Latest Headlines About Surveillance and Drone Strikes
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-02-17 16:45:59 UTC
- Modified: 2014-02-17 16:47:57 UTC
Summary: Sunday's and Monday's coverage of surveillance matters and foreign policy that's connected to it
Unity
-
Who or what could get them thinking the same?
Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.
By exposing the NSA’s vast surveillance web, Snowden created a link between tea partyers and liberals — two tribes camped on opposite sides of the nation’s political chasm.
-
Academics have joined the fight against mass surveillance. Two open letters were published last month from the academic and research communities. One is signed by U.S. information security and cryptography researchers, and the other is signed by over one thousand scholars from a wide range of disciplines who work in universities all over the world.
Europe
-
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday she would talk to French President Francois Hollande about building up a European communication network to avoid emails and other data passing through the United States.
-
In the interview: The president of the German Domestic Intelligence Service Hans-Georg Maassen
Reform
-
The big blow is in the Senate, where chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D – VT) was the author of the legislation and has loudly pushed the reforms for months. Yet he too is suddenly in the “wait and see” camp, apparently content to give the Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt on reforms that will likely never come.
-
Legislation to rein in the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has stalled in the House and Senate.
Lawyers
-
Congratulations to Ben Wittes who, with this post, demonstrates how the NSA can “spy” on Americans without “targeting” them.
-
Asked about the report, Abbott said: "We never comment on operational intelligence matters".
Australia did not use any intelligence it gathers "to the detriment of other countries", he told reporters in Bourke in western NSW.
"We use it for the benefit of our friends. We use it to uphold our values. We use it to protect our citizens and the citizens of other countries.
-
A new leak from NSA documents obtained by whisteblower Edward Snowden have cast light on Australia’s national security agency — the Australian Signals Directorate — and its access to Indonesia’s telecoms network.
Journalism
-
The three journalists who broke the National Security Agency revelations from Edward Snowden in the Guardian are among the recipients of the prestigious 2013 George Polk Awards in Journalism.
Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras will receive the award for national security reporting, along with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post.
Surveillance
-
Google’s found a new tracking tool, and it’s called the Streak plugin, an email watchdog that allows users to tell just when their sent messages were opened — and where the recipients were when they read them.
-
How has whistleblower Edward Snowden’s exposés affected the ways organisations deal with internal and external security threats?
Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass internet surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s GCHQ has caused consternation around the world, particularly in Europe.
Human Rights (Foreign Policy)
-
Karim Khan is a lucky man. When you’re picked up by 20 armed thugs, some in police uniform – aka the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – you can be “disappeared” forever. A mass grave in Balochistan, in the south-west of the country, has just been found, filled with the “missing” from previous arrests. But eight days after he was lifted and – by his own testimony, that of his lawyer Shasad Akbar and the marks still visible on his body – tortured, Mr Khan is back at his Pakistani home. His crime: complaining about US drone attacks – American missiles fired by pilotless aircraft – on civilians inside Pakistan in President Obama’s Strangelove-style operation against al-Qa’ida.
-
Michael Ratner: Eliminating Targets Based on NSA spying but not verified by human intelligence demonstrates Obama's false promise of oversight
-
If the U.S. must withdraw all forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, alternative sites will be needed for drone strikes on Pakistan targets.
-
Fox News' Chris Wallace baselessly suggested that Hillary Clinton dishonestly conflated the 2012 attacks on diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, with protests sparked by an anti-Islam video.
-
While the Obama Administration issued a statement assuring Americans that most of Libya’s weapons, including shoulder-fired Manpads, had been secured, NATO’s then-military committee chairman, Admiral Giampaolo di Paola, was not so sure. His fear that Libyan Manpads could be scattered "from Kenya to Kunduz [Afghanistan]" subsequently materialized.
-
At the moment, we are threatened with a return to a pre-Constitutional situation that Americans would once have dismissed out of hand, a society in which the head of state can take a citizen’s life on his own say-so. If it’s the model for the building of post-Constitutional America, we’re in trouble. Indeed the stakes are high, whether we notice or not.
