NSA Watch: New Faces, Same Policy, Obama Defends Clapper
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-31 22:55:06 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-31 22:55:06 UTC
Summary: Today's news about privacy and the NSA in particular
-
La Quadrature du Net launches a crowd-funding campaign to support the making of the upcoming animation movie about privacy, mass surveillance, and the urgency to rethink our relationship with technology. Help us finance this project!
-
Demonstrators protesting Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych suspected their cellphone location data was being tracked since at least last week, when people in the vicinity of a clash between riot police and protesters received a chilling text message. It read: "Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance."
-
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that relations with Germany have gone through a "rough patch" recently because of revelations about NSA spying, but insisted that the two countries can put the episode behind them.
-
Leaders from several countries, including Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, have reacted angrily to revelations that the US spied on their governments at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, according to a media report.
-
Leaders from several countries, including Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, have reacted angrily to revelations that the US spied on their governments at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, according to a media report.
-
German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere at the Munich Security Conference Friday said the US is not doing enough to restore trust after the NSA scandal: "The information we are being provided with is not satisfactory and the political damage [of the NSA's work] is greater than the security benefit."
-
US Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged Friday that relations with Germany had gone through a "rough period" of late over NSA snooping but that shared security priorities would keep the countries close.
-
Those of you following the steady stream of news stories on the National Security Agency's insatiable appetite for information already know that the spy agency has figured out how to snatch data from mobile apps. Since 2007, The NSA and its partner Britain's Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) have siphoned from apps address books, buddy lists, phone logs and geographic data.
-
NSA also wishes to develop the technology so that it is capable of breaking modern Internet security.
-
German operator group Deutsche Telekom has hailed last year’s revelations that the US spy agency NSA and the UK’s GCHQ had been monitoring ordinary citizens’ browsing and messaging habits as an “opportunity” for operators to provide data privacy and data security services.
-
Alessandro Acquisti in his TED talk tells us why privacy matters in a world in which it is vanishing. "Privacy is not about having something negative to hide," he says.
Indeed, the privacy of all Americans is a matter of principle, enshrined in the Constitution. It used to be we had control of what we wanted people to know about us, good and bad. But not anymore.
As troubling as this assault on privacy is, the Edward Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance show that something even more dangerous is afoot. And it's about what the NSA can do with this information they are collecting on us.
-
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden show NSA kept US negotiators abreast of their rivals' positions at 2009 summitfree
-
Developing countries have reacted angrily to revelations that the United States spied on other governments at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.
-
Vice-admiral Michael Rogers, the commander of the US navy’s tenth fleet and its Fleet Cyber Command, will take over from NSA Director Keith Alexander, who reluctantly became a global figure in the wake of the Snowden revelations.
-
any of us are still quite disappointed that James Clapper has kept his job as Director of National Intelligence after flat out lying to Congress over whether or not the NSA spied on Americans. There have been increasing calls from within Congress to have Clapper investigated and possibly prosecuted for the felony of lying to Congress, but there appears to be no movement there at all. Not only does the Obama administration seem to want to protect one of their own, but it's also made it clear that something like that would make it look like Ed Snowden "won" and they can't allow that sort of thing.
-
As the NSA leaks have expanded to detail spying activities in other countries, those governments affected have had a variety of reactions. In some cases, legitimately questionable tactics were exposed (potential economic espionage in Brazil, tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone) and the responses were genuinely outraged. In other cases, the outrage was temporary and somewhat muted, suggesting these countries were allowing the NSA to take the heat for their own questionable surveillance programs aimed at their citizens.
-
We thought we won the Crypto Wars, the fight to make strong encryption accessible to all, in the 1990s.1 We were wrong. Last month, Reuters broke news about a deal struck between the popular computer security firm RSA and the National Security Agency. RSA reportedly accepted $10 million from NSA to make Dual_EC_DRBG—an intentionally weakened random number generator—the default in its widely used BSAFE encryption toolkit.
-
In the motion filed in federal court in Denver on Wednesday with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, Jamshid Muhtorov also requested that prosecutors disclose more about how surveillance law was used in his case. Muhtorov denies the terror charges he faces.
-
There is so much missing or purposefully obfuscated in the debate about NSA/Five Eyes spying, US Government illegality, CIA collusion with al-Qaeda, Guantanamo, 9/11, torture, drones, Afghanistan, Iraq and everything that millions of people have been outraged about for over a decade, but the most striking is that almost no one is proposing closing these organizations down and few are talking about prosecuting those responsible.
