Another Day of High-Level Abuses: Microsoft Kinect a Target of Spooks, Apple-PRISM Allegations, Ukraine Interventions...
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-01 10:39:31 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-01 10:39:31 UTC
Summary: News from the past 24 hours about British and US surveillance, assassination, and outside intervention in East Europe
NSA/GCHQ
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Nothing To Hide is an "anti-stealth game," in which you must carry cameras and spy gear to live in a world of self-surveillance and self-censorship. A world where you're made to be your own watchdog. Released for The Day We Fight Back, the game is now seeking crowdfunding to complete the open source game—10% of what's raised will first go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Demand Progress, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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Psssst! Wanna come in on a private satellite with me? They're available, and they cost about $2m a year to run, so it would need an awful lot of us to club together via Kickstarter or some such.George Clooney's got one. He trains it between Sudan and South Sudan, keeping a particular eye on the Hague-wanted president Omar al-Bashir, and uses the footage to draw attention to human rights violations. But in the wake of news that the Optic Nerve programme targeted and retained the webcam images of 1.8m UK internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, I'd like you to consider pointing ours somewhere pointed, such as the NSA or GCHQ. Just their car parks would do.
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THE MOST INTERESTING DEVICE shown at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week was the secure Blackphone developed by Silent Circle and Geeksphone.
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"Whatever the level of cryptography you're using, the NSA can probably break into your home network, install keyloggers and grab whatever they want -- passwords, private PGP keys, screenshots, etc.," said Cyril Soler, a developer on the RetroShare project. "This is always easier than breaking the encryption." Their ability to do that is probably facilitated by backdoors.
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Levison was prohibited from discussing any details of the case until last October, when the court unsealed a portion of the documents. The unsealed records reveal that the FBI was demanding access to Lavabit's Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) keys, which would essentially allow the agency access to all messages on Lavabit's server. While the FBI was ostensibly targeting only a single user, Levison was unwilling to sacrifice the privacy of his other 400,000+ users.
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This year's RSA Conference began with controversy. Even before Chairman Art Coviello took the stage to deliver his opening keynote, protesters unfurled banners on the Moscone Center reminding the world of RSA's alleged complicity in enabling the NSA to access data that was believed to be secure.
However, after an interview with Coviello, we are no closer to any meaningful information as he does a skilful job of obfuscating and avoiding questions regarding the NSA.
Webcams
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Three senators condemn UK spy agency’s ‘breathtaking lack of respect’ over interception of Yahoo users’ webcam images
Microsoft
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G.C.H.Q. was apparently also interested in tapping into Microsoft’s Kinect.
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The Kinect for Xbox 360 was once considered for its potential use as a mass surveillance tool by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), according to documents published by The Guardian.
The GCHQ is the British equivalent to the United States' NSA.
The information comes from documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. They document a program entitled "Optic Nerve" that collected images of users through their webcams, including users of Yahoo chats between 2008 and 2010.
Messaging
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The instant messenger is still in the early planning stages, but Tor's developers seem to be preparing to turn it around quickly. The messenger will be built on Instantbird, an existing open-source messenger, and development will largely involve adding in Off-the-Record Messaging encryption, making it send its messages over Tor, and stripping it of some automated logging and reporting features. Tor hopes to have its first step of work on the messaging app completed by the end of March, but it doesn't draw a timeline for the project out from there.
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Tor, the team behind the world’s leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavík, Iceland.
The Tor Instant Messaging Bundle (TIMB) is set to work with the open-source InstantBird messenger client in experimental builds released to the public by March 31, 2014. The developers aim to build in encrypted off-the-record chatting and then bundle the client with the general Tor Launcher in the following months.
