Weekend News: Surveillance, Drones, Torture, and More
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-09 08:35:45 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-09 08:40:51 UTC
Summary: News about power and abuse thereof, including -- for the most part -- surveillance
Ukraine
-
By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Jr. administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against international terrorism; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled “humanitarian intervention”/responsibility to protect. Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago: control and domination of two-thirds of the world’s hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundament and energizer of the global economic system – oil and gas. The Bush Jr./ Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation. In this regard, the Bush Jr. administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species. Libya and the Libyans became the first victims to succumb to AFRICOM under the Obama administration. They will not be the last.
-
According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor. http://www.kommersant.ua/doc/2424454 It is Greece all over again.
-
It's possible to condemn Vladimir Putin's invasion – and to believe that Kiev's new government is no place for fascists
-
One of the ironies of the Ukraine situation which has drawn no comment I can find is that the Ukrainians have been lectured on democracy by Baroness Ashton, who heads EU foreign policy despite never having been elected to anything.
Law
-
The seven Democrats rejected the nomination because Adegbile served as the litigation director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund when the organization legally represented political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal in a 2011 appeal from the death penalty.
NSA
-
This "discussion" about the whole "security vs. privacy" thing the administration claims it has "welcomed" since the Snowden leaks began? Yeah. Still not happening. As Cal Borchers at BetaBoston reports, government reps at an MIT event focused on "big data and privacy" couldn't have appeared less interested in discussing any of the implications of widespread domestic surveillance.
-
Ignoring easier ways to share data, a tech-challenged boss and manager devise an expensive and unnecessary workaround
-
Surveillance tends to sow suspicion and unease among the people who are being surveilled. Is anyone listening? Who might be the spy among us? What trouble might I get into with the things I say? These questions can eat away at the core of human relations – trust. And this is true even at the agency that is conducting the surveillance.
-
The paper points out a number of privacy consequences as well beyond government surveillance. For example, enhanced SSL traffic analysis by an ISP can lead to be enhanced customer data mining and intrusive targeted advertising. Employers can also more effectively monitor employees’ traffic and the techniques can also improve the censorship efforts by oppressive regimes, putting the liberties of privacy advocates at risk.
-
A federal appeals court should outlaw the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of Americans’ telephone records, concentrating searches instead on terror suspects, civil liberties lawyers said in papers filed seeking a reversal of a lower-court judge who ruled the program was legal and necessary to fight terrorism.
-
The NSA cannot keep American phone records for longer than five years, according to a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court responsible for keeping the agency’s actions in check.
-
Julian Assange doesn't think you should hold your breath for Barack Obama to deliver meaningful NSA reform. The WikiLeaks founder said during a talk at SXSW Interactive that he believes the president is beholden to the American spy agencies and not the public. According to the self-anointed guardian of the world's conscience Obama has proven that he does not take concerns about the NSA's over reaching seriously by failing to fire or prosecute people at the agency.
-
The NSA and GCHQ will soon have the ability to spy on the entire planet, as their capabilities double every 18 months, Julian Assange told the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference on Saturday.
-
He also hinted that new leaks are coming from WikiLeaks, though he gave no specifics on what these might be.
-
At SXSW today, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Skyped in from the Ecuadorian embassy in London to take part in an hour-long Q&A session. While the main topic of the discussion – government surveillance of the Internet – and his opposition to it, was unsurprising, Assange had some interesting points worth sharing.
-
Speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his living situation is a bit like prison — with a more lenient visitor policy.
-
Policy on national security and protection is in the hands of people without critical technological understanding, warns cybersecurity expert
-
The place to be today until Tuesday is at the South by Southwest Conference at the Austin Conference Center in Austin, Texas along with 30,000 other people. This year, NSA leaker Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder and secret spiller Julian Assange are topping the speakers’ list.
Yesterday Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, spoke to an energetic audience and announced that the company has completed its efforts to secure user data against unauthorized access.
-
This announcement shares the same nature of secrecy with the collection of data Assange has declared that he is about to reveal. He has chosen to neither disclose a time frame nor reveal anything about the content of this new information. This is so that the concerned individuals, the “perpetrators,” do not have the chance to prepare themselves or “get a heads up.” To his credit, there is no credible speculation as to what this disclosure contains. With all his bravado in hiding, Assange was pulling the strings about getting the word out about Wikileaks. However, he is hardly the star attraction of this years SXSW conference. That distinction goes to Edward Snowden who shall also be participating through a live online feed on Monday from Russia where he seeks temporary asylum.
