Skynet Watch: From Targeting Terrorists to Targeting Protesters and From Foreign to Domestic
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-02-12 15:05:18 UTC
- Modified: 2014-02-12 15:05:18 UTC
Summary: Rapid exacerbation of human rights, with surveillance-based torture and assassination that expand in terms of scope
-
Impending bill from Republican Marc Roberts highlights growing movement at state level against government surveillance powers
-
The former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency, General Michael Hayden has said that the reforms recently announced by president Barack Obama to tackle mass surveillance are limited, as they allow the spy agency "a pretty big box" in which to continue to operate.
Hayden was reported by the Guardian as speaking at an Oxford University lecture, when he said that while some of the reforms would be onerous for the NSA, the agency still had room to manoeuvre, enabling it to continue to collect metadata.
-
According to documents published by German newspaper Der Spiegel, the NSA uses a tactic called "method interdiction," which intercepts packages that are en route to the recipient. Malware or backdoor-enabling hardware is installed in workshops by agents and the item then continues on its way to the customer.
-
Sen. Rand Paul will sue President Barack Obama and top officials in the National Security Agency over surveillance.
-
When the German version of the FBI needs to share sensitive information these days, it types it up and has it hand-delivered.
This time last year, it would have trusted in the security of email. But last year was before Edward Snowden and the public revelations of the scope of the National Security Agency’s PRISM electronic intelligence-gathering program. After Snowden, or post-PRISM, is a new digital world.
-
If you visit sites such as Upworthy, Hacker News, BoingBoing or around 5,000 other sites today, you'll notice an odd headline: a banner stating "Today We Fight Back." The banner runs a loop of facts about the NSA's internet and phone surveillance activities, such as "The NSA is regularly tracking hundreds of millions of devices."
-
In fall 2013, the U.S. National Security Agency quietly began booting up its Utah Data Center, a sprawling 1.5 million-square-foot facility designed to store and analyze the vast amounts of electronic data the spy agency gathers from around the globe. Consisting of four low-slung data halls and a constellation of supporting structures, the facility includes at least 100,000 square feet of the most advanced data reservoirs in the world. The project represents a massive expansion of the NSA's capabilities and a profound threat to press freedom worldwide.
-
At least 117,000 websites and citizens of the world joined a world day of rejection to the massive surveillance in Internet by the National Security Agency of the United States (NSA) and its allied from other countries.
-
It was a walk down memory lane for Mark Klein on Tuesday night, when a crowd gathered to hear him speak out, yet again, about the secret sharing of data between a top communications company and the US government.
Klein, a retired AT&T technician, leaked several internal AT&T documents in 2006 that showed that the NSA was collecting data from AT&T through a restricted room, 641A.
-
The Freedom of Information Act requires a release, but the spy agency says it is excluded due to national security concerns.
-
One of the legacies 2013 will leave behind, as Andrea Peterson wrote recently in The Washington Post, is that it was “the year that proved your paranoid friend right.” Since January of last year, we’ve learned that the National Security Agency is collecting massive amounts of phone call metadata, emails, location information of cell phones and is even listening to Xbox Live. Shocking as this obviously was to me, as a citizen of the country of “We the People,” one founded on civil liberties, what was perhaps more shocking was how mild the reaction of many Americans was. While polls showed that a small majority of U.S. citizens opposed the NSA’s collection of phone and Internet usage data, after months of reassurances by the President that the programs would be reformed and used responsibly, the numbers seem to have changed (or at least, the story seems to be dying down).
-
A court in Pakistan on Wednesday ordered authorities to produce an anti-drone activist abducted just days before he was due to travel to Europe to meet lawmakers, in a case that spotlights citizens’ distrust of the unmanned aircraft and government security forces.
-
“Unmanned” reports the impacts of drone strategy. This documentary directed by Robert Greenwald, investigates drone strikes at home and abroad through more than 70 separate interviews, including a former American drone operator who shares what he has witnessed in his own words, Pakistani families mourning loved ones and seeking legal redress, investigative journalists pursuing the truth and top military officials warning against blowback from the loss of innocent life.
-
“If indeed there is mulling over the possibility of assassinating another American citizen abroad, really what they should be telling the American people is that we’re moving into an era where state-sanctioned assassinations of people is becoming routine and there is no reason for the American people to expect that this will not develop to the point where Americans are routinely targeted in America,” he added.
-
Tuesday’s protest included a blockade of the South Lake Union Streetcar, with activists holding a banner that read: CIAmazon. That was in reference to Amazon Web Services’ partnership with the CIA, and it comes a day after protesters blocked a Microsoft Connector bus on Capitol Hill on Monday.
-
MKUltra also enjoyed the help of ex-Nazi scientists.
-
The attorney general has extended the deadline till June of the six year old investigation into allegations that a CIA prison was operated in Poland, where terrorist suspects were held and tortured.