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Sutton displays precisely the mind-set of the security state, that led GCHQ to intercept the webcam chats of 1.4 million completely random British people, in the hope of finding Islamic terrorists. (They didn’t find any terrorists, but they did look at over 100,000 people masturbating). Sutton states that Begg must be a terrorist because ”a convicted Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA) supporter identified as ‘D’ ” had used Begg’s bookshop. And he calls me “conspiratorial”! The poor man must see terrorists everywhere. The fact that Moazzam Begg is now detained again, had been detained for years, has had everything belonging to him searched microscopically, and nothing has ever been found to justify a criminal charge of any kind, means nothing to witchfinder Sutton. That anti-Muslim bigot is plainly convinced of Moazzam Begg’s guilt, though as he has not been charged, of what is unsure.
Simon Phipps on Spying
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Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp gains them almost half a billion users worth of telephone data
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Maybe there’s more to the Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp than just the centralised consolidation of users and user information that Simon denounced in his previous InfoWorld article . Perhaps this particular addition to their portfolio is Facebook’s move towards becoming the first truly global telco!
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Knowing we could be watched, as Jeremy Bentham observed, changes our behaviour; specifically, it chills our creativity. This in turn affects innovation and hence the economy. More directly, businesses (like RSA) are harmed by the disclosure of their for-profit collusion.
ORG
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Asking for comments and feedback on the code is a positive move, but the survey is not balanced to capture a variety of opinions. For example it asks whether the code explains the benefits of anonymisation, but not whether it explains the risks. And it doesn't.
Apple
[First, watch AOL
promoting the fiction that iMessage is secure. It's
not alone.]
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If you are an iPhone owner, you may have noticed that a minor security update to the iOS software that runs you device was “pushed” to all users by Apple last Friday. The original explanation from Apple was that an attacker “with a privileged network position” could capture or modify data.
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According to slide 6 in the leaked PowerPoint deck on NSA’s PRISM program, Apple was “added” in October 2012.
These three facts prove nothing; it’s purely circumstantial. But the shoe fits.
Sure would be interesting to know who added that spurious line of code to the file. Conspiratorially, one could suppose the NSA planted the bug, through an employee mole, perhaps. Innocuously, the Occam’s Razor explanation would be that this was an inadvertent error on the part of an Apple engineer. It looks like the sort of bug that could result from a merge gone bad, duplicating the goto fail; line.
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Twice now that Apple's bypassed Snow Leopard when it patched newer editions
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The critical iOS vulnerability that Apple patched last week is an excellent example. Look at the code. What caused the vulnerability is a single line of code: a second "goto fail;" statement. Since that statement isn't a conditional, it causes the whole procedure to terminate.
Alexander
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General Keith Alexander, the soon-to-be departed chief of the NSA, admitted Thursday in front of a congressional committee that the massive intelligence agency may be open to extracting less, or more targeted metadata from communication companies.
Classified documents leaked last summer by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the intelligence agency currently compels at least three major telephone providers – Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T – to turn over call information on millions of Americans. Among that information, known as metadata, is the duration of the call, the time the call was made, who the phone call was to, and where it originated.
Ukraine and Intervention
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"Yats is the guy," said Obama's potty-mouthed Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland, in a recorded and widely disseminated discussion with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine earlier this year. She was referring to Arseni Yatsenyuk, the former foreign and economics minister who was confirmed as the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine today.
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The very first act of the western-backed insurrectionists which represent a small percentage of the population and have managed to overthrow the government was to attempt rob Russian speakers in Ukraine of their language.
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Yanukovych is now in Russia and is expected to hold a news conference today. Meanwhile, the United States is rejecting claims that the change in power in Ukraine constitutes a coup. On Thursday, White House spokesperson Jay Carney said Yanukovych had "abdicated his responsibilities" and "undermined his legitimacy" by fleeing Kiev. Carney outlined U.S. plans to work with the new government.
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But the secretive agency is no newcomer to American combat zones. In Vietnam, a war without battle lines, it played a behind-the-scenes role in advancing American interests.
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Soon, intrepid journalists get wind of the operation and file Freedom of Information Act requests for more information. A CIA lawyer — operating under the cover name Walt Logan — thinks up a novel way to keep the mission secret without telling an all-out lie: refuse to confirm or deny whether records about the Glomar Explorer's mission exist. One journalist sues over this confusing non-response, and a battle over government secrecy follows in court.
[...]
