01.25.14

Privacy Watch: NHS Sells Out, Snowden Makes Headlines, GOP Uses NSA for Anti-Obama Partisanship, NSA Program Deemed Illegal, Bieber Rips NSA Coverage

Posted in News Roundup at 1:37 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: News coverage about the NSA, primarily from Friday and today

NHS

• Opinion: NHS “care.data”: You Are Not a Patient, You Are a Commodity

  Well, what do you know. The government saw fit to send us a message about the NHS and all the wonderful things they are doing for us with it. The Guardian tells us a bit about it here.

• Why you should be angry about changes to NHS patient data policy

  Our medical information will be uploaded to a central database. In some ways this makes sense, but the care.data project is cause for concern too

Snowden

• Snowden speaks: NSA spies create ‘databases of ruin’ on innocent folks

  “Not all spying is bad. The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication every single day,” he said.

• US hints at Edward Snowden plea bargain to allow return from Russia

  Attorney general prepared to ‘engage in conversation’ with NSA whistleblower but says full clemency is ‘going too far’

• Snowden considers returning to the US, and the “permanent record”

  In an online Q&A session, former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden answered 13 questions posed by Twitter users. The questions he considered ranged from the reasoning behind his leaks, to his hope for what the future of American intelligence programs may look like.

• NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden lays out hopes for reforms to US intelligence system

• Holder Says He’s Open to Plea Deal with NSA Leaker Snowden

• NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden rules out returning to the US

  Former NSA contractor says he will stay in Russia, claiming that he stands no chance of getting a fair trial under current whistle-blower laws

• If Only All ‘Narcisstic Traitors’ Were This Reasonable And Insightful

  Over the past few months, it’s been funny to watch the personal attacks on Ed Snowden — especially those that call him either a narcissist or a traitor. These seem to be based on little more than, well, a dislike of what Snowden has done, rather than any sort of logical or rational exploration of his statements and deeds.

GOP on Bush Policies

• Republicans call for halt to “unconstitutional surveillance programs”

  New GOP resolution says NSA metadata dragnet program harms basic human rights.

• NSA domestic surveillance condemned in Republican party resolution

• Exclusive: Republican Party Calls For End To NSA Domestic Phone Records Program

• U.S. Republicans condemn NSA ‘dragnet’ spying program

Crime

• ‘This overreach is unacceptable’: the case against NSA bulk collection

  A growing set of people and organizations have spoken out calling for an end to the spy program. Here’s what they said

• Federal Oversight Board: NSA Program Ineffective & Illegal

• US oversight board says NSA bulk phone data collection illegal

  A US oversight board has said the NSA’s bulk telephone spying program is illegal. The man responsible for revealing it, fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, believes he cannot receive a fair trial in the US.

• Pioneers of digital spying have misgivings about current NSA programs

  Former federal prosecutor Eric Friedberg conducted the first court-approved email wiretap nearly 20 years ago while investigating an international conspiracy to sell fraudulent cellphones.

• NSA Spying Sends Data to Canada

  In Kamloops, B.C., cool overnight temperatures in summer mean Telus (TU) needs to run its air conditioning for only about 40 hours a year to keep its computer servers from overheating. Lower cooling costs are part of the Canadian telecommunications company’s sales pitch to businesses looking to store troves of digital information cheaply. Telus also promotes Canada’s inexpensive hydroelectric power, low seismic activity—and, now, lower risk of government snooping. “There is a structural advantage in Canada in that the data is here and the privacy protection is more stringent,” says Lloyd Switzer, who runs Telus’s 10 data centers.

• To Reform the NSA, Slash Its Budget

• The NSA and CIA are criminal enterprises

• Arizona, New Hampshire, Tennessee lawmakers target NSA

• Justifying the Unjustifiable: Deconstructing the Lies of the NSA

  This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.

More Important Than NSA Crimes

• Op-Ed: MSNBC cuts off NSA interview for ‘breaking news’ of Bieber arrest

• Justin Bieber arrested: Report interrupts congresswoman during NSA interview

  There were signs that it is time for us to detonate the Earth and begin colonising a new planet last night, when an MSNBC anchor cut off congresswoman Jane Harman mid-sentence to bring news of Justin Bieber’s arrest.

