NSA Watch: Climate as 'Terrorism', War on Journalism and Anonymity, Anger in Europe and Angry Birds
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-30 12:37:56 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-30 12:37:56 UTC
Summary: A roundup of yesterday's and today's news about the NSA
New Leaks
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The document, with portions marked "top secret," indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that "analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries' preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies."
Illegal Collection of 'Evidence'
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A man charged with aiding a terrorist organization has asked a U.S. court to throw out information collected by the National Security Agency, saying the NSA's surveillance of his Internet communications violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Prosecuting Anonymisers
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In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of a three-judge panel at the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. The case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication.
In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.
War on Journalism
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James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has issued a blistering condemnation of Edward Snowden, calling the surveillance disclosures published by the Guardian and other news outlets a “perfect storm” that would endanger American lives.
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Director of National Intelligence James Clapper urged former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and his “accomplices” to return leaked documents during a hearing on Wednesday.
Europe
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A former Ukrainian president warned on Wednesday that the country is now on “the brink of civil war,” and Russia added to the gloom by announcing the suspension of its financial aid package, which was all that had been keeping Ukraine solvent.
[...]
Protesters for weeks had suspected that the government was using location data from cellphones near the demonstration to pinpoint people for political profiling, and they received alarming confirmation when a court formally ordered a telephone company to hand over such data.
Earlier this month, protesters at a clash with riot police officers received text messages on their phones saying they had been “registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”
Then, three cellphone companies — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.
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Former employee of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Edward Snowden will be invited to the spring session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), APA’s Europe bureau reports.
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Chancellor says Germany and US still 'far apart' on sweeping surveillance and spying activities revealed by Edward Snowden
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Berlin and Washington are still "far apart" in their views on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of Germany but they remain close allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament on Wednesday.
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The German government and the German Federal Intelligence Service are facing legal action because they allegedly aided the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) data collection program.
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THE EUROPEAN UNION JUSTICE COMMISSIONER has spoken out on Data Protection Day about national security agency surveillance.
US Politics
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Ever since leaked NSA documents first started popping up this summer, the battle against NSA surveillance has proceeded on multiple fronts: legislators pushing for new laws, journalists pushing for new stories, and tech companies fighting to regain users’ trust. Yesterday, one of the major fronts closed down. Since July, tech companies had been putting pressure on the Department of Justice, fighting for the right to say more about their interactions with law enforcement. Yesterday they made peace, reaching a settlement and withdrawing a class action suit that had drawn in some of the most powerful companies in America. On this front at least, reformers have likely gotten all they’re going to get.
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Senator Patrick Leahy questioned how the Constitution allows the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records and repeated his calls for President Barack Obama’s administration to end the program during a hearing Wednesday.
The Obama administration should heed the recent advice of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and end the phone records collection program, said Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
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The NSA's new data center in Utah has provided the flashpoint for legislation targeted at "nullifying" the agency by cutting off its access to public utilities and/or leveraging the powers granted to states to combat federal government overreach. An activist group known as The Tenth Amendment Center proposed a state law that would cut off the new data center's much needed water supply, along with any other public utility or service, like sanitation and road repair, in hopes of (at minimum) forcing the NSA to reconsider its collection tactics, or failing that, to find a new home.
Angry Birds
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Some users trying to access the www.angrybirds.com website late Tuesday were greeted by an image depicting the Angry Birds game characters accompanied by the text "Spying Birds." The U.S. National Security Agency's logo was also visible in the image.
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Reacting to recent revelations that smartphone apps such as Angry Birds and Google Maps are being used by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) to spy on their users, the Application Developers Alliance has condemned the NSA for damaging the industry.
BBC
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When the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published the first of Edward Snowden's NSA-GCHQ leaks in June, it unleashed a stream of abbreviations, acronyms and jargon describing the cyberspies' activities.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- EPO "Productivity" Will Fall Off a Cliff If Examiners Stick to the European Patent Convention (EPC) and Follow the Real Rules
- The EPO's "Cocaine Communication Manager" would hate to see the next "productivity" metrics
- The Problem is Not Technology, the Problem is Really Bad Things Sold or Imposed as "Tech" (Like a Religion Built Around Technology)
- Don't hate technology, hate the corporations that abuse it to promote coercion, exploitation etc.
- Resisting IBM and EPO Corruption
- Rise up against EPO dictatorship next week
- Where Slop Meets Ghostwriting: It's a False Analogy
- It's a false analogy
- Slop Technica: Ars Technica Seems Like Repeat Offender, a Part-Time Slopfarm
- The culprits are repeat offenders, but the publisher will never admit this in public
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- Still Some Slopfarms in View, Sometimes Targetting "Linux"
- That's a total of at least 4 in Google News today, coming from 3 sources
- Gemini Links 17/02/2026: 3D-Printed Stainless Steel Smartwatch and Gopher Bay Offline
- Links for the day
- Links 17/02/2026: Machine Rage and Microsoft Kills XBox Social Clubs
- Links for the day
- Links 17/02/2026: Why OpenClaw is Very Sleazy and Ars Technica Exposed as Hub of LLM Slop (Credibility Destroyed Overnight)
- Links for the day
- Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) Used Fake Articles to Promote Ponzi Scheme for Conde Nast and Its Client (Marketing)
- What Ars Technica and Conde Nast do here helps defraud the general public
- Only One in 50 Saudis Would Use Microsoft for Search, Almost Same as Would Use Russia's Yandex
- If statCounter is to be trusted
- Microsoft's "AI" Concerns Are All Indian (or Low-Paid Workers Who Work Extra Hours Unpaid)
- portraying charlatans and frauds like they're some kind of visionaries and luminaries
- Microsoft Turned Bing Into Censorship Machine of China, But Bing Is Pegged at a Mere 2% in Asia, Yandex is Bigger
- Expect many Bing layoffs some time soon (like in past years)
- Just Like The Register MS, Conde Nast's Ars Technica Has Just Publicly Admitted That It Published Fake Articles (Slop) Made by LLMs About Serious Subjects
- Conde Nast might shut Ars Technica down to escape the bad publicity/association
- Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Way Too Slow to Respond to Financial Fraud at Law Firms, in Effect Helping Those Law Firms Defraud Many More People (Fleecing Clients)
- Who will hold the SRA accountable for this?
