Weekend News: Surveillance, Drones, CIA, and Ukraine
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-10 09:29:54 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-10 09:29:54 UTC
Summary: More weekend news (plus early Monday news) about issues scarcely covered in the wider media/press
NSA/Surveillance
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed two briefs on Friday challenging secret government demands for information known as National Security Letters (NSLs) with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The briefs—one filed on behalf of a telecom company and another for an Internet company—remain under seal because the government continues to insist that even identifying the companies involved might endanger national security.
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Has it only been 10 months since Edward Snowden's NSA revelations changed the world? Can you even remember what the world was like, before he gave 50,000 -- no, 200,000 -- no, wait, 2 million-- secret documents to Glenn Greenwald: smoking guns that exposed Washington's global surveillance state, which far outstripped the wildest, wettest dreams of the Stasi, of Stalin, yea of Orwell himself?
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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.
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We never knew the National Security Agency were such fans of the Master Sword.
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Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt wants you to know he's "pretty sure" your data is safe from surveillance.
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There are also other eras I could proclaim, the Era of Severe Money Troubles, since some of the surveillance is justified by lack of monetary responsibility, and the Era of Complacency, because of people not doing anything about the mounting surveillance when they could. I could even call this the Era of Cyber Warfare. But one thing at a time.
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National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden answered questions before the European Parliament on Friday, saying that the United States spy agency pressures its allies to take steps towards further enabling widespread and indiscriminate surveillance.
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We have seen how the NSA’s phony court system has acted as a substitute for genuine judicial review, allowing the NSA to build up precedents purporting to assist its constitutional claims. We have also seen that the NSA is able to obtain surveillance authorization through misrepresentations to the court, without any genuine consequence to the agency, even when discovered. In this Part, we now examine how the NSA shields its activities from review by the public court system, through the control of secret information that could be used as evidence against them.
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Addressing thousands of audience during a teleconference interview at South by Southwest, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said that Americans in exile were fast emerging as new age National security reporters.
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CHELSEA Manning is ‘happy’ and ‘doing well’, according to her Pembrokeshire family who travelled to the US last month.
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Julian Assange, who has been at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 to avoid extradition, addressed attendees of SXSW via Skype, where the confirmed 'there is upcoming material' that will be released and made mention of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Drones
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The idea of a killer robot, as a coalition of international human rights groups has dubbed the autonomous machines, conjures a humanoid Terminator-style robot. The humanoid robots Google recently bought are neat, but most machines being used or tested by national militaries are, for now, more like robotic weapons than robotic soldiers. Still, the line between useful weapons with some automated features and robot soldiers ready to kill can be disturbingly blurry.
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Will we rescue our character, our culture, and our Constitution from a sort of 9/11 P.T.S.D?
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As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.
CIA
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A month later, at a meeting sponsored by Schwab Capital markets, CIA executive director "Buzzy" Krongard laid out for investors what such a war would entail. "[It] will be won in large measure by forces you do not know about, in actions you will not see and in ways you may not want to know about," he said.
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Investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, working in the basement of a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, had obtained an internal agency review summarizing thousands of documents related to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Parts of the C.I.A. report cast a particularly harsh light on the program, the same program the agency was in the midst of defending in a prolonged dispute with the intelligence committee.
Ukraine
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Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchysta on March 8th said the Ukraine is ready to negotiate with Russia “at any level” over the Crimea issue, the move followed announcements by India and China that they were officially backing Russia’ right to intervene in the Crimea. Deshchysta added that international mediation efforts over the issue have made some small steps forward, including progress in efforts to establish a contact group. He also said the mediation group membership had yet to be settled, and progress is fragile. But with over a third of the world’s population backing Russia, the Ukrainian Crisis is over.
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Double standards are on display as Western leaders attack Russia regarding Ukraine, while they themselves commit or endorse worse aggression on other countries.