-
Are we in danger of entering a new age of global totalitarianism?
So pondered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in an unnerving address to the brainy hordes at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin on Saturday afternoon, just one of the many talks and discussion sessions at this year’s event concerned with the intrusion of authoritarian eyes into the former Wild, Wild West of the Internet.
Privacy
-
Despite what the foolish #firstworldproblems hashtag on Twitter would have you believe, my phone was probably the most out of date there. Everyone else in this Ghanaian newsroom was using Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC. A few people had cheaper Nokia Asha smartphones. There were a couple of iPhones and when the Samsung S4 came out a few months later at least one popped up. That’s not to say everyone had a smartphone, or that there wasn’t hardship. But mobile Internet connectivity – with the exception of our unstable WiFi – was not the issue. Indeed, everyone was constantly connected with the now Facebook-owned WhatsApp – to the extent that journalists would update their editors with it.
-
TechCrunch recently reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire Titan Aerospace, a drone-production company that has just started taking orders for its Solara 50. The drone is designed to fly at 65,000 feet, remaining above terrestrial weather. A typical launch sequence is initiated just after midnight, and the aircraft climbs under its own battery power. The Solara reaches altitude as the sun crests over the horizon and enters its standard day-night cycle. When the sun sets, the Solara shifts its propulsion, payload and systems to its battery banks. A battery-management system ensures voltage is maintained in the subzero atmosphere. It is designed to stay aloft for five years with a range or 2.5 million miles. Read related article.
Snowden
-
Next week, the European Parliament will consider an unlikely, last-ditch effort to grant Edward Snowden protection against criminal prosecution and/or extradition to the United States.
-
Edward Snowden says he reported policy or legal issues related to NSA spying to more than 10 officials before blowing the whistle
Drones
-
The US aviation agency said Friday it will appeal the dismissal of a $10,000 fine it imposed on a Swiss entrepreneur who flew a drone over a college campus to make a commercial.
-
As many as 12 fighters from the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) group have been killed in a counter-terrorism operation by French forces in Mali who used drones to track down the jihadists, France's defence minister said on Thursday.
-
Abby Martin remarks on the ongoing media craze surrounding her remarks on RT regarding the crisis in Ukraine and features a clip of her appearance on CNN, where she took the opportunity to call out the corporate media.
-
Just as America is beginning to wake up to poor discipline and order in the nation’s police forces, those same forces are becoming even more militarized. They have weapons that can fire a massive number of bullets without control or even any accuracy. Now, they, and anyone else with the money can have a new toy: A drone that can fire taser darts and shock a person with 80,000 volts. According to a March 7 Engadget article, the weapon is called the “Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone, or "stun copter."
-
Today, Uncle Sam continues to preen as the globe’s big sheriff on the side of international law even while functioning as the world’s biggest outlaw.
-
Technological progress in the West at the cost of human life elsewhere
-
However, I thought it was quite ironical — and sad — that a drone attack killed five Afghan soldiers while the Afghan President was in Sri Lanka. And guess who had launched the attack? It was NATO forces led by the Americans and the British!
CIA
-
Democratic staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee obtained classified documents at the center of a bitter struggle with the CIA some three years before the agency determined that the materials had been spirited out of a secret facility and demanded their return, according to U.S. officials.
-
The spies get caught spying on their bosses; what else could one expect? Give the spy agencies trillions of dollars and all the rope it needed to hang themselves. The over-caffeinated frat boys get bored killing innocent people with drones and tied themselves up in a knot.
-
The confirmation in December that former CIA Director Leon Panetta let classified information slip to "Zero Dark Thirty" screenwriter Mark Boal during a speech at the agency headquarters should result in a criminal espionage charge if there is any truth to Obama administration claims that it isn't enforcing the Espionage Act only against political opponents.
-
...the misguided program of interrogation and torture carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency.
-
The CIA and the Senators overseeing the agency are nearly at war. And it all revolves around the contents of a secret database documenting the CIA's clandestine prisons.
-
The family of American Robert Levinson is preparing Sunday to mark seven years since the former FBI agent disappeared from Iran’s Kish Island while on a mission for the CIA. Levinson turns 66 years old Monday.
