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
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- Links for the day
- Good Thing When Home Appliances Are Ancient Antiques
- dealing with the alarm has cost only time
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- This problem isn't limited to weather sites or subsites
- Why It's Ludicrous to Call Us "Microsoft Haters"
- Even if clustered together, news items still cover a broad spectrum (or spectra) of issues
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- Slop is a Passing Fad, It's About Faking Productivity (Plagiarism, Misinformation, and False Positives)
- Slop is a bubble. Some people accept it later than others.
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- Time will tell, but it seems like a Federal-enabled (by the Federal Government) accounting scam, nothing more, nothing less
- The Media That Keeps Covering "AI" Because the Pushers of It Pay for Spam
- 23 times in the page they mention "AI"
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Tuesday, May 26, 2026
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- cautioned against software patents since the early 90s if not earlier
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- Google (GAFAM) is an evil company deep in debt
- Red Hat: Bluewashing by IBM, Followed by RAs (Layoffs)
- We could use some hints or evidence related to this
- Links 26/05/2026: "Making the Digital Physical"; "The Medical System Abandons Women When They Are Most Vulnerable"
- Links for the day
- While US Government Greenlights (or Bluelights) Bailouts for IBM Some Foreign Governments Blacklist It
- "Albany leadership doesn’t know what they are doing but are damn good at pretending they do."
- IBM Bailouts and the IBM People Inside the Administration
- It seems possible/plausible that it is bailout money down the drain or that this money will never arrive at all
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- Links for the day
- Pursuing Facts in an Age of Lies and 'Hallucinations' (Falsehoods Without Anyone Accountable, They Try Calling Computer-Generated Lies or Forgeries "Intelligence").
- Our aim is to relay information while bypassing gossip networks like social control media and slop in "search" clothing
- Computer-Generated Legal Filings Get You Reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
- We'll write a lot more about this in the future
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- Cocaine addicts in the management were bullying colleagues. They're still in charge.
- Sites in Their Twenties
- We currently run concurrently a handful of series and have a lot more in the backlog
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 88 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP is Defaming Trans People in America Because Garrett Pays Hired Guns to Silence Them
- Garrett is scoring many own goals this year
- Sloppy "Resource Action," (RA) or IBM Layoff, Leads to Another IBM Lawsuit, Alleging IBM Tries to Pass Liability to Algorithms
- IBM is meanwhile resorting to slop to gaslight its remaining shareholders
- The Latest IBM Layoff Rumours
- What has happened to the company that invented so much of modern computing?
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- Will the Holy See move away from GAFAM?
- The Old Ways of Computing Were Objectively Better
- Not as fast, but certainly much better
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- Social Control Media is considered unhealthy to young people, but it is also collectively unhealthy to nations and nation-building
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- Some things never change...
- Gemini Links 26/05/2026: Slop Bug Reports and Crawlers Considered Evil
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 25, 2026
- IRC logs for Monday, May 25, 2026
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- in some parts of the world people die from overheat (heat strokes) as temperatures reach almost 50 degrees as early as May in the northern hemisphere
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- Religion (no matter which) does not oppose machines, but LLMs aren't useful machines
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 87 Out of 200: Access to Justice
- this part will be short
- A Promise IBM/Red Hat Could Not Keep
- "all about control, not so much optics."
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- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
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- Maybe it's time to rename "Bank Holidays"
- Links 25/05/2026: Lingering Environmental Concerns and Domain Registrars Targeted for Unmasking
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 24, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, May 24, 2026