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02.10.14

Privacy Links 10/2/2013: State Surveillance, Private Surveillance, and ‘Dirty Tricks’

Posted in News Roundup at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News which shows the importance of privacy (collected during the weekend and early Monday)

  • Snowden Docs: British Spies Used Sex and ‘Dirty Tricks’

    British spies have developed “dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers, terror groups, suspected criminals and arms dealers that include releasing computer viruses, spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming phones and computers, and using sex to lure targets into “honey traps.”

    Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and exclusively obtained by NBC News describe techniques developed by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG) as part of a growing mission to go on offense and attack adversaries ranging from Iran to the hacktivists of Anonymous. According to the documents, which come from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for NSA cyber spy conferences, the agency’s goal was to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications.

  • New bill demands that smartphones have “kill switch” in case of theft

    A California state legislator has introduced SB 962, a bill that would require smartphones sold in the state to include a “kill switch” that would “render inoperable” the phone if it’s not in the possession of the rightful owner.

  • PGP Web of Trust: Core Concepts Behind Trusted Communication

    If you’ve ever used Linux, you’ve most likely used OpenPGP without even realizing it. The open-source implementation of OpenPGP is called GnuPG (stands for “GNU Privacy Guard”), and nearly all distributions rely on GnuPG for package integrity verification. Next time you run “yum install” or “yum update”, each package will be verified against its cryptographic signature before it is allowed to be installed on your system. This assures that the software has not been altered between the time it was cryptographically signed by distribution developers on the master server, and the time it was downloaded to your system.

  • NBC News’ Richard Engel: My Computers, Cellphone Were Hacked ‘Almost Immediately’ In Sochi

    NBC News’ Richard Engel said that upon arriving in Russia to cover the upcoming event, he was hacked “almost immediately” — and privacy is not something visitors should expect to have.

  • Police will have ‘backdoor’ access to health records despite opt-out, says MP

    David Davis says police would be able to approach central NHS database without a warrant as critics warn of catastrophic breach of trust

  • Don’t Spy On Us – Help get the word out!

    On Tuesday, internet users all over the world are standing up to say no to GCHQ and the NSA’s mass surveillance. Over the last eight months we’ve heard plenty about how intelligence agencies monitor us on the Internet.

  • The People Vs the NSA
  • Tuesday declared ‘The Day we Fight Back’ against NSA et al

    A broad coalition of technology companies and activist groups has declared Tuesday, February 11th 2014 has been “The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance”.

  • Media sometimes try, fail to keep NSA’s secrets

    News organizations publishing leaked National Security Agency documents have inadvertently disclosed the names of at least six intelligence workers and other government secrets they never intended to give away, an Associated Press review has found.

  • Media has disclosed intelligence workers names in NSA coverage
  • An Open Letter to Advertisers in the NSA Era

    Along these lines, a recent Pew Internet Center survey found that the clear majority of respondents are making great efforts to mask their identities online. Looking at this data, we need to be frank: We have long had a contentious relationship with the public, and this fundamentally doesn’t help any brand’s bottom line. In the interest of rebuilding consumer trust, which is so essential to the bottom line, we need to be proactive about addressing privacy concerns in personalization, targeting and measurement.

  • Here’s Everything You Need To Know About The NSA

    Even before the Snowden leaks of last year, the EFF had their suspicions in regards to what the NSA was up to. The group even tried to get the government to spill the beans a few times through lawsuits that never went anyway. As you can imagine, the Snowden leaks helped their cause greatly, and now they’re trying to educate the public on just how far the NSA goes.

  • Google, Facebook, Microsoft hire first anti-NSA lobbyist in Washington

    Technology powers like Apple and Google have coalesced to register a lobbyist in Washington to focus on government surveillance reform in an effort to maintain credibility following NSA spying disclosures that often implicated them as accomplices.

  • More NSA outrage: spying violates attorney-client privilege

    Reporter Nick Nicharios asks a very simple but extremely important question in his latest article for The Nation: “Has the NSA wiretapping violated attorney-client privilege?” Evidence leaked by Edward Snowden seems to prove just that when it comes to some terrorism cases. Nick Nicharios talks to host Rob Sachs about how in many cases there was no clear protocol as to when to turn off the monitoring of phone calls, which has led to monitoring of phone calls between lawyers and their clients.