-
The NSA has finally found an officer for its civil liberties and privacy office. A new member of the NSA team will have to provide expert advice as well as develop measures for strengthening the NSA's privacy protection. The appointed officer seems to be a good choice for the NSA whose reputation has been tarnished, but at the same time this raises some experts' doubts.
-
Documents from Edward Snowden reveal that Canada's foreign signals intelligence agency picked up metadata on airport travellers from free Wi-Fi available at a major Canadian airport.
-
Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday he believes the British public has largely shrugged off the espionage disclosures of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, telling lawmakers that people seem to be satisfied that U.K. spies are doing their jobs.
-
When the National Security Agency’s surveillance program PRISM was disclosed in early June, the immediate question wasn’t if the program would harm the U.S. tech industry but how badly. Six months and many more disclosures later, it’s clear NSA surveillance is an economic millstone that threatens to drag down the U.S. tech industry.
-
Two decades ago, the National Security Agency (NSA) sought legislation requiring a "back door" in all public encryption technologies, enabling the agency to monitor electronic communications even when the parties sought to shield them from prying eyes. That push failed. The NSA then embarked on an effort to accomplish essentially the same goal in secret.
-
The US relationship with the Saudis appears to be changing and even though several decades ago Saudi agreed to sell the US oil at $10 a barrel in perpetuity, the love affair appears to be over. According to former MI5 officer and whistleblower David Shayler there may be plans to change the official story of 9/11 and the US start pointing the finger at Saudi Arabia. Mr. Shayler believes the way to stop all of the illegality being committed by agencies such as CIA, NSA, MI6 and GCHQ is to simply stop funding them.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- IBM May Well Be Laying Off Over 13,500 and Up to 27,000 Staff This Week When It Says "Single-Digit Percentage of Our Global Workforce"
- It's not yet possible to know how many people IBM gets rid of
- Early Unverified Figures About Scale of Latest IBM Layoffs
- the real scale of the RAs will remain elusive
- How Techrights Search Works
- Hopefully bots won't use it
- Techrights Became a Lot More Productive as a Result of Attacks on It
- By default, it's safe to assume anything on the Web is garbage, especially in social control media
- Unverified Rumours: IBM Cuts Will Continue Another ~10 Days, Managers Will Invite Those Impacted for 1-on-1 Meetings
- Right now IBM likes diversity because with adoption of low-paid demographies it gets to pay workers less for the same work
- analytics.usa.gov: Vista 11 Scarcely Used, GNU/Linux Increasingly Dominant (Microsoft Loses "Goodwill", Depletes Cash Equivalents, and Debt Soars)
- "Total current assets" fell by more than 2 billion dollars in the past 3 months
- Not Only Mass Layoffs at IBM But Complete Shutdowns "Amid A.I. Boom"
- apparently about 10,000 layoffs, not counting those who got pushed out by PIPs and other means
-
- Slopwatch: linuxbsdos.com, Linux Journal, LinuxSecurity, Brian Fagioli, and WebProNews
- Either Google doesn't care about the integrity of Google News or it deems slop to be acceptable
- Gemini Links 05/11/2025: Affirmation, GnuPG, and While Loops
- Links for the day
- Links 05/11/2025: Economic Trouble in France and US Bombing All Over the World Without Declaration of War or Congress Approving
- Links for the day
- Red Hat Staff Also Impacted by Latest IBM Layoffs With Focus on North America and Software, Infrastructure
- After the bluewashing never expect to see news about "Red Hat layoffs", just as "Tivoli layoffs" aren't to be expected
- Coming Soon: Part 4 About the EPO's Substance Abuse (Breaking Laws to Fake 'Production' and Profiting From Unlawful Monopolies)
- Notice how quiet the EPO's management has been lately
- For the Record: We Never Named Staff of the Law Firm That's Attacking Us, Except the One the Firm is Named After!
