Political News That Matters
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-07 17:42:59 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-07 17:44:06 UTC
Privacy
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In the EU – US trade negotiations (TTIP / TAFTA) the US tabled a proposal that would prohibit to require local data storage. If the EU accepts this proposal, the EU would give away an instrument essential to protect privacy.
On 5 March 2014 the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament organised a meeting on the complex relationship between data protection, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and the general context of EU-US relations after the Snowden revelations. (Stream available)
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Grumpy with Dropbox? Forget sueing the company, which is trying to keep you from your lawyers with its new Terms of Service document effective as of March 24th, 2014.
NSA
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SURVEILLANCE WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden has responded to the European Parliament's questions about PRISM and data privacy.
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The NSA whistleblower has given extensive evidence to an inquiry into the surveillance of European citizens, describing what he calls a “bazaar” of EU intelligence agencies allowing the U.S. to spy on pretty much everyone.
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But this zero-sum framework ignores the significant damage that the NSA’s practices have done to U.S. national security. In a global digital world, national security depends on many factors beyond surveillance capacities, and over-reliance on global data collection can create unintended security vulnerabilities.
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Sen. John Walsh, D-Mont., introduced his first bill Thursday, to restrict the ability of federal security agencies to secretly collect phone records and other personal data on U.S. citizens.
Walsh’s bill, titled the Civil Liberties Defense Act, also would require the National Security Agency to purge records of already collected data that don’t comply with standards established by the act.
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The NSA is forbidden to spy on American citizens. But the GCHQ is not so forbidden. So has the NSA farmed out its surveillance of Americans to GCHQ? The NSA would then be following the letter of the law, but, through its association with the GCHQ, would have immediate access to surveillance of Americans.
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The National Security Agency leaker will speak with Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, about NSA's spying techniques and "the ways in which technology can help to protect us from mass surveillance." The event will take place Monday and be moderated by Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy & Technology Project (who is also a legal advisor for Snowden). Snowden will take audience questions.
Torture
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Earlier this week, we wrote about the accusations that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were working on a massive $40 million 6,300 pages report condemning the CIA's torture program. The DOJ is apparently already investigating if the CIA violated computer hacking laws in spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee computers. The issue revolved around a draft of an internal review by the CIA, which apparently corroborates many of the Senate report's findings -- but which the CIA did not hand over to the Senate. This internal report not only support's the Senate report's findings, but also shows that the CIA has been lying in response to questions about the terror program.
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“The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around. Since I joined the Committee, the CIA has refused to engage in good faith on the Committee’s study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Instead, the CIA has consistently tried to cast doubt on the accuracy and quality of this report by publicly making false representations about what is and is not in it.
Militarism
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After successful testing last year, the Navy is preparing to deploy its first directed energy weapon to the fleet. When it puts to sea this summer, the afloat forward staging base ship USS Ponce will be equipped with the Navy’s Laser Weapon System (LaWS).
Drones
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The Pentagon has confirmed launching a drone strike against the Logar Province of Afghanistan today, hitting their allies in a case of mistaken identity. The strike kill five Afghan National Army soldiers, and wounded eight others.
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In order to frame last night’s Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate, moderator John Donvan invited Georgetown University constitutional law professor Nick Rosenkranz on stage to give the audience a jumpstart on their thinking as to why this event was distinct from the previous debate on drones. He explained that while the first debate looked at policy–which invariably brings politics into the equation–this argument, “The President Has the Constitutional Power to Target and Kill Americans,” focuses solely on the question of constitutionality.
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This past week, I had to write a paper on the psychological determinants of the United States’ response to the attacks on September 11, 2001. I clarify the year because if y’all never noticed, the Benghazi attacks happened on the same exact day ten years later … eerie. Like most political science papers I write, I dove headfirst into the topic and justified my watching of movies before bedtime because I chose ones that had to do with 9/11. First, it was United 93. Very bad choice. Quite similar to the night I came home from going out and thought “I’ll just watch a short rom com and fall asleep while it’s playing.” I chose Hotel Rwanda. Three hours later, I was alone in bed bawling my eyes out because why is the world such a horrible place?!
[...]