  • Turning table on NSA, US diplomats’ phone call is bugged, leaked to YouTube

    US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, clearly thought they were speaking on a secure line when discussing the political unrest in Ukraine and how the US government should help resolve the crisis. At one point during the January 25 call, Nuland colorfully rejected recent overtures from European Union leaders by telling her colleague: “Fuck the EU.”

  • Protesters Take to the Web to Address NSA Surveillance Concerns

    Thousands are scheduled to gather on Tuesday to protest the surveillance state, but don’t expect any news of riots at the White House gates or marches on the National Mall.

  • How Hackers and Software Companies are Beefing Up NSA Surveillance

    Imagine that you could wander unseen through a city, sneaking into houses and offices of your choosing at any time, day or night. Imagine that, once inside, you could observe everything happening, unnoticed by others—from the combinations used to secure bank safes to the clandestine rendezvous of lovers. Imagine also that you have the ability to silently record everybody’s actions, whether they are at work or play without leaving a trace. Such omniscience could, of course, make you rich, but perhaps more important, it could make you very powerful.

  • Torvald’s Thumbs Up, Gates’ Computer Skills & More…

    In more Snowden news, we learned on Wednesday from PCWorld that the Brit spy agency GCHQ has been engaging in a game of tit-for-tat with the hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec. Evidently they’ve used DDOS attacks and other techniques to an attempt to disrupt the organizations activities. They’ve also managed to do a bit of infiltrating.

  • NSA Whistleblower Thomas DrakeTranscript: Obama’s NSA Policy, Benghazi, 911, Problems with NSA…

    In 2010 the government alleged that Drake mishandled documents, one of the few such espionage cases in the US history, where he was tried under the Espionage Act. The fact is that 60 Minutes did a story on him and shortly after, almost every single charge was dropped except for “misuse of a computer”, for which Drake paid incredibly dearly. So, we’re going to talk about a whole lot of topics about NSA, about the President’s new speech today and a whole lot more.

  • Former NSA official Thomas Drake to speak at Tacoma event

    Drake since has traveled the nation talking about government surveillance efforts and his contention that they violate the U.S. Constitution and the fundamental rights of all Americans.

  • Websites look to ‘harness the outrage’

    Thousands of websites on Tuesday will take a stand against government surveillance by plastering protests across their home pages.

    Tech companies and civil liberties organizations are hoping the demonstration, called The Day We Fight Back, will replicate their success in defeating the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in 2012.

  • Facebook leaks Private Messages by because of Typo

    Facebook is not secure after all, as users of this social network, we have private settings where by we can change our private setting and regulate the people who can see our personal information and those who are not allowed to see the information. But is this truly what happens.

  • What Facebook knows about you

    Facebook has spent the past 10 years building a business upon your personal information.

  • Yet Another Surveillance Tool in FBI Hands. But How Are They Using It?

    Yesterday, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI asking for details about a surveillance tool we know too little about, called a port reader. According to news reports, port readers copy entire emails and instant messages as they move through networks, in real time. They then delete the contents of the messages, leaving only the “metadata” — the sender, recipient, and time of a message, and maybe even the location from which it was sent — behind for the government. According to the same reports, the FBI is taking steps to install port readers on the networks of major U.S. phone and Internet companies, going so far as to make threats of contempt of court to providers that don’t cooperate.

  • Overhead: New Photos of the NSA and Other Top Intelligence Agencies Revealed for First Time
  • Rep. Peter King: Security Reforms At The NSA Will Prevent Future Snowdens

    Following a stinging report in the New York Times explaining how Edward Snowden was able to collect his trove of top-secret government documents, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y) this morning took to the Sunday show Face The Nation to make the following claim (full transcript): “A lot that have has been changed; there is monitoring now of what goes on. Snowden would not be able to do it again in the future.”

  • States Step Up Efforts to Stymie NSA Surveillance

    Ironically, as many conservatives have given up hope on nullification as a way to fight back against federal overreach, several national news stories are highlighting those very state efforts.

    For example, in a big story for February 5, the Associated Press reports, “State lawmakers around the nation are proposing bills to curtail the powers of law enforcement to monitor and track citizens.”

    The message from these states to Capitol Hill, the story says, is “if you don’t take action to strengthen privacy, we will.”