• Video: Congresswoman speaking on NSA phone scandal interrupted for Justin Bieber in court

  Social media users were outraged last night when a MSNBC segment was interrupted for “breaking news” relating to Justin Beiber’s arrest.

Corporate Views

• Is Red Hat Working for the NSA?

  Is Red Hat secretly working with the NSA to build back doors into their products? I don’t think so. As far as I can tell, the company is the best of breed when it comes to big business and Linux. The company seems to be a very good open source citizen.

• NSA Interception In Action? Tor Developer’s Computer Gets Mysteriously Re-Routed To Virginia

  Also, some more details from PrivacySOS. As you can see, rather than go from the Amazon warehouse in Santa Ana, California up the coast to Seattle, instead the package went across the country to Dulles, Virginia to Alexandria (right outside of DC) and was “delivered” there. Upon seeing this, my initial reaction was that it might not be a big deal. With shipping logistics these days, it’s no uncommon to see a sort of hub system, where packages travel across the country from one warehouse to a shipping hub, only to be shipped back across the country for actual delivery.

• Tim Cook Talks NSA, Secrecy, and More with ABC News

  On the NSA front, however, Cook said quite pointedly that Apple is under a gag order and can’t tell what it knows about the NSA surveillance.

• Google chairman says ‘encrypting everything’ could end China’s censorship, stop NSA snooping

  Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt has reportedly said that encryption is the key to many of Internet’s modern-day problems, including opening up countries with strict censorship laws.

• Google’s Boasts About Ending Surveillance Are Hard To Swallow

  Google’s Eric Schmidt is at the Davos World Economic forum right now talking up his company’s potential to end government surveillance and censorship completely using solely “strong encryption,” reports Rich McCormick of The Verge.

  The American NSA has proven itself quite adept at finding cracks in Google’s systems, and China’s real-time censorship machine is unlike any other in the world.

  Nevertheless, Schmidt is confident, from the Verge:

  Schmidt said that Google was attempting to strengthen its encryption so the world’s governments “won’t be able to penetrate it” and obtain private data. Those efforts creates problems for “governments like China’s,” which he thought responsible for “80 to 85 percent of the world’s industrial espionage.”

  The Google chairman also said he saw the eventual relaxation of Chinese censorship over time as the number of people using social media in the country continued to grow.

Misc.

• Letter from Crypto Pioneers Denounces NSA Surveillance

  Perhaps the biggest condemnation of President Obama’s address last Friday announcing reforms to the NSA’s surveillance programs was his failure to mention any of the agency’s alleged involvement in subverting cryptography standards and the impact that has had on the trustworthiness of products built on those baselines.

• Why Obama’s speech on NSA reforms is a bag of chips full of air

  A couple of days ago Obama gave a long speech about the so-called reforms he was going to bring to NSA. When I went through the transcript of his speech it reminded me of a packet of chips that’s practically full of air.

• On children’s website, NSA puts a furry, smiley face on its mission

  The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters that marketers use to make products like cereal and toys appealing to children.

  But the reptile, known as T. Top, who says creating and breaking codes is really “kewl,” is pushing something far weightier: the benefits of the National Security Agency.

• NSA Surveillance Sparks Talk of National Internets

  Just imagine the “network of all networks,” the globe-spanning Internet, becoming a loose web of tightly guarded, nearly impermeable regional or even national networks. It seems antithetical to the mythology surrounding the Internet’s power and purpose. But ongoing revelations about the extensive surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are pushing countries like Germany and Brazil to take concrete steps in that direction.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

01.23.14

Links 23/1/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 4:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Links 23/1/2014: Applications

Posted in News Roundup at 4:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Links 23/1/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

01.22.14

Links 22/1/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 5:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Links 22/1/2014: Instructionals

Posted in News Roundup at 5:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

01.20.14

Linking Surveillance to Assassinations

Posted in News Roundup at 4:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Very recent news about privacy infringement, mass surveillance, government coverup, and assassinations

NSA Dropbox (PRISM)

• Dropbox Lands $250 Million in Funding, Report Says

• Dropbox valuation tops $10bn following $250m fundraising

Privacy

• LCA 2014: Keynote by Dr. Suelette Dreyfus on mass surveillance and whitleblowers [MP4]

• The Whistle-Blower Who Freed Dreyfus

  Picquart, like many of his contemporaries, was casually anti-Semitic. It came as no surprise to him when Dreyfus — the only Jew on the general staff — was suspected of passing secret intelligence to the Germans. It was Picquart who provided a sample of Dreyfus’s handwriting to the investigators. And when expert analysis seemed to confirm Dreyfus’s guilt, it was Picquart who met his unsuspecting former pupil in the Ministry of War so he could be quietly bundled off to prison.