- Just to affirm and be sure, I've used our new search facility
- Links 05/11/2025: Medicare Privatisation and "Breaker Box Economy"
- Links for the day
- Techrights Search Will Come Early
- Maybe tomorrow
- It Seems Like GNOME/IBM Don't Like Women and When Budget is Limited Only Women Take the Fall
- Seems like a very patriarchal, GAFAM-controlled Foundation
- "Last Day" as in "IBM Sacked Me" (Cruel Euphemisms)
- "The entire design and research technical leadership at IBM was laid off in the past year, including this round"
- Shadow Crew and Ads Disguised as Articles
- That The Register MS runs articles that are paid-for fluff isn't unprecedented
- Vista 11 "Market Share" Has Fallen This Month, Based on statCounter
- The US government's own data shows the same thing this month
- This is How Mainstream Media, Boosted or Parroted by Slopfarms, Spins IBM's Commercial Failure and Mass Layoffs as "AI"
- Some say "software focus", but most just resort to buzzwords and blame-shifting hype
- Resisting Misogynists
- Rianne has already added close to 100,000 pages to this site
- Starting November on a Strong Note
- All in all, this month started well for us as we have good, accurate publications with considerable impact
- Fake Retirements Help IBM Keep the Layoff Figures Down
- Yesterday we read that it was quite cruel how IBM (or Red Hat) compelled staff to pretend to be happily leaving or "retiring" when the reality was, they had been pushed out with some "package"
- Cocaine at the European Patent Office Now a Subject in YouTube, Media Will Revisit the Topic
- "The Cocaine Patent Office" is no joking matter
- Gemini Links 05/11/2025: "Wuthering Heights" and "Winter is Coming"
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 04, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, November 04, 2025
- 2 Days Until Site Anniversary Party, Search Likely to Launch Same Day
- We're now just two days away from the nineteenth anniversary of the site
- Richard Stallman's 2005 Article on Why Patents on Software Should be Denied
- If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman
- "Last Day" at IBM and Red Hat as "Stealth Layoffs" (They Force People to Pretend It's Wilful)
- So the real extent of the layoffs is being kept 'undercover'
- Slopwatch: The WebProNews Slopfarm and the Serial Slopper
- The Web is ill
- Links 04/11/2025: Tensions Around Belarus Grow, Turkey’s Hype-inflation Continues
- Links for the day
- Corporate Media That Fails to Report Cocaine at EPO is Totally Failing to Report Mass Layoffs at IBM
- How come nobody anywhere writes about this week's RAs?
- Search @ Techrights: Almost There Now (Maybe an Anniversary Gift)
- Just to be very clear, search would not be unprecedented at Techrights
- At IBM, Layoffs Start at 1AM (at Night)
- not a single English-speaking site covers the news about the layoffs
- Links 04/11/2025: Google Cloud Account Engages in Censorship of the Innocent, arXiv Spammed by LLM Slop
- Links for the day
- EPO Cocaine Chronicles: Our Aim Will be to Ensure This Becomes a Mainstream Media Topic, Not a Suppressed Scandal (Which the German State Deems Embarrassing and Detrimental to Its Pan-European Patent Franchise)
- At the EPO, and perhaps in German media as well, people "fall upwards" (they get rewarded for bad things)
- Envy Makes People Do Self-Harming Things (and Harm to Others)
- Online communities that can be deemed successful are built around trust, mutual respect, and collective accomplishment
- Static Site Generators (SSGs) Made Techrights Better, Faster, Easier to Manage
- Consider adopting SSGs if you still use a CMS such as WordPress
- But he Was Born in Manchester! (Origin Stories)
- Borussia Dortmund does not exist!
- What Julian Darley Wrote About the Stallman Talk Regarding "AI" in Oxford (2025)
- From LinkedIn (Microsoft)
- GNU/Linux is American, Not Finnish
- It started in Boston, not in Helsinki
- 'Hacker' 'News' Makes Dumb Assertions Against Smart People
- A logical fallacy
- We Turned Down Every Settlement Offer Because Truths Aren't Determined in Bank Accounts
- Without free press, there won't be free society
- "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -Galileo Galilei
- This site is educational
- Why I'm Always Proud of the Site I've Devoted My Life to
- As a graffiti around the corner from our home says, "be a better person"
- Standing Up or Standing for What's True But Inconvenient
- Bad actors need to be called out
- Many People Have Said That They "Leave" IBM in Recent Days (Ahead of Mass Layoffs)
- So the real extent of layoffs is greater than what's publicly stated (there are silent layoffs) [...] Whatever IBM says about the scope, scale, or magnitude of the "RAs", it doesn't tell the full story
- Media Coverage Regarding IBM is Vapourware and LLM Slop
- With slop images, too
- statCounter Says GNU/Linux Rose to 4% in the Russian Federation
- Adoption of Vista 11 has been embarrassingly weak
- Corruption is Not a Joke
- we'll try to limit our use of humour to avoid misunderstandings or misinterpretations
- The Slopfarm WebProNews is Overwhelming "linux" Results in Google News
- Google News is slop
- The Fall of IBM: What Happened?
