Privacy News: Ten States Against the NSA, Snowden Speaks About Espionage
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-27 09:28:36 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-27 10:26:48 UTC
Summary: News from the past couple of days, mostly about the NSA
State-level Actions
-
With the introduction of the 4th Amendment Protection Act this week, Mississippi became the tenth state in the country to consider legislation to make life difficult for the NSA’s ongoing mass surveillance programs.
Edward Snowden
-
Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden told German TV on Sunday about reports that U.S. government officials want to assassinate him for leaking secret documents about the NSA's collection of telephone records and emails.
In what German public broadcaster ARD said was Snowden's first television interview, Snowden also said he believes the NSA has monitored other top German government officials along with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
-
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden claims in a new interview that the US agency is involved in industrial espionage.
-
German public broadcaster ARD will air a half-hour interview with NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden on Sunday. The first snippet, aired late Saturday, accuses the NSA of conducting industrial espionage.
-
The NSA agency is not preoccupied solely with national security, but also spies on foreign industrial entities in US business interests, former American intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, has revealed in an interview to German TV.
-
Snowden says the NSA will use information even if it "has nothing to do with national security".
-
NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden held a public Web chat on Thursday during which he answered questions sent in from hundreds of curious citizens via Twitter. This was Snowden's first live chat since June of last year, and during the broadcast viewers became privy to some of the outspoken leaker's opinions, especially that of the NSA and their previous actions.
Radical Politicians
-
White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden declined to comment, but people familiar with the matter said an announcement is expected soon.
Rogers, a Navy cryptologist, had long been seen as the frontrunner to succeed Gen. Keith Alexander, who has been NSA director since 2005. Alexander, who will retire March 14, is the longest-serving NSA head. He is also the first commander of U.S. Cyber Command, which launched in 2009.
Criticism
-
Just a friendly reminder that the NSA's children's website, "CryptoKids," is an actual thing that exists.
-
If, for instance, you wanted to stop mass shootings, legislation outlawing the sale, possession or manufacture of any gun capable of firing more than one bullet without reloading might work. It would also be a terrible idea.
-
As it tries to protect us from the “bad guys,” the government has become more intrusive in our lives. Where do we draw the line? If you have nothing to hide, would it be OK for government agents to show up unannounced at your door (without cause) to search your home? Would it also be OK for agents to randomly select citizens from off the street and subject them to full body searches?
-
Try to think back to the 1970s if you are old enough. Imagine if one day there had been a decree from the Nixon Administration that all citizens must within a week pay for a hand-held device that will allow government to keep track of all your movements and to monitor your telephone calls and written messages you'd be able send through the air to other devices.
I think it would have scared the crap out of most people, and I think they'd be massive resistance to it. So 40 years later millions of people are cajoled through gradual technological advances, advertisement, government secrecy, and peer pressure to actually line up at stores to pay for the latest model of these monitoring devices.
Corporate Spying
-
The public is fickle; it will always want the next and best thing, and there will always be someone eager to provide it. For a blink of history's eye, that was the Pony Express. No matter how brilliant your business idea, how diligent and disciplined your execution of it, there is forever someone hungrier and faster coming over the horizon.
-
The major selling point for BlackBerry has always been its security and privacy - the way it encrypted communication across its network was the only game in town - that is, until 2010, when governments threatened to “block encrypted BlackBerry corporate e-mail and messaging services” unless their security agencies were granted access to them.
This was the beginning of the demise of Blackberry. Because of The Surveillance State’s inability to spy on their own citizens, governments forced BlackBerry to change their business model, which in turn played a major role in the company’s collapse.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
- AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
- Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
- They're trying to save face right now
- What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
- History goes in circles
- Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
- Shame in SRA
- At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
- From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
- Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
- Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
- Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
- IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
- Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
- Links for the day
-
- Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
- Links for the day
- It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
- What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
- No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
- Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
- "Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
- Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
- Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
- That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
- "NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
- Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
- Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
- The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
- United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
- cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
- Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
- Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
- Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
- Links for the day
- The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
- Remember that it all began with trust
- Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
- This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
- Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
- Linus caught the 'brain virus'
- Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
- Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
- Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026
- Gemini Links 12/11/2026: A Firing of a Boss and Geminispace Growing Fast
- Links for the day
- Bill Epsteingate-Funded BBC "Totally Ignoring the $1.7 Trillion Wiped off NVIDIA Stocks"
- Imagine how many pension funds are tied to this NVIDIA pyramid scheme
- A Few Hours Before NVIDIA CEO Canned (and NVIDIA Shares Plunged) the NVIDIA-Funded The Register MS Published Paid Spam With "AI" 18 Times in It
- Anything to inflate the bubble
- Links 11/11/2026: NVIDIA Decapitated, "The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically"
- Links for the day
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXIX - We Didn't Start the Fire
- It started in 2012
- Photo Ops Are Liabilities
- NVIDIA is not a "family business" and its CEO isn't some modest genius
- NVIDIA’s Total Debt Trebled in Three Months!
- Not the hallmark of a rich company unless its accounting is fraudulent
- NVIDIA Turns Out to be Serial Cheater, Stock Plunges 33% in 5 Weeks
- The "slop bros" have long relied on patience and blind faith
- Adopting LLM Slop is Still Suicide
- Suicide (in the literal sense) is also linked to adoption of chatbots
- On Laundering Licences and Code
- A "Second SCO" waiting to happen
- The Cyber Show on Slop and the Ministry Of Truth in "Nineteen Eighty Four"
- "cultural erasure" by slop
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXVIII - Keeping Both Eyes on the Ball
- One upside of these disputes is that they raise at least two very important issues concerning the law
- Gemini Links 12/11/2026: Encryption is Easy, Human Emacs, and Legislation in Italy
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
- IRC logs for Wednesday, November 11, 2026
- Links 11/11/2026: End of Novaya Gazeta (Assassinated by Putin) and North Koreans Too Poor to Buy Rice
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/11/2026: The Tyrant’s Moat and Rants About Slop Causing Problems
- Links for the day
- Links 11/11/2026: Skydance Games and Boeing Hit By Layoffs, "Time Out for Timeouts"
- Links for the day
- IRC is for Communities, Social Control Networks Are for Broligarchs (by Broligarchs)
- Unlike Reddit, it's not a company
- JavaScript is the Problem, Not the Answer
- Making the Web better is about making things better, not slapping more JavaScript 'walls' at it
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXVII - "Making a False Complaint to Police is a Crime." (British Cops Aren't American Mercenaries)
- "In the United Kingdom, the Foreign Enlistment Act 1819 and the Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 make it unlawful for British subjects to join the armed forces of any state warring with another state at peace with Britain."
- The Label 'Anti-AI'
- They make it sound like opposing plagiarism or cheating is an act of intolerance or hatred
- Intolerance and Violence
- Intolerance in the software world is not a new problem
- António Campinos Hiding From Staff Amid Strikes, Won't Participate in Dialogue
- They voted to continue striking until Christmas
- Silent Layoffs at IBM (Rolling Layoffs), Now Curbs on H1B (Mostly Indian Applicants)
- Little will change at IBM except the gravity (global distribution) of its workforce will go east
- Links 11/11/2026: Moving from Proton to Posteo and "Floating in Space"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 10, 2026
- IRC logs for Tuesday, November 10, 2026