the Ukrainian Jewish community.
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The Washington-paid schemers are now reaping their just reward as they sit in craven silence while neo-nazi Muzychko wielding an Ak-47 challenges government officials to their face: “I dare you take my gun!”
FBI/Police
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Jim Sensenbrenner among those concerned by proposals on the table and says stance to end bulk surveillance is ‘unwavering’
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Edward Snowden ripped the blinds off the surveillance state last summer with his leak of top-secret National Security Agency documents, forcing a national conversation about spying in the post-9/11 era. However, there’s still no concrete proof that America’s elite intelligence units are analyzing most Americans’ computer and telephone activity — even though they can.
Los Angeles and Southern California police, by contrast, are expanding their use of surveillance technology such as intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification and military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime. Information on the identity and movements of millions of Southern California residents is being collected and tracked.
Civil Rights
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As has been widely reported (BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph) the Court of Appeal has approved the use of “whole life tariffs” for murderers, seemingly contradicting the European Court of Human Rights. But as the reporting seems to miss some of subtleties of the judgment it is worth a closer look.
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