  [...]

  It was then that Picquart, after 25 years’ army service, realized he had no alternative but to break ranks. He passed his evidence against Esterhazy to a senior politician, the vice president of the senate, Auguste Scheurer-Kestner. Then, at the end of 1897, he provided Émile Zola with the information that enabled the novelist to write his celebrated exposé of the affair, “J’Accuse …!” Picquart’s reward was to be dismissed from the army, framed as a forger and locked up in solitary confinement for more than a year.

  It was not until 1906 that justice was finally done; Dreyfus’s conviction was quashed, and Picquart was restored to the army with the rank of brigadier general. That fall, when his friend and fellow Dreyfusard, Georges Clemenceau — the owner of the newspaper that published “J’Accuse …!” became prime minister, he made Picquart minister of war, a post he held for three years.

  [...]

  And yet the injustices against which he fought so courageously — the inherent unreliability of secret courts and secret evidence, the dangers of rogue intelligence agencies becoming laws unto themselves, the instinctive response of governments and national security organizations to cover up their mistakes, the easy flourishing of “national security” to stifle democratic scrutiny — all these continue. “Dreyfus was the victim,” Clemenceau observed, “but Picquart was the hero.” On this day, he deserves to be remembered.

• Google working on smart contact lens for diabetes patients

  Google has a highly secretive ‘X’ division which works on futuristic technologies and the ‘smart contact lens’ is emerging from this division. Unlike Google Glass which is ‘wearable’ computer for entertainment and communication, ‘smart contact lens’ initially (as the company is projecting it right now) looks like a medical solution for patients with diabetes.

NSA

• NSA Spying and Search Engine “Tracking Technologies”

• NSA surveillance: American debate, British denial

  Barack Obama’s speech on NSA surveillance was in many ways the Democratic president at his best and the United States at its best too. George Bush would certainly not have made the speech. Nor, arguably, would Bill Clinton. What is more, no modern British prime minister of either party would have come anywhere near it. And no Chinese or Russian leader would even think of such a thing. It would be hard to imagine, outside the realm of Hollywood fiction, a more balanced and serious response to the vexed issues of security and privacy abuse than the one Mr Obama offered today .

• NSA as Massa of the Global Sigint Plantation

  Craig Murray caused quite a fuss in 2004 when, as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, he openly criticized the systemic and severe human rights abuses of the Karimov regime. He was publicly and pointedly stomped on by the British government, with the full encouragement of the Bush administration, for complicating Western access to the Karshi-Khanabad airbase and queering the Global War on Terror pitch.

  [...]

  Murray had complained that intel provided by the Uzbek government through the CIA to the UK was tainted by the fact that it was obtained through torture. Beyond the fact that tortured detainees often provide false information in order to stop their mistreatment, the UK is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture and, by the interpretation of Murray and others, was precluded from possessing (as well as using in a court of law) evidence obtained under torture.

• The strange connection between the NSA and an Ontario tech firm

  And since 1995, any software developer building encryption for technology they intended to sell to the American or Canadian government has had to consult something called the Cryptographic Module Validation Program. It’s a list of algorithms blessed by the CMVP that are, according to the government agencies that publish it, “accepted by the Federal Agencies of both countries for the protection of sensitive information.”

• Why the NSA’s Spying on Offline Computers Is Less Scary Than Mass Surveillance

  The relevant NSA documents hosted on Cryptome date back to 2008, which means the NSA’s capabilities have undoubtedly improved beyond the technologies described in the documents. But the documents still provide a useful glimpse of how the agency might go about planting such spy tools—which are mostly made from off-the-shelf components—inside computers that don’t have wired or wireless Internet connections. They also show why such frighteningly precise spying is far more limited than the NSA’s broader mass surveillance of Internet data and cellphones.