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In her March, 2011 testimony before Congress, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, lamented that the US propaganda mill was losing ground to its rivals for lack of funding. In an informal interview she went further, stating that when abroad she got her news from RT, since CNN had become obsessed with celebrity trials and failed to cover international developments. So the US Secretary of State declared publicly that her most trusted news source was....(drum roll ) Russia Today .
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As the Euromaidan protests in the Ukrainian capitol of Kiev culminated this week, displays of open fascism and neo-Nazi extremism became too glaring to ignore. Since demonstrators filled the downtown square to battle Ukrainian riot police and demand the ouster of the corruption-stained, pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, it has been filled with far-right streetfighting men pledging to defend their country’s ethnic purity.
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The Russian invasion of Crimea occurred in a place little known to Americans, for reasons rooted in a tangled and bloody history. The showdown between President Vladimir Putin and the new Ukrainian government is a fight about tangible matters of intense mutual interest.
But many Americans can't address international crises without sounding like a Toby Keith song: "I Wanna Talk About Me."
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- Who will be held accountable for all this?
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- Or Microsoft lost 700 billion dollars in "value" in less than two weeks
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- And last summer Microsoft indicated that it had lost 400 million Windows users
- It's Not About Speed, It's About the Message (or Its Depth)
- Better to write news than to just link to news if there's commentary that the news may merit
- Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part IV - EPO Can Get Away With Murders, Suicide Clusters, and Systematic and Prolonged Bullying by 'Team Campinos' ("Alicante Mafia" as Insiders Call It)
- Nobody in the Council or the EU/EC/EP gives a damn as long as laws are broken to fabricate 'growth'
- Jeff Bezos Isn't Just Killing the Washington Post, He's Killing Thousands of News Sites/Newsrooms (in Dozens of Languages) That Rely on It for Many Decades Already
- Not just slopfarms; even the Ukraine-based reporters are culled by Bezos, who's looking to please the dictators of the world
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- "On the agenda: Amicale framework & Financial assistance for courses"
- How to Win Lawsuits in 5 Simple Steps
- Keep issuing threats every week and send 60 kilograms of legal papers to the target
- Living in Freedom When 'False Flag Operations' Like EFF Get Captured by Billionaires to Take Freedom Away
- There are many ways to think of Software Freedom
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- Microsoft Leadership: Stop Taxing Us, Tax Only Poor People
- Does Microsoft create jobs?
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- Wait till it "monetises" billions of GMail users with slop
- PIPs and Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Still Going on, It's "Forever Layoffs" (to Skirt the WARN Act)
- American workers out
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Friday, February 06, 2026
- Stressful Times for Team Campinos ("Alicante Mafia") at Europe's Second-Largest Institution
- Keep pushing
- Growing Discrimination in the European Patent Office (EPO)
- it's a race to the bottom, basically
- Converting FOSDEM Talk on Software Patents in Europe Into Formats That Work for "FOS" and Don't Have Software Patent Traps
- transcoded version of the video
- Google News Drowning in (or Actively Promoting) Slopfarms Again
- LLM slop is a nuisance
- Gemini Links 07/02/2026: "Choosing a License for Literary Work" and "Social Media Is Not Social Networking (Anymore)"
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Git and Email Patches; MNT Pocket Reform
- Links for the day
- Geminispace Net Growth in 2026 About a Capsule a Day
- A pace like this means net gain of ~300 per year, i.e. about the same as last year
- Benjamin Henrion Warned About the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Court (UPC) in FOSDEM 2026
- Listen to Benjamin Henrion
- Economies Crashing Not Because of Slop Improving 'Efficiency' (That's a False Excuse) and 'Expensive' (Read: Qualified) Workers Discarded in Race to the Bottom
- Actual cocaine addicts are pushing out moral people
- IBM's CEO Speaks of Layoffs, Resorts to Mythical (False) Excuses
- This has nothing to do with slop
- Links 06/02/2026: Voter Intimidation and Press Shutdowns in US, Web Traffic Warped by LLM Sludge
- Links for the day
- Does Linux Torvalds Regret Having Dinners With Bill 'Russian Girls' Gates?
