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
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXVIII - Microsoft Doesn't Want People to Speak About Microsoft-Controlled Restricted ('Secure') Boot, a Silent Injustice and Back Door/Kill Switch
- Can we please stop treating this as normal or acceptable?
- Links 01/11/2026: Digital Minimalism and "Palantir Cofounder Announces Cruel Plan to Breed Thousands of Lab Monkeys for Medical Experiments"
- Links for the day
-
- Links 02/11/2026: Slop Destroying Mathematics and "Democracy is Not on the Ballot" (in US)
- Links for the day
- Celebrating Photography, Celebrating Life, Celebrating Magnificent Humanity, Not Plagiarism Disservices
- Any time we adopt or spread slop imagery we are participating in the problem
- Year-Long Celebration Starts on Saturday
- This coming Saturday we turn 20
- On Desktops/Laptops, Clownflare Sees Windows at Under 60% and GNU/Linux at 15% This Past Weekend
- Impressive if accurate
- Microsoft Lunduke is Slop
- Microsoft Lunduke is just trying to stir up hatred
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXVII - Shooting the Messengers (People Who Oppose Microsoft Back Doors), Even Across the Atlantic
- Keep this in mind later this week when a dictator either discredits the voting or covertly tampers with the voting process
- Microsoft Wants 60,000 Employees Gone (One Way or Another)
- At IBM, 15% of staff got marked as candidates for removal; at Microsoft it's almost 30%
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 01, 2026
- IRC logs for Sunday, November 01, 2026
- Jean-Claude Van Linus
- Claude talking?
- Gemini Links 01/11/2026: OpenBSD, Broken MicroHDMI, Nextcloud, and More
- Links for the day
- IBM Vapourware on a Budget (to Grab Bailouts From US Taxpayers)
- Anderon is the sort of thing that makes IBMers uncomfortable
- Microsoft Accenture in Trouble, Accenture’s Debt Skyrockets
- Seeing a wave of adoption of Free software in Europe, it's not exactly shocking that "consultants" from Microsoft Accenture are no longer in demand
- Microsoft Says Its "Goodwill" Value Has Been Declining for Years, But It Also Claimed That Doubled in One Year
- Wall Street deserves far more criticism or scepticism (at the very least)
- SkyChatz: From Nothing to #2 in IRC (in Less Than a Year)
- Second only to Libera.Chat
- Making Up Words or Inventing a Vocabulary
- Or why Large Language Models are useless
- Assange on What Lula Means to Free Press
- Here in the UK we've also found our 'Lulas'
- GNU/Linux is No Underdog (But There Are Attempts to Put It "To Sleep")
- There's a moral imperative
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXVI - The "Law and Order" Candidate Who Crushes Both Law and Order and Even Rejects Election Outcomes (Insurrection Follows)
- A world without real technical security is a world void of democracy, justice, and human rights
- Links 01/11/2026: Malaysian Media Perishing, France Belatedly Identifies Social Control Media as Weaponised Yellow Press
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 01/11/2026: "Trick-or-Treating seems to be dead, at least in our neighborhood"; BaseFree Numerical System and Human Emacs
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 31, 2026
- IRC logs for Saturday, October 31, 2026
- Gemini Links 31/10/2026: MangoWM, Qutebrowser and Codeberg, Plugh
- Links for the day
- Massive Cuts Inside Microsoft (the Media Does Not Talk About That)
- It is in many ways like IBM a decade ago
- In US Government Sites, GNU/Linux Measured at New All-Time High of 7% (or About 10% Across Desktops/Laptops Alone)
- There's no doubt GNU/Linux is growing
- Intel Has Just Lost in One Single Day Over 150 Billion Dollars in 'Value' (Market Cap), Intel is Also Over 50 Billion Dollars in Debt
- This really says a lot about Wall Street and the slop bubble, doesn't it?
- They Hate Him Because He's Effective
- Effective voices invite more aggressive censorship attempts
- Audience Growing in Spite of the Deluge of Webslop
- We probably benefit from the rejection of LLM slop
- The Munich FUD Tactics (Microsoft Modus Operandi): Microsoft-Connected Sites Claim Denmark Failed With Free Software, But That's Not What Actually Happened
- With Microsoft, it almost always boils down to politics
- Links 31/10/2026: John Romero Comeback After Being Shafted by Microsoft, Google Faces Criminal Probe Over Deforestation in Finland
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 31/10/2026: Rambling on Self-hosting and Ad Video Screens Don’t Make Money
- Links for the day
- Can't Trust Big Banks, Let's Try 'Bros' Instead?
- But let's blame "North Korea"
- IRC's Growing Popularity in 2026
- No company controls or profits from IRC, it is in the Commons
- "AI" as Surrogate for Debt and Distraction From Computing (Bots Described as "Agents" and/or Any Form of "Intelligence" is More Like a Religion)
- We're letting people without even college degrees game the "market" (Wall Street) by lying to it
- Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXV - Election Integrity at a Time of Back Doors and Very Severe Bugs in UEFI
- How dare British media comment on insurrection following a US election?
- "The Judge Accepted That Mrs Schestowitz Had Been the Subject of a Vicious Campaign of Online Harassment"
- That's consistent with how they men treat women
- Gemini Links 31/10/2026: Hallowe'en and "Thinking About People"
- Links for the day
- Links 31/10/2026: The Hinge on Apple's Constantly Breaking New Foldable iPhone Was "Built With Slop", Slop Causes Cash Squeeze GAFAM
- Links for the day
- Amazon's Debt Skyrockets by Almost 100 Billion Dollars in 9 Months
- On top of that there is additional (secret, kept stealth by accounting tricks) debt
- Google Illegally Destroyed a Quarter Million Trees Without a Permit for a Hypothetical Project That Might be Cancelled, Debt Has Soared by 30 Billion Dollars in 3 Months ($10 Billions Borrowed Per Month)
- Google is bleeding from slop
- Slavery at Microsoft
- illegal if true
- Many People "Left" Red Hat This Month, Including Yesterday
- We already saw this with SUSE
- Gemini Links 31/10/2026: "Where I Draw the Line With" Slop Plagiarism and "Nobody Cares That You're Leaving Proton" (Over Slop)
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, October 30, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, October 30, 2026