• Jimmy Wales says he’d go “ballistic” if NSA tried to gain backdoor into his new mobile operator

  Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has told TechDigest that he will go “ballistic” if the NSA try to gain backdoor access into The People’s Operator, the new mobile phone network that it has just been announced Wales will become co-chair of.

• The NSA Is Scary Good

  Many of these same conversations also occurred in 2006, when it was reveled that the NSA was collecting data from billions of phone calls made by normal citizens. Curiously, the support for these programs seems to be very closely tied to the political leanings of the commander-in-chief. In 2006, with a Republican in office, 71% of Republicans supported the actions of the NSA. Conversely, with a Democrat in office, Republican approval plummeted to 32%.

• Alan Rusbridger defends Snowden leaks as Obama prepares to announce NSA reforms

  Good morning. Barack Obama will today set out his plans for reforming the NSA in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations – published in the Guardian and elsewhere – about the vast scope of the US intelligence agency’s secret surveillance of Americans and foreigners.

  Briefings to US media organisations have suggested the president may introduce changes to the way the NSA collects telephone metadata regarding every American phone call – who called whom and when – although an idea put forward by a White House review panel that the telecom companies rather than the NSA should store this data has faced opposition from the companies themselves. It is thought Obama may pass this issue to Congress to resolve – easier said than done, since Congress is deeply divided over the issues raised by Snowden.

• NSA goes on declassification spree ahead of Obama reform

  US National Intelligence director James Clapper has thrown open the books on hundreds of previously classified documents detailing national and international surveillance, as President Obama’s scheme to reform the NSA goes into operation. The new batch of declassified files brings the total number of released documents to around 2,300 pages, DNI Clapper wrote, including orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), documents the NSA and others have previously submitted to Congress, and data about the legality of the ways in which the NSA collects telephone metadata and other programs currently operating.

Obama Speech/Statement

• Obama Calls for Overhaul of N.S.A.’s Phone Data Collection Program

• Obama’s NSA ‘reforms’ are little more than a PR attempt to mollify the public

  Obama is draping the banner of change over the NSA status quo. Bulk surveillance that caused such outrage will remain in place

• Obama presents NSA reforms with plan to end government storage of call data

• Obama’s NSA speech leaves more questions than answers

• Obama’s Speech, Annotated Version

• Obama acknowledges Edward Snowden disclosures in NSA reform speech

• Obama NSA reforms receive mixed response in Europe and Brazil

  Europeans were largely underwhelmed by Barack Obama’s speech on limited reform of US espionage practices, saying the measures did not go far enough to address concerns over American snooping on its European allies.

• Obama bans spying on allies in NSA reforms

  President Barack Obama has vowed to ban the surveillance of American allies under major reforms to the country’s spying apparatus in the wake of the ­Edward Snowden revelations.

• Obama’s NSA speech: an affirmation that mass surveillance has a future

  The president’s rhetoric pursued balance but his speech suggests an NSA victory in its fight against restrictions

• We need oversight to stop NSA cheating – former intel analyst

  ​The NSA needs oversight to ensure the NSA adheres to the reforms announced by President Obama, a former analyst has said. The US president curtailed the NSA’s mass gathering of metadata which had been branded as “unconstitutional” on Friday.

• 4 questionable claims Obama has made on NSA surveillance

  Former NSA employee Thomas Drake argues that even if Snowden were a government employee who went through the proper legal channels, he still wouldn’t have been safe from retaliation. Drake says while he reported his concerns about a 2001 surveillance program to his NSA superiors, Congress, and the Department of Defense, he was told the program was legal. Drake was later indicted for providing information to the Baltimore Sun. After years of legal wrangling, Drake pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and got no prison time.

• Should Obama be tried for treason after his NSA speech on Friday?

  Floating an administration source’s trial balloon on just where Obama is trying to go on this NSA thing, the New York Times has divulged that Obama is seeking to declare the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution null and void once and for all.

  The language of the amendment, which embodies the sentiment in Patriot speeches of the American Revolution that “a man’s house is his castle,” is beautifully crystalline in clarity as all the Founding Fathers’ declarations were.