- See, the rules that govern the Linux Foundation and its big sponsors aren't the same rules that apply to all of us
- IBM: Cheapening Code, Cheapening Staff, Cheapening Everything
- IBM's management runs IBM like it's a local branch of McDonald's. IBM is a junk company with morbid innards.
- GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in One of the World's Largest Nations
- Democratic Republic Of The Congo
- Linux Foundation Operative Says We and Our Software All "Owe an Enormous Debt of Gratitude" to a Software Patents Reinforcer
- The only true solution is to entirely get rid of all software patents
- More Than 99% of "AI" Companies Aren't AI, They're Pure BS
- We need to discard those stupid debates about "AI" and reject media that gets paid to participate in such overt narrative control (manipulation like The Register MS)
- AI Used to Save Lives, Now "AI" is a Grifting Scheme That Burns the Planet and Will Crash the Economy
- What the media calls "AI" (it gets paid to call it that) is the same stuff that could instead be dubbed "algorithms"
- Amutable is a Microsoft Siege Against Freedom in GNU/Linux, Just Like the People Who Brought You 'Secure Boot' Controlled by Microsoft
- Do whatever is possible to avoid Amutable and its "products"
- Growing Focus on Publication
- Over the past ~10 days we always served more than a million Web hits per day
- "Going to be a large number of Microsoft layoffs announced soon"
- Everybody knows a giant wave of layoffs is coming Microsoft's way
- End of the 'GPU Bubble' and NVIDIA Finally Admits It Won't Bail Out Microsoft OpenAI Anymore
- circular financing (financial/accounting fraud)
- Corrupt Media Won't Hold Accountable Rich People for Role in Pedophilia
- Journalistic misconduct or malpractice is a real thing
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 05, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, February 05, 2026
- EPO Management ("Alicante Mafia") Not Properly Sharing Information on Scale of Strikes by EPO Staff
- disproportionate (double) deductions in salaries against people who participate in strikes, which are protected by law
- Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Slop/Microslop, Home Assistant, and Valid Ex Commands
- Links for the day
- Blackmail evidence: Debian social engineering exposed in ClueCon 2024 talk on politics
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Changes at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
- SRA is basically a waste of money
- Claims That IBM Will Lay Off 20% (or 15%) of Its Workforce This Year Unless It Finds a Way to Push Them All Out by Threats, Shame, Guilt
- Where are the articles about IBM layoffs?
- IBM Isn't a Serious Company Anymore, It's a Ponzi Scheme Operated by a Clique and It Misuses Companies It Acquires to Prop Up or Legitimise the Scheme
- IBM seems like it's nothing but a "Scheme"
- Google News Drowning in Slop About "Linux" (Slopfarms Galore)
- Google should know better than to link to any of these slopfarms, but today's Google is itself a pusher of slop
- Links 05/02/2026: EU Commission Gutting Net Neutrality
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 05/02/2026: NixOS Books and Monochrome Emojis
- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- Explaining the Letter From JUDGE SYKES FRIXOU, Threatening Me Around the Time GNOME's Nat Friedman Lost His CEO Job at Microsoft GitHub and His Best Friend Got Arrested for Strangulation
- this letter (with annotation) is critical
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- The Web as a resource/source of information is perishing
- "Sponsored by Azul" to Write Fake 'Article' About Azul, Quoting Azul Itself
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- JuristGate is for sale: three billion Swiss francs for a domain name
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Like Microsoft and IBM, the 'Alicante Mafia'-Governed EPO Does PIPs Nowadays (at the EPO, It's "Professional Incompetence Procedure")
- So "PIPs" are definitely in the EPO and we saw letters sent to staff
- Time for Change, More New Articles, Less Curation
- The oligarchy wants to gut the real press and replace media with slop and social control media (or social control media with slop in it, i.e. their own voices, mechanised)
- Gemini Links 05/02/2026: Coercion, Antibiotics, and LVDT Project
- Links for the day
- Almost 1,600 EPO Employees Went on Strike Last Week
- There is another strike coming 2.5 weeks from now
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC logs for Wednesday, February 04, 2026