  • Shunned as NSA Advisers, Academics Question Their Ties to the Agency
  • NSA Maintains Secret ‘Five Eyes’ Satellite Facility In Israel – OpEd

    If this is the message, it’s not being broadcast in a way that will find a receptive ear in Washington. American spooks don’t like their cover blown, no matter the reason or motivation. If Bibi thought this would make a positive impression on the Obama administration, he’s naïve. But my guess is that this isn’t intended for Obama’s ears. It’s intended as ammunition for the Lobby in making its case both about Iran sanctions and the Kerry peace talks. Members on Capitol Hill can use this new development as grist for the pro-Israel mill in their future Israel-related legislative deliberations.

    This is yet another example of how out of synch Israel is with the U.S. administration. Bibi speaks over Obama’s head instead of directly to him. There is no direct communication. No point of common contact.

  • Wave of NSA Reports Strain Ties With Europe

    A furor in Europe over new reports of National Security Agency surveillance is undermining U.S. efforts to move beyond the affair and has thrown plans for a trans-Atlantic trade agreement into question just weeks before talks are scheduled to resume.

    U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, have engaged in a diplomatic offensive in recent weeks aimed at putting European fears over the data collection to rest. But a wave of European media reports based on information provided by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden have provided further details of the U.S. surveillance programs, confounding Washington’s efforts.

02.07.14

Links 7/2/2013: Surveillance, Censorship, Police Abuses, and Collusion Against Citizens

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Privacy/Surveillance

  • More than 4,000 groups sign up to protest NSA

    More than 4,000 groups and websites have signed on to support a day of protest against U.S. National Security Agency surveillance programs, scheduled for Tuesday.

  • Fighting Back Against the N.S.A., Websites Organize to Protest the N.S.A. Surveillance

    Due to the overwhelming concern and outrage regarding all of the N.S.A. surveillance that has come to light in recent months, internet users and groups are taking a strong arm “internet approach”, and plan to fight back. February 11th has been designated as The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance from the N.S.A.

  • Swatch chief executive ticked off about NSA spying scandal

    The eccentric chief executive officer of Swatch Group, one of the world’s top watchmakers, was so incensed by recent allegations of mass U.S. spying that he chastised a top New York official over the matter in a letter late last year.

  • FISA Court Approves Changes To The NSA
  • The Center for American Progress and the Nullify NSA Movement

    The premise of Offnow is local legislation in states, counties, and universities to make it policy to dis-invest in mass surveillance. Twelve state legislatures have introduced versions of the 4th Amendment Act (Alaska, Arizona, California, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont and Washington). The big target is Utah, home of the huge Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, where the provision of 1.7 million gallons of water by the state every day cools the huge supercomputers.

  • Back to the Future With the NSA

    In no time, helped by these brilliant minds, I figured out that the AI “secret” would be a military affair, and that meant the National Security Agency – already in the mid-1980s vaguely known as “no such agency”, with double the CIA’s annual budget and snooping the whole planet. The mission back then was to penetrate and monitor the global electronic net – that was years before all the hype over the “information highway” – and at the same time reassure the Pentagon over the inviolability of its lines of communication. For those comrades – remember, the Cold War, even with Gorbachev in power in the USSR, was still on – AI was a gift from God (beating Pope Francis by almost three decades).

    So what was the Pentagon/NSA up to, at the height of the star wars hype, and over a decade and a half before the Revolution in Military Affairs and the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine?

    They already wanted to control their ships and planes and heavy weapons with their voices, not their hands; voice command just like Hal, the star computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still, that was a faraway dream. Minsky believed “only in the next century” we would be able to talk to a computer. Others believed that would never happen. Anyway, IBM was already working on a system accepting dictation, and MIT on another system identifying words spoken by different people, while Intel was developing a special chip for all this.

  • Glassholes: A Mini NSA on Your Face, Recorded by the Spy Agency

    A new app will allow total strangers to ID you and pull up all your information…

  • NSA foe Greenwald, eBay’s Omidyar to launch digital magazine next week

    The digital magazine’s “initial focus will be in-depth reporting on the classified documents previously provided” by Snowden, according to Omidyar and former Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates, who posted a brief item about the launch on the First Look Media Web site today. Bates had been previously announced as a First Look team member, along with a handful of others.

  • Orwell Would Be Proud: NSA Defender Explains How Even Though NSA Spies On Americans, It’s OK To Say They Don’t

    Got that? Because there are some limitations on all the spying they do on Americans, and it’s too complicated to understand those limitations, so it’s okay to lie and say they don’t spy on Americans. Of course, in the very next paragraph, Wittes tries to effectively brush away the massive amount of surveillance done on Americans.