• NSA will suck data anytime it wants

  Obama invoked the memory of 9/11 and mentioned massive cyberattacks. He spoke of bombs being made in basements and said, oddly enough, “our electric grid could be shut down by operators an ocean away.”

• Obama’s NSA promises fail to quell European fears

• Obama’s NSA Reform: Electronic Frontier Foundation Levies Harsh ScoreCard

  Internet rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation took the trouble to “score” President Obama’s promises on reforming the National Security Agency’s snooping practices.

• Obama’s NSA speech does little to calm privacy fears

  U.S. President Barack Obama’s orders to change some American surveillance practices puts the burden on Congress to finally deal with a national security controversy that has spooked Americans and outraged foreign allies.

• Supporters decry absence of amnesty for Snowden in Obama’s NSA speech

  Supporters of Edward Snowden complained of a glaring omission in the White House’s pledge on Friday to rein in government surveillance activities: amnesty for the fugitive leaker who’s now holed up in Russia after revealing the secrets that led to this shake-up.

  In news releases, on television and across social media, the former contractor’s supporters drove home the message that the reforms announced on Friday came solely because of Snowden’s unauthorised disclosures.

• In Keeping Grip on Data Pipeline, Obama Does Little to Reassure Industry

  Google, which briefly considered moving all of its computer servers out of the United States last year after learning how they had been penetrated by the National Security Agency, was looking for a public assurance from President Obama that the government would no longer secretly suck data from the company’s corner of the Internet cloud.

• Obama Defends the Indefensible

  He believes privacy invasion intrusiveness should comfort us. He lied claiming it makes us safer. How does destroying civil liberties protect them?

• Those NSA ‘reforms’ in full: El Reg translates US Prez Obama’s pledges

  Prez Obama’s speech is presented below in bold, with our annotations throughout.

• Where to stockpile mountains of NSA data?

  Figuring out where to house mountains of data collected by the National Security Agency is the thorniest challenge the United States faces in curtailing its massive surveillance, officials said Sunday.

  In a long-awaited speech designed to quell a furor over the programs exposed by fugitive former contractor Edward Snowden, President Barack Obama said he was trimming the reach of NSA phone sweeps.

  He also vowed to halt spy taps on friendly world leaders and proposed new shields for foreigners caught in US data collection.

• Barack Obama: NSA Reform Is Inadequate

• Obama: NSA Debate Was ‘Not Worth’ the Leaks

• Obama’s promise to curb NSA snooping fails to please critics

• Obama’s NSA reforms won’t solve Silicon Valley’s trust problem

  When Barack Obama announced his reforms of National Security Agency surveillance programmes today, few people were as interested as Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Marissa Mayer, and Steve Ballmer.

• Signifying Nothing

  The image was the thing. Those serried American flags beneath their burnished and distinctly imperial eagles. Obama’s speech on the NSA was devoid of meaningful content. The threats against Snowden and the references to America’s right to spy on its potential enemies – which seemed to mean everybody – were obviously heartfelt. The “restrictions” on the NSA were devoid of intent, mumbled and hedged around. Actually you don’t have to analyse what he said. The picture says it all.

Germany

• Obama placates Germany over NSA

  President Barack Obama has told Germany’s ZDF public television that US intelligence services will continue to spy on foreign governments, but he would not let such work damage relations with Germany.

• German Interior Minister de Maiziere warns over NSA ‘fixation’

  The German interior minister contradicted a suggestion that Obama’s speech contained “few concrete changes,” denying that the government in Berlin was disappointed.

• Actions must follow Obama’s words on NSA, Germans say

Brazil

• Brazil to closely assess US vow to limit NSA spying

• Brazil, smarting from NSA spying, says it’s closely following US reforms

  Spokesman Thomas Traumann is using the official blog of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to say the government has closely analyzed Friday’s speech on NSA reforms by U.S. President Barack Obama. He calls the speech “a first step.”

• Brazil says to follow NSA developments closely

Shane Todd

• Singapore’s IME audited for spying

  Singapore says US officials invited to inspect the work of a local research institute to probe spy claims have been ‘satisfied’ with the audit findings.