-
Abd al-Wahhab al-Humayqani says the United States is doing more to stoke terrorism here, in the heartland of al-Qaida’s most active franchise, than to defeat it. What the United States ought to do, he argues, is strengthen Yemen’s state institutions rather than create enemies by carrying out drone strikes.
-
The U.S. is making plans to set up drone bases in Central Asia in the case that the government of Afghanistan doesn't allow U.S. troops to remain in that country past this year, the Los Angeles Times has reported. The military wants to maintain the ability to carry out attacks against militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan even if it has no military presence in those countries, and the next best options are the Central Asian states. The officials interviewed didn't specify which countries were being considered: "There are contingency plans for alternatives in the north," said one official quoted by the paper.
Civil Rights (Police)
-
The eight Los Angeles police officers who shot at two women over 100 times will not lose their jobs. They won't even be suspended. They'll just get some additional training.
-
Detective Peter Valentin (top) and (from left) Detective Vincent Orsini, Sgt. Fritz Glemaud and Detective Warren Rohan are among the 55 NYPD cops who have been sued at least 10 times over the past decade.
-
Mass-murderer Anders Breivik has issued a second letter of complaint about the conditions he's endured in a Norwegian prison since killing 77 teenagers attending a conference for the youth wing of a left-wing political party (here's the first, which runs to 27 pages and features a demand for moisturizer). This time around, Breivik is upset that he is forced to use an outdated Playstation 2 and isn't allowed to choose his own games; wants his uncomfortable cell-chair replaced with an armchair or sofa; and more. He threatens a hunger-strike if his 12 demands are not met.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- The 'Culture Wars' in Free Software Have Gone Out of Control
- Social control media amplifies such utterly infantile discourse
- 10 Out of 10: RMS Attracts Massive Audience in Göteborg, Sweden (All Seats Occupied, Some People Standing)
- a 55-second clip of his talk
- The Lawsuit by Clients of Brett Wilson LLP Against Brett Wilson LLP is Officially On, It is Progressing, The 'Experts' Pick Outside Law Firms (RPC and Mills & Reeve) to Spare Them From Litigants in Person
- So it is probably quite potent
- Slopwatch: Plagiarism and "Linux" Articles by Bots
- Sites that do this won't survive; many of them rely on slop services (suppliers) that will cease to exist after the bubble bursts
-
- Geminispace is Very Large
- The word continues to spread and the number of participants grows
- Teaser: To Compensate for the Fact Our Clients Are Terrible Human Beings Who Strangle Women (While on Microsoft's Payroll) and We Get Paid by Mystery Parties We Bombard You and Your Wife With Almost 10 Kilograms of Legal Papers
- If you can't win an argument, then drown the other side with papers?
- Another Wave of Microsoft Layoffs, This Time During National Day Holiday
- This time it's China again
- Staying Happy in Times of Crackdowns on Civil Society
- Optimism in this sort of "new reality" or "new normal" seems like something for the irrational person
- "Nobel" Exploited Posthumously for "AI" Hype, Now They Do the Same With "Quantum"
- ere have been many jokes about "Nobel" for peace (often granted to pro-war people) and a fake one for "Economics" (establishment propaganda)
- Distinguished Lecture by Richard Stallman This Coming Monday in Rome
- After "Free software, Crucial for Freedom in a Digital World"
- Links 10/10/2025: Putin Admits Russia Downed Azerbaijan Airlines Jet, More New Heat Records
- Links for the day
- Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)
- A lot of what they do is patent 'trolling' or lawyering up against their own staff (e.g. HR disputes)
- Links 10/10/2025: US Judge Bars Attacks by ICE On Journalists and Protesters; “We Took The Freedom of Speech Away” Says the President
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers, Google News Gifting Slopfarms, and Fake News/Plagiarism About "Linux"
- Google itself is a slop pusher these days
- Qualcomm, the New Owner of Arduino, Blasted for Its Software Patents Tax on 'Smartphones'
- A lot of Qualcomm's patents are on software. We wrote about this in prior years.