There are limited circumstances in which a Glomar response may be necessary to protect veritable government secrets, but as I've written before in The New York Times (with Jameel Jaffer) and in the NYU Law Review, it has been deployed far beyond acceptable bounds. Perhaps most disturbing is the way the government uses Glomar to facilitate selective and misleading disclosures. Government officials often "leak" information to the press that paints controversial programs in a positive light on the condition that the press withholds their names. But when asked to officially release records under FOIA, those officials clam up and hide behind the Glomar response. The result is an absurd double standard, and our democracy suffers for it.
Civil Rights
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The interrogators told him he was under interrogation for publishing a picture of Jerusalem City Council Head, Nir Barkat, describing him as the “mayor of occupied Jerusalem”.
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Months after their conduct was discovered, two police officers were disciplined for making a game of stealing signs from homeless people in Midland, Texas — and many believe the cops’ punishment was not harsh enough to fit the offense.
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Moazzam Begg, a native-born British citizen of Pakistani descent, spent three years incarcerated in the most notorious detention camps created in the post-9/11 “War on Terror”: all without ever being charged with any crime.
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Britain’s citizenship deprivation processes may help obscure the Obama Administration’s willingness to kill and kidnap Britons.
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Five years into his presidency, it’s clear Obama failed to keep promises he claimed were at the heart of his approach to governance. We expected better.
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Idaho’s governor has signed a bill into law that makes it illegal for undercover investigators and whistleblowers to expose animal cruelty on factory farms and slaughterhouses.
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The Whist€ler, the new whis€tleblower sup€port net€work in the UK, recently held an inter€na€tional pre-launch in London.
The Whist€ler has been set up by Gavin Mac€Fa€dyen, Dir€ector of the Centre for Invest€ig€at€ive Journ€al€ism and Eileen Chubb of Com€pas€sion in Care.
Both, through their work, real€ise the heavy price that all whis€tleblowers from every sec€tor have to pay, not just pro€fes€sion€ally, but also socially, psy€cho€lo€gic€ally and also poten€tially leg€ally. And they want to help.
Drones
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Pakistani anti-drone activist Karim Khan was abducted February 5, just before he was due to travel to Europe to speak out about U.S. drone strikes. He joins us to describe how he was held for nine days. During that time he says he was repeatedly tortured and beaten. In 2009, a U.S. drone killed Khan’s brother and son. He joins us from London, where he traveled to to meet with British lawmakers to raise concerns about the U.S. drone program. "They attacked our mosques, they attacked our schools, they attacked our schoolchildren, they attacked our teachers," Khan says. "So everything is completely destroyed by these drone strikes." We also speak with Khan’s lawyer, Shahzad Akbar. "This is what the human face of the victim is, and it is important that the American people are told about who these people are," Akbar says. "They are being targeted in the name of national security, [but] what we see on the ground is that it is not really serving the national security interests of anyone."
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Microsoft Media Operatives and Bill Epsteingate-Funded Sites Said Microsoft Lays Off 9,000, But Other Sites Say More (Including 2,300 in Redmond Alone)
- We might never know the real number/s (Microsoft will keep the cards close to its chest) until there are leakers or unless there are whistleblowers with hard proof
- GNU/Linux Reaches All-Time High in the United States of America
- Windows is trending down
- Why the Microsoft People Who Started SLAPPs Against Techrights Could Very Well be Sent Back to Prison
- White-collar crime is also a crime
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- Links 02/07/2025: Deep Microsoft Cuts, Macron Speaks to Putin
- Links for the day
- Confirmed: Microsoft Shutdowns Today, Not Only Mass Layoffs
- "The Initiative is the only studio closure planned today, although some other teams have seen cuts of varying degrees."
- GNU/Linux is Replacing Microsoft Windows. But We Need to Eradicate Microsoft, It's a Hub of Crime.
- I have been writing about Microsoft since the 1990s when I was in school
- Microsoft Windows Nosedives in Switzerland While GNU/Linux Leaps Above 6%
- sooner or later they might have to make the move anyway
- Anxiety at Microsoft: Many Workers (Maybe Over 10,000) Still Don't Know They're Being Laid Off Just Before US Independence Day
- "Has anyone gotten the notification yet?"