In 2011, a so-called terrorist threat, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was targeted and successfully removed from the picture, much like many other covert operations led out by top American military forces. The only thing that made this different from the assassination of Osama bin Ladin was that Anwar al-Aulaqi was an American citizen, as was his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Aulaqi, whose death was officially stated as a “mistake” by the United States government. There were outcries from journalists and social justice groups following the two separate incidents; what happened to innocent until proven guilty? The response of the government was that the reasons for assassinating these two men — well, really one boy and one man — were too dangerous to let the public in on. So basically, we should really just trust the military and let them kill whomever they want, regardless of citizenship. Because the government is always looking out for the people, right? Except when they unlawfully assassinate us … it’s a cycle of complete bullshit.
Ukraine
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The EU has just announced that it’s going to freeze the suspect assets of 18 Ukrainian politicians, including former president Viktor Yanukovych. This comes after Switzerland and Austria froze assets earlier in the week. Quite apart from the criticism that the EU’s delay gives plenty of time for Ukraine’s missing billions to be shifted further afield, there is a bigger problem here.
If there are concerns that this money is corrupt, why did any of the EU’s banks accept it in the first place? Banks are supposed to obey anti-money laundering laws that require them to check out their customers and their source of funds. Then they’re supposed to turn down money that has been earned through crime – including the sort of state looting that seems to have been happening in Ukraine. And governments are supposed to hold banks that fail to do all this to account.
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In recent days, the Crimean peninsula has been at the heart of what some have described as the greatest international crisis of the 21st century. But this is not the first time the region has been so critical to international affairs. Many educated people have at least heard of the great struggle known as the Crimean War (1853-56), although its causes and events remain mysterious to most non-specialists.
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While the Kremlin denied any involvement, Georgian officials accused Russia of being behind the attacks.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Richard Stallman's Next Public Talk is on Friday, 17:30 in Córdoba (Spain), FSF Cannot Mention It
- Any attempt to marginalise founders isn't unprecedented as a strategy
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- On DebConf and Debian 'Bedroom Nepotism' (Connected to Canonical, Red Hat, and Google)
- Why the public must know suppressed facts (which women themselves are voicing concerns about; some men muzzle them to save face)
- Several Years After Vista 11 Came Out Few People in Africa Use It, Its Relative Share Declines (People Delete It and Move to BSD/GNU/Linux?)
- These trends are worth discussing
- Canonical, Ubuntu & Debian DebConf19 Diversity Girls email
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Links 23/04/2024: Escalations Around Poland, Microsoft Shares Dumped
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 23/04/2024: Offline PSP Media Player and OpenBSD on ThinkPad
- Links for the day
- Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, Holger Levsen & Debian DebConf6 fight
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- DebConf8: who slept with who? Rooming list leaked
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Bruce Perens & Debian: swiping the Open Source trademark
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Ean Schuessler & Debian SPI OSI trademark disputes
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Windows in Sudan: From 99.15% to 2.12%
- With conflict in Sudan, plus the occasional escalation/s, buying a laptop with Vista 11 isn't a high priority
- Anatomy of a Cancel Mob Campaign
- how they go about
- [Meme] The 'Cancel Culture' and Its 'Hit List'
- organisers are being contacted by the 'cancel mob'
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, April 22, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, April 22, 2024
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- Don't trust me. Trust the voters.
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Chris Lamb & Debian demanded Ubuntu censor my blog
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Ean Schuessler, Branden Robinson & Debian SPI accounting crisis
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- William Lee Irwin III, Michael Schultheiss & Debian, Oracle, Russian kernel scandal
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Microsoft's Windows Down to 8% in Afghanistan According to statCounter Data
- in Vietnam Windows is at 8%, in Iraq 4.9%, Syria 3.7%, and Yemen 2.2%
- [Meme] Only Criminals Would Want to Use Printers?
- The EPO's war on paper
- EPO: We and Microsoft Will Spy on Everything (No Physical Copies)
- The letter is dated last Thursday
- Links 22/04/2024: Windows Getting Worse, Oligarch-Owned Media Attacking Assange Again
- Links for the day
- Links 21/04/2024: LINUX Unplugged and 'Screen Time' as the New Tobacco
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 22/04/2024: Health Issues and Online Documentation
- Links for the day
- What Fake News or Botspew From Microsoft Looks Like... (Also: Techrights to Invest 500 Billion in Datacentres by 2050!)