- XBox Layoffs Rumours, Downtime, and Criticism From XBox Co-Founder
- "everyone is ditching the xbox."
- Links 10/10/2025: Honoring The Legacy Of Robert Murray-Smith, Many Articles on the Hey Hi (AI) Bubble
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/10/2025: October Gothic and Reading Middle Earth Role Playing; C and Ada
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 09, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, October 09, 2025
- Links 09/10/2025: Farewell to Jane Goodall, California Bans Algorithmic Price-Fixing
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Lost Wages and a Saga Of Continuing To Use Palm PDAs
- Links for the day
- Richard Stallman's Talk in Helsinki is Done. Tomorrow Göteborg.
- There are scarce details in Finnish about Dr. Stallman's talk
- New XBox Leaks Probably Serve to Confirm XBox's Collapse (Many More Layoffs)
- It's very much consistent with what many other sites have reported lately
- The Slop Song
- The train wreck marches on
- LLM Slop/Advanced Plagiarism Flooding the Zone With Capital That Does Not Exist
- Many publishers out there still participate in this bubble instead of calling it what it is
- Links 09/10/2025: Sacked Microsoft Workers Make "Sackbird", IBM Taps CockroachDB for PostgreSQL
- Links for the day
- "Happy Hacking Day" Richard Stallman Talk This Afternoon (From 14:00 to 16:00) at Haaga-Helia University in Pasila
- Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 08, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, October 08, 2025
- Links 09/10/2025: Impact of Microsoft Layoffs, More Data Breaches
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 09/10/2025: Autumn Blues and C IRC Bot
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch Appreciated by Real Authors of GNU/Linux Articles
- We do try to keep on top of those things
- Upgraded R.R.R.R.R.R. Today
- The Web of 2025 is full of garbage, not limited to slopfarms
- Freedom From Proprietary Prisons
- Forking always an option
- IBM's Watson Died in 1956, Now Watson Dies Again
- IBM is becoming just a reseller of GAFAM and other stuff
- Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, and Google News
- We've also just noticed more slop from UbuntuPIT
- Microsoft Says That Constant Mass Layoffs Are Success, the Media Isn't Buying This Microsoft Narrative Anymore
- If people in the media feel an obligation to repeat whatever lies Microsoft tells, what point will there be to the media?
- Links 08/10/2025: "Mali Puts Free Speech on Trial" And Apple Enforces Dictatorship
- Links for the day
- Links 08/10/2025: ‘Death to Spotify’ and Law to Ban Loud Commercials on Streaming (Dis)Services
- Links for the day
- Links 08/10/2025: Real Innovation and Nina.chat is Dead
- Links for the day
- Links 08/10/2025: Y2K38 Bug is a Vulnerability, Chat Control in Europe a Threat
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Windows is No Longer an Operating System, It's Surveillance Project
- Why is this even legal to preload on PCs outside the US?
- How and Why Once-Legitimate Sites Turn Into Slopfarms
- Many sites will go offline and many social control networks will shut down once they realise or even openly admit they spend money and time gardening a bunch of bots and slop
- UbuntuPIT Became a Slopfarm and Gnoppix Tarnishes Its Own Brand With Slop
- It fits all the characteristics of mildly-edited (if at all) slop
- Slopwatch: Linux Journal and Other Slopfarms
- GAFAM needs to go the way of the dodo
- Gemini Links 08/10/2025: "Seek Seek Revolution" and Gradient Backgrounds
- Links for the day
- Qualcomm Arduino Takes Aim at Raspberry Pi
- Qualcomm is a Microsoft partner
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, October 07, 2025
- Stagnation of the Economy and What Free Software Can (or Could) Do For It
- If your economic model is based on a pyramid of lies, it won't last very long
- Social Control Media is Sinking
- it would rightly seem like the era of centralised "social" sites (they're not social, they're about controlling the users) is ending, not overnight but gradually