- Microsoft "Declined to Say How Many People Would be Laid Off," According to Associated Press
- Some other prominent publications said they reached out for comment from Microsoft and received none
- The X War is Over and the "Wayland People" Lost
- People will gravitate towards what works for them
- 20 Years Since My Thesis
- It's still online
- GNU/Linux is Replacing Windows in Laptops/Desktops
- The world will move on while Windows and Microsoft shrink
- Now Comes the Expected Webspam, Framing Microsoft Layoffs as "Hey Hi" Success Story (False Marketing That's Piggybacking the Layoffs)
- falsely marketed as "intelligence"
- Hungary: Microsoft Windows Sinks to 17% "Market Share"
- In many nations in Europe it seems like the era of Windows is coming to an end
- Microsoft Layoffs in Spain, Portugal Record for GNU/Linux
- in Portugal we see GNU/Linux at record levels
- Yes, Microsoft is Again Using Its Favourite Liars (Stenographers) to Seed Fake Layoff Numbers, Much Lower Than What's Really Happening
- It is Jordan Novet again, just as we predicted
- Will Microsoft Once Again Choose Its Favourite Liar to Spread Lies About Today's Layoffs, Quickly to be Replicated and Spread by Slopfarms?
- What lies is Microsoft briefing its media moles to tell today?
- "OSS Fetishism" Wins After Ferenc Zsolt Szabó Ousted (Microsoft Mole From Capgemini)
- Many people said 2025 would be the "year of Linux on the desktop"
- There is Nothing That LLMs Can Offer Honest People
- LLMs are a passing fad; they're expensive and offer poor "value" for energy; they usually offer no value at all unless you are a cheater, spammer, and liar
- What statCounter Shows Today Helps Explain Microsoft's Helplessness, Mass Layoffs
- Since many US journalists are already away on holiday almost nobody will dare ask the difficult questions or give a voice to whistleblowers
- Microsoft Gets the Chop in South America
- The notion of digital sovereignty gained a lot of popularity
- Europe Has an 'Exit'
- Let's see what happens the rest of this year
- El Presidente Talks, Canada Walks (Away From Windows)
- GNU/Linux rising
- Cities in France and Germany Move to GNU/Linux and statCounter Detects Big Differences
- Will governments lead by example?
- Microsoft Lost Its Foothold in Africa
- How many of these are "old" Windows machines converted to GNU/Linux? Probably a lot.
- Led by Europe, GNU/Linux Makes Big Gains This Month
- statCounter started showing new/fresh stats
- Links 02/07/2025: Massive Microsoft Layoffs About to Commence, "Tesla's Robotaxi Program Is Failing"
- Links for the day
- The Company Run by Former (and Last Proper) Red Hat CEO, Promoting Microsoft Mono, Faces Shock as Senior Partner Jailed for 33 Sexual Offenses Including Pedophilia
- "As reported by The Oxford Mail in April 2025, the offenses include rape, sexual assault, engaging in non-penetrative activity with a child, and more."