- Just like the EPO continues riding some old reputation acquired in the 1970s IBM relies on old myths like, "nobody gets fired for buying IBM."
- IBM's CEO Already Has the Excuse for the Latest Wave of Mass Layoffs
- Only days ago the CEO told a bunch of nonsense
- Links 04/11/2025: Conflicts, Politics, and IPv6 at Home
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 04/11/2025: Entering WiFi Passwords and Programming Rambles
- Links for the day
- Arch Linux Seems Like the New Debian
- Arch users (btw!) are growing in relative and absolute share
- Analytics From US Government Affirm a Trend: Microsoft's "Market Share" in Search is Falling
- the data set is large
- Holding Institutions Such as the EPO Accountable Through Public Information
- Speaking truth to power is never easy
- Techrights Will Contact German Media About the EPO's Substance Abuse
- This scandal won't "go to waste"
- EPO Staff Losing Holidays, as Usual, as the Office Increases Profits by Illegally Granting Invalid Patents While Reducing Salaries
- How much more can the staff endure and generally tolerate?
- Free Software Does Not Always Speak for Itself, It Needs Advocates
- Legal matters that relate to sharing of code will be discussed
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 03, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, November 03, 2025
- The Register MS Continues Looking for Money in Promotion of the "AI" Ponzi Scheme
- That The Register MS participates in this deceit rather than tackle/debunk it says a lot about The Register MS
- IBM Layoffs in "Software", This Likely Impacts Red Hat as Well
- Many people say "software" people are impacted
- Escaping Proprietary Software, Not Just Escaping Microsoft
- To take control of your life adopt GNU/Linux
- A Lot of Fake News About Microsoft Headcount (Also: Microsoft's Debt Rose by About 24 Billion Dollars in Past 12 Months)
- If you see some headline about Microsoft's CEO making claims about hirings, look away
- Techrights Turns 19 in Three Days
- It would be nice to meet for a chat
- Akira Urushibata on How Grokipedia Fails to Work
- The Grokipedia article gives the wrong character for the "Ko" on "Koan"
- Links 03/11/2025: Data Breaches, Wars, and Digital Censorship
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 03/11/2025: Poetry, Old Androids and Small Shells
- Links for the day
- The Rumour Was True, Mass Layoffs at IBM Today
- How widespread the layoffs are (or how they're disguised, e.g. PIPs) is hard to assess
- Links 03/11/2025: Internet Anniversary
- Links for the day
- Two Years of Uptime
- Reboots are seldom involuntary
- Richard Stallman is Giving Another Talk in Less Than a Fortnight
- in two weeks' time (13 days from now)
- Windows Falls Below 20% in the UK
- Many people choose to leave Windows altogether
- Microsoft's Search Business Falls to Lowest Point in 2 Years, Based on statCounter
- what can Microsoft sell other than shares in Microsoft?
- Evidence Regarding Layoffs at Red Hat
- Seems like IBM layoffs
- Microsoft: Our "Goodwill" Value Grew More Than Tenfold Since 2011
- Hallmark of pseudo-economics
- GNU/Linux as a Boarding Pass
- being mostly analogue is still feasible
- Links 03/11/2025: Lack of Trust in LLMs and Windows TCO at Jaguar
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 03/11/2025: Books in October and Change
- Links for the day
- Mozilla Firefox Won't Survive and Many Sites Don't Work With It (Compatibility Abandoned)
- The Web has become monocultural
- Debian is Non-Free
- Devuan might be worth looking into
- Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli and LinuxSecurity
- This is a real problem and most certainly a big problem because when people try to find real information about security and GNU/Linux they instead read "word salads" made by bots
- Four Reasons to Party With Us in Four Days, Celebrating the Four Freedoms
- Today we expect to be back to a more-or-less regular publication pace
- Links 03/11/2025: The "Smartphone Panopticon" and Belarus' Hybrid Attacks on EU Intensify
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 02, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, November 02, 2025