- Techrights Became a Hub for News That IBM/Red Hat Doesn't Want You to See (and Pays Mainstream Media to Distract From)
- the more viciously the notorious organisation attacks the reporter, the greater the interest in what the reporter has to say
- EPO's Central Staff Committee on Fourth Technical Meeting, Two Days Before First of (At Least) 4 Winter Strikes at the Second-Largest European Institution
- “future orientations on the salary adjustment procedure”
- IBM's Collapse Continues, Half of EU Countries to Have Mass Layoffs, "IBM Clearly Disinvests From Europe" Says IBM European Works Council
- Recent publication
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, February 16, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, February 16, 2026
- Gemini Links 17/02/2026: Alpenglow Industries' Closure and Gemini Server Issues
- Links for the day
- The Southern California Linux Expo (“SCALE”) or SCALE 23x Becomes Microsoft
- It's not supporting the event, it is buying it.
- Where Microsoft's Bing Cannot Even Reach 1% "Market Share"
- Looking at "I" countries
- Microsoft to Focus on Name-Dropping Buzzwords to Distract From Declining Business, IBM RAs (Layoffs) With Staff Stack-Ranked
- Calling everything cloud or reclassifying as "AI"
- Another EPO Strike One Week From Now, Local Staff Committee Munich to Discuss It This Week
- Campinos MIA while Office staff goes on strike at least 4 times
- Links 16/02/2026: Barack Obama Responds to Racist Cheeto and Benjamin Mako Hill Studies Online Communities
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/02/2026: Task Completed by Avoidance and "Playing Again With Akkoma"
- Links for the day
- Happy Birthday (or Anniversary) to SoylentNews
- "Happy Birthday SoylentNews"
- Techrights' Architecture
- Stability is the main goal
- IBM Reduces the Thresholds for Acceptance (and the Salaries)
- Are chatbots good enough as IBM staff?
- When It Comes to Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
- It's not about security or politics
- Linux Foundation Continues Falling Off a Cliff in Geminispace
- Gemini Protocol will turn 7 this summer
- Links 16/02/2026: cURL’s Daniel Stenberg Asserts That Slop is DDoSing Free Software, But Still Uses a Plagiarism and GPL-Violating Blender (Microsoft GitHub)
- Links for the day
- The Techrights Community Never Needed Money, Only Goodwill
- We accomplish things by a track record of suppressed facts
- "AboutCode" is a Microsoft Proxy and Microsoft's Acquisition of the OSI Advances Via OSI Moles
- presenting direct evidence anybody can verify
- Social Control Media is Just a Digital Weapon
- Social control media is not social and not media
- They Will Call Smart People "Luddites"
- Is society "seeing the light"?
- Microsoft Amutable Already Reveals That Its Focus Is Not Linux, It'll Promote "Remote Attestation"
- This is basically an attack on Software Freedom, even if they toss around the brand "Linux"
- More People in Chad Move to GNU/Linux
- Last year we began to see GNU/Linux rising there - a trend which continues this year
- Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
- Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind"
- Debt of Broadcom Grew by More Than 50%, Broadcom is Deeper in Debt Than Google
- Expect many more cuts
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 15, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, February 15, 2026
- Links 15/02/2026: Slop, Politics, and Gemini
- Links for the day
- Small is Beautiful (in Cascading Style Sheets/Inheritance Rules)
- If done correctly, pages can take a tenth of a second to fully load
- Microsoft Has Fallen to New Lows in Hong Kong This Year
- That Windows "market share" falls there is perhaps expected
- Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.5 Million Dollars This Winter, Almost 50% More Than in All of 2024 Combined
- Verbal advocacy goes a long way
- Spread the Word About EPO Strikes and Patent Injustices in Europe
- Corruption in Europe is a real thing
- The Register MS is Promoting Slop, Promotion Connected to Microsoft (Trying to Replace Judges With Microsoft)
- marketing spun as "science"
- He Did Not Have Enough Souls
- A lot of the subjects we cover here no other site dares touch
- "Mix Vale" is a Slopfarm
- 3 "articles" about "ubuntu"
- Links 15/02/2026: Roy Medvedev Dead at 100, Rise of "YouTube Politicians"
- Links for the day
- Links 15/02/2026: How Alexey Navalny Was Executed by Putin, Erdogan Helping Iran
- Links for the day
- IBM Fedora Keeps Promoting Slop, Red Hat Has Been Turned Into Chaff and Trash to Help IBM's Stock (With "AI" Storytelling)
- Red Hat's Fedora is an old brand (20+ years). It no longer stands for what it meant to people in the Fedora Core days (I was a Fedora user back then).
- What IBM Said About 2026 Layoffs and What's Happening in Practice
- t'll leave IBM at the very bottom, in due course (customers will notice something profound has changed)
- Gemini Links 15/02/2026: "Already Midway February" and Loadbars Remembered
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 14, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, February 14, 2026