- Microsoft Lost 29% of Windows Users, Based on Microsoft, Now Come Massive Layoffs
- Microsoft collapse is today
- Slopwatch: Google Serves to People Linux Slop and Linux FUD (Made by Bots)
- "Slopwatch" finds it difficult to ignore Google's role in encouraging LLM slop
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, July 01, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, July 01, 2025
- "Wayland People" Behave Like the Googles and Microsofts of This World
- Published yesterday by Igor Ljubuncic
- Gemini Links 02/07/2025: Arch Linux and Fulfillment in Gemini
- Links for the day
- Links 01/07/2025: "Independence Day in Taiwan", Bounties on Software Patents
- Links for the day
- What Happens When Your Law Firm is Preoccupied With Harassing and Trying to Extort a Humble Couple in Manchester, Even on Behalf of Violent Microsoft Staff From Another Continent
- It's good to see that law firms which operate in bad faith are perishing
- Lawyer X, Law Firm X and Elon Musk's X: scandals linked by Old Xaverian
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 01/07/2025: Distraction-Free Writing and Hytale Mismanagement
- Links for the day
- Links 01/07/2025: "Beauty of Blogging" and "Etiquette of Collapse"
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Uses LLM Slop to Defraud (or Rob) Shareholders
- Microsoft is basically defrauding its shareholders by LLM slop
- The Web is a Dead End
- We need to adopt alternatives
- When Words Lose Their Intended Meaning
- examples of words that, at least in the technical spheres, don't mean what they sound like
- People Who Disagree With You on Technical Matters May or May Not Agree With You on Political Things (But Usually They Do)
- What bothers me a great deal is seeing left-leaning people accusing other left-leaning people of being "nazis"
- "Too Much Choice" and "Too Many Programming Languages"
- What IBM and its apologists aim for was attempted in the 1930s and it failed
- Microsoft Lost 400,000,000 Windows Users, According to Microsoft
- more people adopt smaller computers and many people replace Windows with GNU/Linux, as they don't really need a new computer
- The "Davos Effect": Tarnishing the Reputation of Places Not by Overtourism But by Oligarch Infestation
- The last Venice needs is an affiliation with Venetian oligarchs
- Half a Year Gone, What's to Come Next
- In the second half of 2025 we expect to be done with the Microsoft SLAPPs
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 30, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, June 30, 2025
- People at the Very Top of Microsoft Know How Bad Things Really Are
- There's no product that can replace the former profitability of Windows licensing and stuff that went on top of Windows
- Gemini Links 01/07/2025: Mid Year and a Tour of Old Languages
- Links for the day
- EPO Presentation Bemoans Misuse of Slop in Decision-Making on Patents and in Classification (Which is Likely Illegal Too)
- We habitually mention failed use cases of LLMs on the Web
- Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Confirmed, "XBox Hardware Is Dead"
- It's possible that over 20% of the staff will be laid off
- Links 30/06/2025: Kyrgyzstan vs Media Freedom, Dalai Lama Succession
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 30/06/2025: Backend Programs in Gemini and Dynamic Content Without The Scripting
- Links for the day
- Links 30/06/2025: Zuckerberg’s Tax-Evading Scheme Harms Kids, US Copyright Office Lacks Leadership
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Isn't Laying Off Tens of Thousands to 'Invest' in Slop ('Hey Hi'), It's Laying Off Tens of Thousands Because It's Running Out of Money (and Willing Lenders)
- the layoffs are a sign of the business failing, not "hey hi" (whatever that is) replacing staff
- Intel Lays Off 20% of Its Workforce, Microsoft is Doing the Same This Year
- Like a yoyo, whatever goes up will come back down
- Microsoft XBox Layoffs: Almost 2,000 Layoffs Became "Over 2,000"? (Over 20% of the Staff)
- over 20% of staff will be let go, not counting staff that leaves voluntarily
- GNU/Linux Rises to New Highs in Angola, Africa in General is Abandoning Windows
- Western media barely covers Microsoft layoffs in Africa, but in recent years Microsoft culled the workforce and even shut down entire operations
- Summer Plans in Techrights and Elsewhere
- massive layoffs at Microsoft
- Destination Geminispace (in the Age of LLM Slop and Slop Images That Infest the Web and Social Control Media)
- Geminispace isn't vast, but at least it is - on average - a lot "cleaner"
- GNU/Linux Growing in Sierra Leone This Year
- Based on what statCounter is seeing, this year there are more and more people there who adopt GNU/Linux
- Serial Sloppers Gonna Slop
- More sites out there ought to call out the cheaters
- Quartz (qz.com) is Spam and a Slopfarm
- It used to be OK. Then they fired the staff.
- Links 30/06/2025: US Economic Woes, Extreme Heat
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 29, 2025
- IRC logs for Sunday, June 29, 2025
- Gemini Links 30/06/2025: "The AI Hype" and New AuraGem Ask
- Links for the day