- Sededin Dedovic (if that's a real name) does Microsoft stenography
- Stefano Maffulli's (and Microsoft's) Openwashing Slant Initiative (OSI) Report Was Finalised a Few Months Ago, Revealing Only 3% of the Money Comes From Members/People
- Microsoft's role remains prominent (for OSI to help the attack on the GPL and constantly engage in promotion of proprietary GitHub)
- [Meme] Master Engineer, But Only They Can Say It
- One can conclude that "inclusive language" is a community-hostile trolling campaign
- [Meme] It Takes Three to Grant a Monopoly, Or... Injunction Against Staff Representatives
- Quality control
- [Video] EPO's "Heart of Staff Rep" Has a Heartless New Rant
- The wordplay is just for fun
- An Unfortunate Miscalculation Of Capital
- Reprinted with permission from Andy Farnell
- [Video] Online Brigade Demands That the Person Who Started GNU/Linux is Denied Public Speaking (and Why FSF Cannot Mention His Speeches)
- So basically the attack on RMS did not stop; even when he's ill with cancer the cancel culture will try to cancel him, preventing him from talking (or be heard) about what he started in 1983
- Online Brigade Demands That the Person Who Made Nix Leaves Nix for Not Censoring People 'Enough'
- Trying to 'nix' the founder over alleged "safety" of so-called 'minorities'
- [Video] Inauthentic Sites and Our Upcoming Publications
- In the future, at least in the short term, we'll continue to highlight Debian issues
- List of Debian Suicides & Accidents
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Jens Schmalzing & Debian: rooftop fall, inaccurately described as accident
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- [Teaser] EPO Leaks About EPO Leaks
- Yo dawg!
- On Wednesday IBM Announces 'Results' (Partial; Bad Parts Offloaded Later) and Red Hat Has Layoffs Anniversary
- There's still expectation that Red Hat will make more staff cuts
- IBM: We Are No Longer Pro-Nazi (Not Anymore)
- Historically, IBM has had a nazi problem
- Bad faith: attacking a volunteer at a time of grief, disrespect for the sanctity of human life
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Bad faith: how many Debian Developers really committed suicide?
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, April 21, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, April 21, 2024
- A History of Frivolous Filings and Heavy Drug Use
- So the militant was psychotic due to copious amounts of marijuana
- Bad faith: suicide, stigma and tarnishing
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- UDRP Legitimate interests: EU whistleblower directive, workplace health & safety concerns
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 21/04/2024: Earth Day Coming, Day of Rest, Excess Deaths Hidden by Manipulation
- Links for the day
- Bad faith: no communication before opening WIPO UDRP case
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Bad faith: real origins of harassment and evidence
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 21/04/2024: Censorship Abundant, More Decisions to Quit Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- Bad faith: Debian Community domain used for harassment after WIPO seizure
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- If Red Hat/IBM Was a Restaurant...
- Two hours ago in thelayoff.com
- Why We Republish Articles From Debian Disguised.Work (Formerly Debian.Community)
- articles at disguised.work aren't easy to find
- Google: We Run and Fund Diversity Programs, Please Ignore How Our Own Staff Behaves
- censorship is done by the recipients of the grants
- Paul Tagliamonte & Debian Outreachy OPW dating
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- Disguised.Work unmasked, Debian-private fresh leaks
- Reprinted with permission from disguised.work
- [Meme] Fake European Patents Helped Fund the War on Ukraine
- The European Patent Office (EPO) does not serve the interests of Europe
- European Patent Office (EPO) Has Serious Safety Issues, This New Report Highlights Some of Them
- 9-page document that was released to staff a couple of days ago
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 20, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, April 20, 2024
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- Microsoft-Run FUD Machine Wants Nobody to Pay Attention to Microsoft Getting Cracked All the Time
- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) is the business model of "modern" media
- Torvalds Fed Up With "AI" Passing Fad, Calls It "Autocorrect on Steroids."
- and Microsoft pretends that it is speaking for Linux
- Gemini Links 21/04/2024: Minecraft Ruined
- Links for the day