  • Between Illegality and Incompetence: Otis Pike and the NSA

    History is by some marvels of anti-institutional warriors. Now, the names of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden tend to find copy and coverage, leakers and soldiers against tight lipped secrecy. But last month, when former New York Congressman Otis G. Pike died, there was barely a murmur. Obituaries proved few in number. Most were colourless and unreflective.

    As Mark Ames of Pando Daily (Feb 4) quite rightly pointed out, the barely reported, and unremarked death of that great challenger of the national security complex was stunning, a “teachable moment” even as the Snowden snowstorm continues its effects. Such a moment was “probably not lost on today’s already spineless political class.” Wither, sadly, the denizens of genuine reform.

  • Dutch agency was intercepting phone data, not the NSA

    Dutch government ministers have admitted that it was not the American National Security Agency (NSA) that intercepted data from millions of Dutch phone calls in late 2012/early 2013, as was reported in October 2013.

  • Germany’s Protonet to protect servers from NSA

    Co-founder of German company Protonet, Ali Jelveh, poses with a server at their headquarters in Hamburg, January 30. Protonet and many other start-ups in the country offer data security “made in Germany” after former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden alleged the NSA is engaged in industrial espionage and put software in almost 100,000 computers around the world. Picture taken January 30.

  • Putting the German govt in dock over surveillance may strike back at NSA

    Founded over thirty years ago in Berlin, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) is an institution in Europe. The CCC is Europe’s largest association of hackers, known for its annual shindig, the Chaos Communication Congress, as well as its involvement in numerous campaigns to raise awareness of digital security gaps, be these lapses in corporate software development or government-controlled spyware. Always imbued with a strong pro-privacy and anti-censorship orientation (previous members include Wau Holland and former Wikileaks spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg), Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance in Germany have unsurprisingly proven of pivotal interest to the CCC’s membership.

  • Jean-Jacques Quisquater on Alleged NSA-GCHQ Hack
  • NSA is collecting less than 30 percent of U.S. call data, officials say

    The National Security Agency is collecting less than 30 percent of all Americans’ call records because of an inability to keep pace with the explosion in cellphone use, according to current and former U.S. officials.

    The disclosure contradicts popular perceptions that the government is sweeping up virtually all domestic phone data. It is also likely to raise questions about the efficacy of a program that is premised on its breadth and depth, on collecting as close to a complete universe of data as possible in order to make sure that clues aren’t missed in counterterrorism investigations.

  • Selling Your Secrets

    There are three broad ways that these software companies collaborate with the state: a National Security Agency program called “Bullrun” through which that agency is alleged to pay off developers like RSA, a software security firm, to build “backdoors” into our computers; the use of “bounty hunters” like Endgame and Vupen that find exploitable flaws in existing software like Microsoft Office and our smartphones; and finally the use of data brokers like Millennial Media to harvest personal data on everybody on the Internet, especially when they go shopping or play games like Angry Birds, Farmville, or Call of Duty.

  • Travel to Sochi for the Olympics, Get Hacked?

    If you’re headed to Sochi for the Winter Olympics, it might be best to stay off the grid.

    The State Department has already warned travelers that they should have no expectation of privacy while in Russia. And now, NBC’s Richard Engel has demonstrated just how easy it is to get hacked while at the games.

  • Does Twitter Give Data to NSA?

    The microblogging service released new statistics Thursday on the amount of information it hands over to governments and the number of posts it removes at their request. (Governments worldwide are asking for more data, and Twitter removes relatively few, though some, posts in certain countries.)

  • 30-Second Tech Trick: How to Delete Your Facebook Account

Censorship

Police

TPP

  • FSF: Anti-Fast Track mobilization to be extended after more than half a million people take action

    Yesterday, a diverse network of organizations opposing Fast Track legislation, including the Free Software Foundation, announced they are extending their ten days of activism following massive and widespread public action. Since its inception on January 22nd, more than a hundred new groups have joined the effort at StopFastTrack.com, including Coalition for a Prosperous America, Ben & Jerry’s, SumOfUs, Democracy for America, Friends of the Earth, Namecheap, and CREDO — adding to an already impressive, and unlikely, list of groups like reddit, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO, MoveOn, LabelGMOs, and Fight for the Future.

  • Exclusive: EU ready to lift duties on most U.S. goods for trade pact

    The European Union will offer to lift tariffs on nearly all goods imported from the United States as part of negotiations towards the world’s largest free-trade deal, people familiar with the proposal have told Reuters.