Canada and the Crown
-
Imagine what would happen if the Crown suppressed thousands of pages of police evidence from an important trial? It wouldn't take a legal expert to tell you there would be an immediate mistrial -- especially if the Crown also prepared a false evidence sheet that mislead the judges. And yet, this was done to the survivors of St. Anne's Residential School. Despite a damning ruling against this abuse of process in Ontario Superior Court, nothing has been done to remediate this situation.
-
Today we've published on our about page a new definition of the world we want to see, explaining how we are working to achieve our aims.
-
Setting the background, both Cooper and Clegg bring up the state of the debate about the capabilities of the intelligence agencies. The shadow Home secretary claims that debate has “barely begun”. She should not mistake the unwillingness of MPs to hold the state to account for a lack of debate or concern in the wider public. There have been endless column inches, each new detail in the Guardian minutely examined in social media, a Pirate Party petition with 10s of 1000s of signatures, demonstrations, public meetings, a law case launched with crowd funding, an Edward Snowden mural in Manchester in the vein of what you expect to see in Belfast for heaven's sake...
Recent Techrights' Posts
- [Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
- So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
- This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
- Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
- 20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
- We are hoping to bring more original stories
- Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
- From over 99% to just over 7%
-
- Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
- 4 new stories
- Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
- outrage included
- GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
- Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
- Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
- "Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
- 'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
- looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
- Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
- Links for the day
- Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
- mostly redhat.com
- Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
- Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
- Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
- Seychelles cannot be considered poor
- Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
- "Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
- About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
- The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
- Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
- This is not happening only in Germany
- Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
- It uses buzzwords where none are needed
- [Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
- It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
- Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
- linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
- Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
- retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
- Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
- Links for the day
- In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
- Not even counting Chromebooks
- LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
- an appeal to recover some of these talks
- Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
- Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
- Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
- "the "smiling faces" behind it."
- Android at 90% or More in Chad
- Windows below 2%
- David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
- "a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
- Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
- And probably at a symbolic capacity only
- Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
- Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
- Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
- uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
- Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
- the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
- Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
- in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
- What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
- Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
- IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024
- Links 28/06/2024: Kangaroo Courts and Patents Spam, EFF Still Fighting for CPC's TikTok (a Digital Weapon)
- Links for the day
- Links 28/06/2024: Overton window and Polarization
- Links for the day
- [Meme] In 50 Years...
- Microsoft's Vista 11 will take 50 years to be fully adopted
- Only About 1 in 8 Russian Windows Users is Using Vista 11
- it looks like over the past 12 months Vista 11 hardly grew and it remains very low at around 12% of Windows usage in Russia
- Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 28/06/2024: Christmas Prematurely, Self-hosting
- Links for the day
- IBM: So Long, Suckers. Your Free OS is Now Proprietary. Pay IBM or Else.
- almost exactly a year after turning RHEL into proprietary software
- Vista 11 is Doomed and Despite Lack of Adoption Microsoft Already Speaks of Vapourware ("12")
- "Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures."
- ChromeOS Reaches Highest Share in Years at the World's Most Populous Nation, Windows Now at All-Time Low of 13%
- We're talking about India today
- [Video] "It Is Incredible That Julian Assange Survives"
- There was a positive and mutual relationship between Wikileaks and Dr Jill Stein
- Never Assume That Because the Law Exists the Powerful Will Follow the Law
- Who's going to hold them accountable now?
- Nearly a Month Has Passed and Nobody at the Debian Project Even Attempted to Explain What Seems Like Back-dooring of Debian (and Hundreds of Distros That Are Debian-Derived)
- I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
- [Video] Julian Assange Explains Wikileaks' Logistics
- predating indefinite detention
- IBM Was Never the "Good Guy", Just a Self-Serving and Opportunistic Money- and Power-Hungry Monopolist, Living Off of Taxpayers' Money (Government Contracts)
- The Nazi Party of Germany was its second-biggest client at one point and now it's looking to profit from the work of slaves
- "I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
- Don't forget what Watson the son did to a poor woman on a plane
- State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
- Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
- GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
- Android rising a lot this year, too
- [Meme] More Monopolies Granted While Patent Examiners Die (Overworking for Less Compensation)
- Work more; Get less
- Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Taking the New Pension Scheme (NPS) to an International Tribunal (ILOAT)
- SUEPO wants more EPO staff to participate in collective action
- Stella Assange and the Legal Team Speak to the Media a Day After WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrives in Australia
- Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 27, 2024
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 27, 2024
- RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock