03.27.14

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

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

The ‘civilising’ power of technology without human rights

Drones

• Up in the air

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

• UN watchdog urges Barack Obama to review deadly drone policy

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

• US human rights record chastised in UN report

• UN watchdog urges Obama to review deadly drone policy

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

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

• Medals need revision in war on terror

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

• Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK holds discussion on drone warfare

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

• EU should press Obama on drone secrecy

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ministry needs to be open about drone war

• Exclusive: Minister in row over BT’s link to US drones’ war

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

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

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

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

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

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

• MoD ‘too secretive’ on murder drones

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

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

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

• Amnesty International protests against US human rights violations

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

• This drone can steal what’s on your phone

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

• $397 billion fighter jet deployment may be delayed by software glitches

• To replace drone strikes, US to give Yemen Hellfire-armed crop dusters

• Drone project at Fresno State a call for ‘contemplation’ (video)

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

• City Theatre pushes kill button with ‘Grounded’

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

Human Rights

• Nauru casework files copied and pasted to meet targets, says Salvos employee

  Asylum seekers’ health and education records fabricated in bid to keep contract, Salvation Army worker tells SBS

UK Human Rights

• UK’s Unacceptable Obsession With Stripping British Citizens Of Their UK Nationality – OpEd

  In January, Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, secured cross-party support for an alarming last-minute addition to the current Immigration Bill, allowing her to strip foreign-born British citizens of their citizenship, even if it leaves them stateless.

• PO box justice: what secret Home Office court says about British openness

  Clegg and Miliband call for reform of Investigatory Powers Tribunal, as critics accuse it of secrecy and unfairness

Censorship Using Threats

• Fulldisclosure — Improving network security through full disclosure

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

UK Censorship by Default

• Why is parodying Sky’s Captain America filtering adverts still illegal?

  Captain America, Marvel Comics’ World War II supersoldier, is the star of Sky Broadband’s latest advert. And he’s taking a break from fighting 1940s comic book bad guys to promote Sky’s default Internet filters.

• The internet censorship programme you’re not allowed to know about

  It is against this background, therefore, that we now await the result of a first tier tribunal appeal by TJ McIntyre which took place last week. This appeal is against the Home Office decision not to allow him to view Home Office material on the possible liability they and/or filtering companies would face for wrongful blocking.

FOIA

• NSA, CIA, FBI sent Mandela to jail, claims MIT student

  It seems, the agencies could have been complicit in the arrest of Nelson Mandela which led to him being incarcerated for 27 years.

• Why Did the FBI Label Ryan Shapiro’s Dissertation on Animal Rights a Threat to National Security?

  Over the past decade, Ryan Shapiro has become a leading freedom of information activist, unearthing tens of thousands of once-secret documents. His work focuses on how the government infiltrates and monitors political movements, in particular those for animal and environmental rights. Today, he has around 700 Freedom of Information Act requests before the FBI, seeking around 350,000 documents

Ukraine

• Either Putin and the Whole Russian Military Don’t Use Electronics, or the CIA Messed Up

  Putin doesn’t use cell phones. He doesn’t text. He rarely ventures “into that place where you apparently live, that Internet,” according to Time’s Simon Shuster. And that means that he is “a very hard target for foreign spies.” Sound crazy? Well, you didn’t build your career working for the KGB in a country that was unabashed about spying on its citizens.

• Post-Cold War West poked Russian bear with a stick until it finally swiped back – David Speedie, Carnegie Council Senior Fellow

• Russia’s actions in Crimea ‘completely understandable’ – German ex-chancellor

  Moscow’s actions in the Crimea are comprehensible, former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt said, criticizing the Western reaction to the peninsula’s reunification with Russia.

  President Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Crimean issue is “completely understandable,” Schmidt wrote in Die Zeit newspaper where he’s employed as an editor.

• Russia Has Taken Ukraine’s Fleet of Dolphins

  Russia has taken a fleet of military dolphins trained by the Ukrainian navy, a Russian news agency reports. The Soviet Union’s combat dolphin program has been around since the 1960s, and was handed over to Ukraine after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. The Ukrainian navy had been planning to disband the program next month, but with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the dolphins have a new commander to report to—Vladimir Putin.

