03.23.14

More Drones Debate, Espionage Against China

Posted in News Roundup at 12:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Drones

• Death of traumatised boy sparks outrage at US drone strikes in Yemen

  Opposition to the deadly US drone strikes in Yemen has gained momentum after the death of a boy who was psychologically affected by a strike in 2012 in the port city of Shiher in Hadramout province.

• The drone lobby’s image problem

  That war technology has uses beyond war doesn’t justify the funding of technologies whose core mission is war.

• Drones are a Crime against Humanity and Responsible for Worst Human Rights Violations

  Global human rights violators have found a large loophole in International Law and International Humanitarian Law. Exploiting this loophole they have developed armed drones to kill civilians with impunity. For the sake of the continuation of the human race, these vile killers must be condemned and stopped.

• What’s a Logical Drone Strikes Policy? Hint: Not the Current One.

  President Obama said last May that he was placing limits on the use of drones in foreign countries, and senior administration officials have said the United States cannot exist in an inchoate state of war against terrorists everywhere (the sort President George W. Bush fantasized about) But there’s still no cut and dry, publicly available legal framework setting out when and where the government can launch drone strikes.

• Brimstone Completes Drone Test Trials

• US Boycotts Pakistan’s Push For Greater Transparency On Drone Strikes

  The United States is refusing to participate in UN Human Rights Council talks about greater accountability for human rights violations in covert drone wars.

• The Catholic Roots of Obama’s Activism

• NYT Fawns Over Obama’s ‘Catholic Roots,’ Ignores Rev. Wright’s Conspiratorial Rants

Censorship

• Shocker! The more people use the Internet, the less they like Web censorship

Civil Rights

• Freedom After 30 Years on Death Row

  Ford was quickly convicted. At the sentencing phase of his trial, the lack of competent defense counsel again played a factor. The best mitigation witnesses who might have testified for him lived out of state—but Ford’s lawyers were unsure about the process for subpoenaing them to testify in Louisiana. It took that all-white jury less than three hours to recommend a sentence of death for the man they believed murdered Isadore Rozeman.

  [...]

  Just before Glenn Ford walked out of prison late Tuesday afternoon, the state of Louisiana—which had wrongfully charged, convicted, and incarcerated him for 30 years—gave him a $20 dollar debit card for his troubles. (As recently as 2011, the state gave only $10 to inmates leaving prison.) When you combine the debit card with the balance in Ford’s prison account, the total he received upon his departure from Angola was $20.04. He left, too, with some photographs and with his medicine, all in two small boxes. He left behind his headphones.

Venezuela

• Venezuela: This is a revolt of the rich, not a ‘terror campaign’

  Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it.

  I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the right-wing protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city.

Ukraine

• Russia, U.S. Trade Sanctions over Ukraine; EU Leaders Sign Deal with Ukraine Gov’t

  Russia and the United States have each imposed new sanctions on the other over the crisis in Ukraine. President Obama made the announcement on Thursday.

• Who In Ukraine Will Benefit From An IMF Bailout?

Espionage Against China

• NSA spied on Chinese govt and telecom giant Huawei – Snowden docs

  The new portion of revelations from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, published by Der Spiegel and The New York Times, has exposed the great interest of the US secret service in obtaining data from China.

• SA Spied on Chinese Government and Networking Firm

• Slides Describe Mission Involving Huawei

• NSA targeted Chinese telecoms giant Huawei – report

• China’s Huawei condemns reported NSA snooping

  Chinese telecom and internet company Huawei defended is independence on Sunday and said it would condemn any infiltration of its servers by the U.S. National Security Agency if reports of such activities by the NSA were true.

• U.S. NSA infiltrates servers of China telecom giant Huawei – report

  The U.S. National Security Agency has infiltrated servers in the headquarters of Chinese telecommunications and internet giant Huawei Technologies Co, obtaining sensitive information and monitoring the communications of top executives, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

  The newspaper said its report on the operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was based on NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former agency contractor who since last year has leaked data revealing sweeping U.S. surveillance activities. The German magazine Der Spiegel also reported on the documents.