    The offer will be made on Monday, a week ahead of face-to-face talks between EU trade chief Karel De Gucht and his U.S. counterpart Michael Froman in Washington, they said.

  • Tea Party teams with union leaders to fight Obama’s trade plan

    “This is one of those issues that 90 percent of the left and 90 percent of the right agree on,” Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, said.

    Obama dismayed union allies last week when he called for Congress to pass trade promotion authority legislation in his State of the Union address.

    The authority, which was last given to former President George W. Bush, would prevent Congress from amending trade deals in exchange for the administration achieving specific negotiating objectives. It also would impose time limits on congressional consideration of trade agreements.

    The authority is thought to make it much easier to negotiate trade deals, because foreign partners have more certainty that the deals will become U.S. law.

  • Studies Reveal Consensus: Trade Flows during “Free Trade” Era Have Exacerbated U.S. Income Inequality

    Tonight President Obama is expected to address two linked subjects in his State of the Union address: the historic rise in U.S. income inequality and a trade policy agenda that threatens to exacerbate inequality. As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, Obama cannot have it both ways: he cannot propose to close the yawning income gap while pushing to Fast Track through Congress a controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade” deal that would widen the gap. The TPP would expand the status quo “free trade” model that study after study has found to be an increasingly significant contributor to U.S. income inequality.

Copyrights

  • Judge Understands BitTorrent, Kills Mass Piracy Lawsuits

    In the U.S. roughly half a million people have been sued for sharing copyrighted files in recent years, but filing of mass-lawsuits is not getting easier. A federal judge in Iowa has just issued a key order which makes mass-BitTorrent piracy lawsuits virtually impossible. The judge ruled that copyright holders can’t join multiple defendants in one suit, since there is no proof that they shared files with each other.

  • One Week Left To Give Input To Future European Copyright Monopoly Law

    The European Commission is planning an overhaul of the copyright monopoly laws in Europe, and is asking the public for input. The deadline for such input is February 5, one week from now. Activists have made it as easy as possible for you to submit meaningful input.

  • Crowdsourcing A List Of How Disney Uses The Public Domain

    We’ve written plenty of times about the importance of the public domain around here, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of the public domain has been Disney, a company which has regularly mined the public domain for the stories it then recreates and copyrights. Of course, somewhat depressingly, Disney also has been one of the most extreme players in keeping anything new out of the public domain, as pointed out by Tom Bell’s excellent “mickey mouse curve” showing how Disney has sought to push out the term of copyrights every time Mickey Mouse gets near the public domain.

  • Pirate Bay Founder’s Detention Extended, Investigation Continues

    Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm had his custody extended for four more weeks during a behind-closed-doors court hearing today. The investigation into Gottfrid’s alleged hacking activities is still ongoing, with the prosecution today revealing that police records obtained during the hack may have been transferred to servers abroad.

02.06.14

Links 6/2/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 4:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 6/2/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 4:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • Setting Performance Expectations For Wine Direct3D
  • First impressions of Antergos installation

    One of the amazing things about Linux is the fact that there is always something new out there to learn. A new package manager, a different desktop environment, a different philosophy, a completely different ethos.

  • 10 VsFTP (Very Secure File Transfer Protocol) Interview Questions and Answers

    FTP stands for ‘File Transfer Protocol‘ is one of the most widely used and standard protocol available over Internet. FTP works in a Server/­Client architecture and is used to transfer file. Initially FTP client were command-­line based. Now most of the platform comes bundled with FTP client and server program and a lot of FTP Client/Server Program is available. Here we are presenting 10 Interview Questions based on Vsftp (Very Secure File Transfer Protocol) on a Linux Server.

  • Developer Prepares uTorrent GTK Client for Linux, Are You Interested?

    At the moment, the uTorrent server for Linux only has a web-based user interface that doesn’t allow users to click magnet links in web pages in order to add them to the download queue. So, if GuTorrent becomes reality, it will be the first ever graphical client for the uTorrent server, a.k.a. the first ever uTorrent client for Linux.

  • First Look at Maxthon Cloud Browser for Linux

    Maxthon Cloud Browser for Linux is not yet an official release, as it’s still in development, and it resides on the official Maxthon forums for the moment, where users can grab the latest Beta versions. It’s easily installable on Debian, Red Hat and other Linux operating systems, especially Arch Linux users, as a package is already available in AUR.

Links 6/2/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

02.04.14

Links 4/2/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 5:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

02.01.14

Links 1/2/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 1:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links 1/2/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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