01.25.14

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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

Snowden

GOP on Bush Policies

Crime

More Important Than NSA Crimes

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.

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