Privacy

• Podcast: Why Is British Government Stripping Individuals of Their Citizenship & How Is US Responsible?

• Tech giants to press Obama on NSA reform in private White House meeting

  Executives from Facebook, Google and Yahoo invited to Oval Office discussion amid continued frustration over lack of action

• Obama meets tech giants to discuss concerns over NSA surveillance

• Google shows the NSA how to make surveillance socially acceptable – with a £30 TV Dongle

  Do read the press cover on the launch of the new Google Chromecast TV dongle . In my blog entry on the breaking of the “Social Contract” that underpins public acceptance of the way the Internet works, I mentioned the reaction at a CTF meeting when we learned that smart TV licenses require you to give permission to transmit data on your viewing habits to anywhere in the world. The gathering pace of the convergence of the worlds of the TV, mobile phone, personal computer and Internet, often with no off-switch to protect against 24 by 7 surveillance, is now truly transformative.

• Obama Allays Fears of CEOs of Facebook, Google and Netflix on NSA

  US President Barack Obama has reassured internet and tech CEOs that his government is committed to protecting the people’s privacy, as he tried to allay their growing concern about the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency.

• Why We Need To Worry About Every Other Country’s NSA Too

  With the troves of extremely valuable personal information collected by social media giants, it’s likely—if not already occurring—that foreign spies have infiltrated several Silicon Valley companies in the hopes of accessing your/our data, according to leading cyber security strategist Menny Barzilay.

• Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators

  Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.

• US judge slams surveillance requests as “repugnant to the Fourth Amendment”

  Federal Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola denied a US government request earlier this month for a search and seizure warrant, targeting electronic data stored on Apple Inc. property.

• Theresa May warns Yahoo that its move to Dublin is a security worry

  Internet firm is known to be unhappy about snooping and would be under no obligation to hand over material under Irish laws

• Attorney General’s new war on encrypted web services

  Australia’s Attorney-General’s department wants new laws to force users and providers of encrypted internet communications services to decode any data intercepted by authorities.

  The proposal is buried in a submission (pdf) by the department to a Senate inquiry on revision of the Telecommunications Interception Act.

• Navy database tracks civilians’ parking tickets, fender-benders, raising fears of domestic spying

  A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person’s name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.

• Obama meets tech giants to discuss concerns over NSA surveillance

• Exile: Sarah Harrison On Paying The Price For Helping Edward Snowden

  She points out that she is not alone in suffering from the UK government’s absurdly broad definition of “terrorism”: Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained for nine hours at London’s Heathrow airport, and Snowden’s lawyer, Jesselyn Radack, was interrogated there too. But the knock-on effects for journalism in the UK are particularly serious:

  If Britain is going to investigate journalists as terrorists take and destroy our documents, force us to give up passwords and answer questions — how can we be sure we can protect our sources? But this precedent is now set; no journalist can be certain that if they leave, enter or transit through the UK this will not happen to them.

  One likely consequence of this is that international journalists will avoid passing through the UK on the way to their final destinations. More seriously, they may be unwilling to enter the UK to visit. Sadly, given the UK’s increasingly besmirched reputation as a beacon of civilization with a free and effective press, that’s likely to be viewed by the government there as more of a feature than a bug.

• Petition to install Eric Schmidt as US CEO hits the White House

  A PETITION that asks for the entire US government to be removed and replaced with technical people and Eric Schmidt as CEO is not very close to its 100,000 target.

• Indian journalist beats Snowden to win Google Digital Activism Award

  Journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary is the winner of the 2014 Google Digital Activism Award. Choudhary is the mind behind CGNet Swara (Voice of Chhattisgarh), a mobile phone service allowing people to post and listen to local reports in their local language using basic cellphones.

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