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
- The Aim is Not Fame
- Reposted from schestowitz.com
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 114 Out of 200: Thousands of Long Articles to Come, Properly Covering the SLAPP Industry in the UK and Its Modus Operandi
- "Stowell described SLAPPs as ‘a stain on our legal system’."
- Chad's Move to GNU/Linux or the Point of Exceeding 5% "Market Share"
- experienced centuries of being colonised
- GAFAM is Drowning in Debt, GAFAM is Clearly Not Sustainable Anymore (It Runs on Borrowed Money and Bailouts)
- The war and surrender in Iran will deepen the debt; we'll see the GAFAM reports in late July
- Microsoft at 50 Follows the General Trajectory of Skype
- How many years does Microsoft have left before payroll becomes impossible?
- Cybersecurity Does Not Mean Asking Microsoft for Permission to Boot
- There were very good and timely reasons to speak about the matter, including impending antitrust complaints against Microsoft
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- Links 22/06/2026: "The Sycophancy Machine" and "Port 22 Open for 54 Days"
- Links for the day
- When People Who Make the Most Money Are the Best "Boot Lickers" (Sucking Up to Jeffrey Epstein's Circle and the Dictator)
- Sucking up to rich people may pay off
- "Internally Important, Externally Irrelevant": IBM in a Nutshell
- Right now its debt spins out of control and its stock spirals down the drain
- Finding a Way to Get Paid to Improve LibreJS
- So now we have more people resurrecting LibreJS and improving it
- Microsoft Can't Even Wait Until July, Shutdowns and Layoffs Already Happening
- Mashable speak of "a grim picture for the state of Xbox."
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 21, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 21, 2026
- Gemini Links 22/06/2026: Appreciating Simple Things, Perfect Summer Evening, IRIX, Vim and so
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 21/06/2026: Dating Oaks, Paying With Cash, and "More on Withered Technology"
- Links for the day
- GAFAM Was Never an Ally to Europe
- Only 1 in 10 Europeans see US as an ally — study [...] military providers in "tech" clothing cannot be trusted
- GitHub, LinkedIn, and XBox Will Finish Like Skype (Sustainability Crisis)
- Skype should become a verb. When Microsoft 'Skypes' something it means it basically shuts it down with some temporal excuse/s.
- Drowning in Garbage: AUR Shows That Too Much Low-Quality Software (Including Slop) is Bad for Everybody
- What happened in AUR had happened elsewhere before and will happen again in the future
- Links 21/06/2026: EU on Patented (Monopolised) Crops, Microsoft Software "Narcs on You to Your Boss"
- Links for the day
- A Year After a Microsofter Took Over The Register MS It is Effectively a Content Farm With News as a 'Side Dish'
- This is not journalism, this is spam
- IBM Pays the Media and Cons Some 'Journalists' Into Participating in "Quantum" Spam
- "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"
- You Don't Need an 'App' for Your Birdhouse (Slopfondlers Come for Birds)
- That they sell those things as "AI" really says a lot about how dishonest slopfondlers really are
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 113 Out of 200: The United Kingdom is Not Turkey
- Turkey is ranked almost worst in the Western World for press freedom
- Links 21/06/2026: Bots from Alibaba Do Harm and Many Xbox Games Are Being Cancelled
- Links for the day
- 5 Years After Release of Vista 11 Not Even One in 5 People Use It (in the US)
- It doesn't look like Vista 11 will ever be adopted like prior versions and announcing a Vista 12 will mostly upset companies/organisations that only recently "upgraded" to 11
- Gemini Links 21/06/2026: Boca Raton, Perfect Summer Day, and LLM Doing Things Poorly
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 20, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 20, 2026
- Microsoft Insiders - Not Limited to XBox - Expect a 'Bloodbath' (Their Own Word)
- This isn't limited to XBox
- Reports of "PIP" as Means of Mass Layoffs at IBM This Year
- some insights into the PIPs
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 112 Out of 200: Strangles Women, Then Refuses to Even Attend Any of His Own Hearings About It
- It is meanwhile very apparent that Brett Wilson LLP is becoming a "mench sphere"
- Gemini Links 20/06/2026: "There Was Never Supposed to Be a Camera" and "What Is A Programming Language"?
- Links for the day
- Geminispace Reaches Its 8th Year, Today It Has Turned 7
- Gemini Protocol 'went live' 7 years ago, just before the COVID-19 pandemic
- Links 20/06/2026: "Full Page Paralysis" and "Hopes For Xbox’s Future Might Be Over Before It Even Begins"
- Links for the day
- European Patent Office's (EPO) Strikes "at a Scale not Seen Since Battistelli", European Patent Grants Down by Over 25% in Past 3 Months
- The actions are effective
- Real Security Elusive, Microsoft Layoffs to Coincide With Certificate Apocalypse
- July 1
- Links 20/06/2026: Microsoft's "Year of Shame" and "Feed the Writers"
- Links for the day
- 2026 is a Year of Strikes at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- As it stands at the moment, to many people the EPO represents crime, not law
- Web Browsers Are Technically Bloatware (No Matter What Runs in Them)
- Don't make it a society that shames people into using a Web browser where none should be needed
- Fedora Has Changed a Lot Since I Last Used It (IBM Dominates Almost Everything, IBM Agenda Displaces Community Goals)
- "It is effectively 100% run by Red Hat/IBM employed people... even when they are community-elected representatives."
- Andy (Cyber Show) on His Teacher Who "Squeezed Every Last Drop Out of Life, With Gratitude, Humility, Generosity and Mettle"
- Some call them "eccentric" and are dismissive about what they have to offer
- Only 1.5% Oppose the European Patent Office's (EPO) Strikes and Other Industrial Actions Until 2027
- Among those polled/surveyed (in a ballot)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 19, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, June 19, 2026
- Gopher/Gemini Links 20/06/2026: Slop With Tcl/Tk and Nokia 770 Perishes
- Links for the day