-
Independent research published recently contains revealing facts about the involvement of doctors and other health professionals in tortures in military jails of the USA.
-
Last week it was reported that former CIA Director James Woolsey, forced to resign during the Clinton administration for his bungling of the Aldrich Ames affair, was going around telling people that the reason Jonathan Pollard, the notorious Israeli spy, was still in prison after 29 years is because the U.S. government is anti-Semitic. In short, Pollard remains in prison because he's a Jew.
-
According to Wikipedia, a content farm is an organization that employs large numbers of "writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines." In a way, the American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writer's Workshop, is a content farm, too—one initially designed to satisfy a much less complicated algorithm sculpted by the CIA to maximize the spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part IX: Minimum Wages For You (Experienced Scientist), Alicante/EU Paydays For Me (Unproductive, Corrupt Official)
- Does UPRP maladministration extend to the false belief that qualified and experienced scientists can play the role of circus clowns?
- "The Liberating Power of Simply Telling People the Truth."
- 'polite' bullying
- Who Imitates Who? Plagiarist as Client (From Microsoft), 'Plagiarism' at the Law Firm?
- let's revisit the subject
- EPO's Central Staff Committee (CSC) Scrutinises the Man Who Illegally Grants (and Forces Others to Illegally Participate in Granting) Software Patents in Europe
- EPO compels examiners to break the law in the name of obeying illegal "rules" or "orders"
- The Latest Rumour Says The Next (as Correctly Predicted Before) Wave of Layoffs at Microsoft is 3 Weeks Away, "Larger Than the First Wave"
- Step 2
- TV Licensing Used to SPAM Your Postbox, Now It Does the Same to E-mail
- First they ask for your E-mail address; then they start nagging you via E-mail
- Our Priority is Still Tackling Software Patents and Corruption in Patent Offices
- Meanwhile we got compliments on our recent articles, which means that they are effective
-
- Slopwatch and Yet More Holes in 'Secure Boot' (as Usual!), Promoted Inside Linux by the Man We Are Suing
- Today's Slopwatch will be short
- Gemini Links 13/06/2025: People You've Left Behind, Life Update and OS Changes
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 12, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 12, 2025
- Links 12/06/2025: Portland Homeless Deaths Quadruple, COVID Cases Surge in Asia
- Links for the day
- EPO's Gareth Lord Asked About "Quality and Productivity" or, Put Another Way, Why the EPO Keeps Granting So Many Invalid/Illegal Patents
- letter to Lord
- The Toxic Playbook
- Either you support Prince Mohammed bin Salman or you're a nazi
- It's Possible That BetaNews Got Cracked, But Nobody Talks About It, The Site Contains an Outdated Old Image, No Activity
- It's possible that they will never explain what happened to the site and users' accounts
- Links 12/06/2025: Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson Dies
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 12/06/2025: Video Game Diegesis and Steam Next Fest
- Links for the day
- Why the Militants Have Lost Every Battle Since 2022 (When Attacking My Wife and I in Various Ways, Even Attacking Our Employers)
- This takes patience, sure, but at the end most evildoers face the consequences for their actions
- Politics Will Impact Software Choices
- Will those systems respect users' freedom?
- EPO: Neglecting Children to Promote American Monopolies by Shielding Them From European Competition
- Yesterday the Central Staff Committee at the EPO spoke about another "reform" at the Office
- Slopwatch: Another Day, Another Slopfest, LLM Slop Scrapers Slow Down Our Site
- We too have some slop issues; this past day this site and the sister site had to answer about 2.5 million requests (not counting Gemini Protocol) and it's slowing things down for everybody
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, June 11, 2025
- Links 11/06/2025: More Vulnerabilities Found in 'Smart' Phones, China Extends Reach in the Pacific
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 11/06/2025: Grain and Steam Next Fest
- Links for the day
- Links 11/06/2025: "Quantum" Hype From IBM, US Closer to Martial Law, and “The Nation” Celebrates Milestone
- Links for the day
- IBM's CEO Roasted, Sizzled and Grilled for Dumb and Inconsistent Vapourware Promises
- It looks like being a chronic liar is what it takes to lead the company once synonymous with computing
- IBM's Goal Is Not (and Never Was) Computer Users' Freedom
- More than 1.5 decades ago I found IBM to be an "ally of convenience" because of OpenDocument Format (ODF)
- Wayland Shows the IBM/Red Hat Way of Doing Things
- IBM is trying to 'kill' X
- GitHub is Proprietary, Controlled by Microsoft, and GPL Violation Warehouse
- "IRS tax filing software [will be] released to the people as free software" ... In general this is good news
- Slopfarm Catastrophe
- Seems like BetaNews (or BetaNoise) has just suffered a major data loss and restored the site from a week-old backup
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part VIII: Illegal Working Conditions
- How many people need to die for these people to get their massive salaries?
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 10, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, June 10, 2025