• Ukraine puts Crimea’s acting chief prosecutor Poklonskaya on wanted list

  Natalya Poklonskaya, acting Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea, has been put on the wanted list in Ukraine. Her name, birth date and photograph appeared on the list of “persons hiding from the Ukrainian authorities”, according to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s website.

• Donetsk is British? Ukrainians vote in mock referendum to join UK

  Ukrainians in the eastern city of Donetsk have voted in an online spoof referendum to secede from Ukraine and join the UK. Residents wrote that their hometown was founded by a Briton, so the UK should seize this “decisive moment” and take them in.

Encryption

• Young MIT researcher develops NSA-proof encryption service

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

• Mylar stops NSA & hackers from stealing your data

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

Privacy of Allies

• NSA director badly out of touch [Letter]

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

Corporations Spying

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

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

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

Snowden

• Former President Carter Says He’s Open to Pardon for NSA-Leaker Snowden

  Jimmy Carter said that if Edward Snowden were to be convicted and given a death sentence, he would consider pardoning the National Security Agency leaker. He noted, however, that he doesn’t feel he has enough information to judge the extent of the damage Snowden may have done to U.S. national security interests.

• Petitions call on U.S. government to leave Snowden alone

Reform

• Snowden welcomes Obama’s plans for NSA reform as ‘turning point’

• Snowden praises Obama’s NSA reform proposal

• The Fraud of Obama’s NSA “Reform”

  Perhaps the most significant component of the proposal is one that has been buried in the media coverage. The new legislation will reportedly require telecommunications companies to give the NSA access to cell phone records, a central preoccupation of the spy agency. US officials disclosed in February that only about 30 percent of all call records are available to the NSA because of the widespread use of cell phones, which have up to now not been part of the information handed over to the government.

• Phone companies will be the only ones to hold these records unless court ordered to hand them over

• NSA critics express ‘deep concern’ over route change for House reform bill

  The House parliamentarian, who oversees procedural matters, has determined that a new bill that substantially modifies the seminal 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will go through the intelligence committee rather than the judiciary committee, a move that two congressional aides consider “highly unusual.”

• Obama’s NSA phone-record law ignores the other (big) data we’re giving away

  So President Obama is finally ready to do something about the government storage of our phone records, preparing legislation for Congress that would partially change the National Security Agency’s bulk collection. Except he’s missing something much more important: all of the other, much more revealing data we generate simply by living our daily lives. What about all of the other data that internet companies buy and sell, and that yet more companies create and sell without even telling us – indeed, all of the rest of a data retention program that you and I helped build?

Facebook Joke

• Oculus purchase was a 1st April joke: Facebook

• Facebook Buys Oculus VR, The Internet Freaks Out

• The Internet mourns Oculus Rift’s purchase by Facebook

  Facebook may want to become the Internet (as The Verge hypotheses), the real Internet – the geeks – don’t have a very good reputation of The Social Network. The dearth of any geeks on Facebook and mass exodus to Google + shows how much geeks love Facebook. The irony, for Facebook, is that these geeks are the future of the Internet, these geeks play a major role in success or demise of any product and they are not fond of Facebook – this acquisition has showed a very grim picture of Facebook.

• Oculus Deal Panned by Gamers Lamenting Facebook Takeover

  Oculus VR Inc. co-founder Palmer Luckey called Facebook Inc.’s $2 billion purchase of his virtual-reality headset company a move that will help transform industries. Some fans weren’t so upbeat.

• Aw, Zuck! Minecraft Creator Cancels Oculus Port After Facebook Deal

  The creator of the popular video game says the social network creeps him out

  [...]

  Perrson is not alone in his criticism of the Facebook deal. Virtual reality enthusiasts were quick to blast the planned acquisition on Twitter after it was announced, Adweek points out.

Torture

• US lawmakers to vote on secret CIA interrogation report

• ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Leaks: Pentagon Says Employee Was Prohibited From Providing Report to Congress

  Multiple national security leaks by US officials occurred during the production of the Oscar-nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty, which dramatized the hunt for Osama bin Laden that ended in his execution. But, when the Pentagon Inspector General’s office investigated what had happened, the office found then-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta had mishandled classified information.

• A tale of two torture reports

  We already know the CIA misled the Justice Department

• Yes, the CIA is probably lying about torture

  The CIA’s own account of the Bush-era interrogation techniques has been refuted by independent organizations

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