  The state-linked Institute of Microelectronics (IME) was first thrust into the spotlight in February when the London-based Financial Times cast doubt on the apparent suicide of one of its former researchers – US electronics engineer Shane Todd, who was found hanged in his Singapore flat in June 2012.

• Shane Todd’s death: US govt satisfied with IME audit results

  Responding to media queries, an MFA spokesman said the voluntary audit of IME was an offer made by Minister for Foreign Affairs K. Shanmugam to US Secretary of State John Kerry in March this year. The offer was made “in the spirit of cooperation and openness to satisfy the US that allegations of illegal transfers of US technology from IME to the Chinese company Huawei were completely untrue and without basis,” said the MFA spokesman.

• ‘Satisfied’ US audits Singapore institute over spy claims

Assassination Based on NSA Kill Lists

• Pentagon & NSA Officials say They Want Snowden Extrajudicially Assassinated

  President Obama claims the right to extrajudicially execute American citizens, keeps a so-called “kill list,” and has bragged he’s “really good at killing people.” This isn’t bluster. Obama has backed this up with action, having killed U.S. citizens — including a 16-year-old boy – without charging, much less convicting, any of them with a single crime.

  The implications are profound (and profoundly disturbing), and raise questions about Americans’ constitutional right to due process, the most basic constraints on presidential power, and our treatment of whistleblowers. Indeed, how can anyone expect those who witness executive-branch crimes to blow the whistle when the head of the executive branch asserts the right to instantly execute anyone he pleases at any time?

  All of this may sound theoretical, academic, or even fantastical, straight out of a dystopian sci-fi flick. But it isn’t. It is very real. After all, only a few months ago, the chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee publicly offered to help extrajudicially assassinate NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And now, according to a harrowing new report that just hit the Internet, top NSA and Pentagon officials are doing much the same, even after court rulings and disclosures have concluded that Snowden is a whistleblower who exposed serious government crimes.

• US has taken targeted killings to new high: Author Mark Mazzetti

  Agreeing that targeted killings have been used by certain countries, notably Israel, Mazzetti said Israel also invented drones but never used both of these to the extent US has employed them.

• Humanitarian aspect of drone attacks

• Washington’s Terrorism or Counterterrorism in Somalia

Gaza

• Israeli drone strike wounds two

  In Extra-Judicial Execution Attempt, Israeli Drone Targets Motorbike Wounding Member of Palestinian Armed Group and Child in North Gaza

• Two Gazans hurt as Israel strike targets Islamic Jihad

  Gaza emergency services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said the strike had hit a motorcycle in the northern neighbourhood of Saftawi, leaving its rider, a 22-year-old man, in critical condition.

  A 12-year-old boy who was standing nearby suffered moderate head wounds in the raid, he told AFP.

UK

• Judges reject case over UK role in US drone strikes

• Pakistan drone strike relative loses GCHQ court case

  Judges say case would involve ‘sitting in judgment’ on US and block move by Noor Khan, whose father died in a 2011 attack

Yemen

• Yemen says US drone crashed after hitting mountain

  A military source said last Thursday that a US drone had fallen near the border with neighboring Oman.

• What really happened when a U.S. drone hit a Yemeni wedding convoy?

  Three men killed from Jishm left behind 17 children between them, and another will be born in about six months. Their fathers either eked out livings growing qat – the mild narcotic plant chewed by a majority of Yemenis – in the barren landscape surrounding the village, or sneaked across Yemen’s northern border into Saudi Arabia looking for work.

• Yemeni children traumatized by US drone strikes

  The Yemeni children are experiencing psychological problems as a consequence of unending U.S. drone attacks…

• New technologies reshape the future of war

  The evolution of surveillance technologies, space weapons and autonomous unmanned systems of all sorts is also transforming how wars are fought

• Yemen sets up drone counseling center for kids following US attacks

Laws to Allow Abuse of Domestic Population

• Emmett, Idaho, Nullifies Indefinite Detention of NDAA

  Another American town has decided its citizens will not be denied due process by the president of the United States.

• Michigan Passes Law Nullifying NDAA Indefinite Detention

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

01.19.14

Links 19/1/2014: Games

Posted in News Roundup at 11:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend