03.27.14
Posted in News Roundup at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The ‘civilising’ power of technology without human rights
Drones
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When America invaded Iraq in 2003, it had a couple of hundred; by the time it left, it had almost 10,000.
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A UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration on Thursday to review its use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants abroad and reveal how it chose its targets.
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A UN human rights watchdog called on the Obama administration today to review its use of drones to kill suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban militants abroad and reveal how it chose its targets.
In its first report on Washington’s rights record since 2006, it also called for the prosecution of anyone who ordered or carried out killings, abductions and torture under a CIA programme at the time of President George W. Bush, and to keep a promise to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
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Physical risk is the central issue in recent disputes over the Purple Heart and the recognition of drone pilots. The controversies have helped prompt Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to order a yearlong study of how the Pentagon awards its ribbons and medals.
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Peace activist Medea Benjamin spoke to a crowd of Radford University students, faculty and community members last Wednesday evening in McGuffey Hall.
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Trade and the crisis in Ukraine are likely to dominate the agenda during US President Barack Obama’s first official visit to Brussels on March 26.
But the European Union and Nato leaders also should use the summit to press Obama on another critical issue: ensuring that US operations against terrorist suspects, most often carried out with remotely piloted aircraft known as drones, comply with international law.
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The British government should be more transparent about intelligence-sharing that leads to covert drone strikes, say MPs in a report published today.
The call for greater transparency ‘in relation to safeguards and limitations the UK Government has in place for the sharing of intelligence’, came in a report on drones by the Defence select committee. The report acknowledged that intelligence-sharing was outside the committee’s remit and called on the Intelligence and Security Committee to examine the issue.
The report adds that it is ‘vital’ that a ‘clear distinction’ is drawn between UK drone operations and covert strikes such as those conducted by the US in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
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The former chief executive of BT, who is now a senior Government trade minister, is at the centre of a row over Britain’s alleged role in America’s secret drones’ war.
Ian Livingston was head of the telecoms giant when it won a contract to set up a top secret £15m communications link between an RAF base in Northamptonshire and America’s headquarters for drone attacks in Africa. Last year he was made Lord Livingston and four months ago started a high-profile trade job in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
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Mr Livingston was head of the telecoms giant when it won a contract to set up a top secret £15m communications link between an RAF base in Northamptonshire and America’s headquarters for drone attacks in Africa. Last year he was made Lord Livingston and four months ago started a high-profile trade job in the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
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Lord Livingston, former CEO of BT, is at the centre of a row over the company’s involvement in America’s secret military drone war, which has killed hundreds of civilians in Yemen.
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The Ministry of Defence needs to be more open about its use of unmanned aerial drones, MPs said yesterday.
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Britain is due to hold its next strategic defence and security review (SDSR) in 2015, the year of a national election.
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Amnesty protesters were dressed in orange jumpsuits – as worn by detainees at the Guantanamo detention centre – when they demonstrated in Brussels on Tuesday.
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The next threat to your privacy could be hovering over head while you walk down the street.
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The 49-foot-by-27-foot sculpture, based on a General Atomics MQ-1 Predator aerial vehicle, is a memorial to civilians killed by unmanned U.S. drones overseas, said artist Joseph DeLappe.
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Drone strikes by the United States seemed to be in the news only sporadically in 2011, when George Brant chanced on a statistic that said the Obama administration was using them at least four times more than the pace they were employed by President George W. Bush. His curiosity ignited, the playwright delved into the subject and emerged with “Grounded,” an award-winning play that explores the life of someone who pushes a kill button while 8,000 miles from the target, then goes home to her family.
Human Rights
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Asylum seekers’ health and education records fabricated in bid to keep contract, Salvation Army worker tells SBS
UK Human Rights
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In January, Theresa May, the British Home Secretary, secured cross-party support for an alarming last-minute addition to the current Immigration Bill, allowing her to strip foreign-born British citizens of their citizenship, even if it leaves them stateless.
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Clegg and Miliband call for reform of Investigatory Powers Tribunal, as critics accuse it of secrecy and unfairness
Censorship Using Threats
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This list is meant as a spiritual successor to the grok.org.uk Full-Disclosure list started by Len Rose and John Cartwright in 2002 and terminated abruptly in March 2014 due to bogus legal threats. We are giving this list a fresh start, so members of the old list need to resubscribe here. “
UK Censorship by Default
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Captain America, Marvel Comics’ World War II supersoldier, is the star of Sky Broadband’s latest advert. And he’s taking a break from fighting 1940s comic book bad guys to promote Sky’s default Internet filters.
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It is against this background, therefore, that we now await the result of a first tier tribunal appeal by TJ McIntyre which took place last week. This appeal is against the Home Office decision not to allow him to view Home Office material on the possible liability they and/or filtering companies would face for wrongful blocking.
FOIA
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It seems, the agencies could have been complicit in the arrest of Nelson Mandela which led to him being incarcerated for 27 years.
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Over the past decade, Ryan Shapiro has become a leading freedom of information activist, unearthing tens of thousands of once-secret documents. His work focuses on how the government infiltrates and monitors political movements, in particular those for animal and environmental rights. Today, he has around 700 Freedom of Information Act requests before the FBI, seeking around 350,000 documents
Ukraine
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Putin doesn’t use cell phones. He doesn’t text. He rarely ventures “into that place where you apparently live, that Internet,” according to Time’s Simon Shuster. And that means that he is “a very hard target for foreign spies.” Sound crazy? Well, you didn’t build your career working for the KGB in a country that was unabashed about spying on its citizens.
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Moscow’s actions in the Crimea are comprehensible, former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt said, criticizing the Western reaction to the peninsula’s reunification with Russia.
President Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Crimean issue is “completely understandable,” Schmidt wrote in Die Zeit newspaper where he’s employed as an editor.
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Russia has taken a fleet of military dolphins trained by the Ukrainian navy, a Russian news agency reports. The Soviet Union’s combat dolphin program has been around since the 1960s, and was handed over to Ukraine after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. The Ukrainian navy had been planning to disband the program next month, but with Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the dolphins have a new commander to report to—Vladimir Putin.
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Natalya Poklonskaya, acting Chief Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea, has been put on the wanted list in Ukraine. Her name, birth date and photograph appeared on the list of “persons hiding from the Ukrainian authorities”, according to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry’s website.
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Ukrainians in the eastern city of Donetsk have voted in an online spoof referendum to secede from Ukraine and join the UK. Residents wrote that their hometown was founded by a Briton, so the UK should seize this “decisive moment” and take them in.
Encryption
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If you were horrified by the revelations of the American National Security Agency (NSA) spying on citizens, world leaders, blue chip technology companies and – oh yeah, the pope – then you’ll be glad that a young researcher working at MIT has developed a way to encrypt all the data that leaves your computer before spies and hackers can get their hands on it.
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Stop living in a fear that the NSA, other government agencies, ISPs and hackers will steal your important data & funny-cat videos. MIT engineer Raluca Popa has built a new platform, called Mylar, that helps you build secure NSA-proof web applications. Most of the web applications typically depend on the servers to store and process the data. Anyone who gets access to the server can get control of entire data and there’s nothing you can do about it. Mylar solves this problem through its unique approach to the problem. Mylar stores the data on the server in encrypted form and decrypts it in the user’s browser. Only the intended user can therefore can use the information.
Privacy of Allies
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It might be time for the National Security Agency director Keith Alexander to come down from the ivory tower where he sits and be put out to pasture. He and his executive staff are in a world or atmosphere that is disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. Just ask our closest allies and their leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Corporations Spying
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The U.S. intelligence community is still playing word games with us. The NSA collects our data based on four different legal authorities: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 and modified in 2004 and 2008, Section 215 of the Patriot Act of 2001, and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008. Be careful when someone from the intelligence community uses the caveat “not under this program,” or “not under this authority”; almost certainly it means that whatever it is they’re denying is done under some other program or authority. So when De said that companies knew about NSA collection under Section 702, it doesn’t mean they knew about the other collection programs.
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Snowden
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Jimmy Carter said that if Edward Snowden were to be convicted and given a death sentence, he would consider pardoning the National Security Agency leaker. He noted, however, that he doesn’t feel he has enough information to judge the extent of the damage Snowden may have done to U.S. national security interests.
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Reform
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Perhaps the most significant component of the proposal is one that has been buried in the media coverage. The new legislation will reportedly require telecommunications companies to give the NSA access to cell phone records, a central preoccupation of the spy agency. US officials disclosed in February that only about 30 percent of all call records are available to the NSA because of the widespread use of cell phones, which have up to now not been part of the information handed over to the government.
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The House parliamentarian, who oversees procedural matters, has determined that a new bill that substantially modifies the seminal 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will go through the intelligence committee rather than the judiciary committee, a move that two congressional aides consider “highly unusual.”
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So President Obama is finally ready to do something about the government storage of our phone records, preparing legislation for Congress that would partially change the National Security Agency’s bulk collection. Except he’s missing something much more important: all of the other, much more revealing data we generate simply by living our daily lives. What about all of the other data that internet companies buy and sell, and that yet more companies create and sell without even telling us – indeed, all of the rest of a data retention program that you and I helped build?
Facebook Joke
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Facebook may want to become the Internet (as The Verge hypotheses), the real Internet – the geeks – don’t have a very good reputation of The Social Network. The dearth of any geeks on Facebook and mass exodus to Google + shows how much geeks love Facebook. The irony, for Facebook, is that these geeks are the future of the Internet, these geeks play a major role in success or demise of any product and they are not fond of Facebook – this acquisition has showed a very grim picture of Facebook.
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Oculus VR Inc. co-founder Palmer Luckey called Facebook Inc.’s $2 billion purchase of his virtual-reality headset company a move that will help transform industries. Some fans weren’t so upbeat.
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The creator of the popular video game says the social network creeps him out
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Perrson is not alone in his criticism of the Facebook deal. Virtual reality enthusiasts were quick to blast the planned acquisition on Twitter after it was announced, Adweek points out.
Torture
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Multiple national security leaks by US officials occurred during the production of the Oscar-nominated film, Zero Dark Thirty, which dramatized the hunt for Osama bin Laden that ended in his execution. But, when the Pentagon Inspector General’s office investigated what had happened, the office found then-Pentagon chief Leon Panetta had mishandled classified information.
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We already know the CIA misled the Justice Department
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The CIA’s own account of the Bush-era interrogation techniques has been refuted by independent organizations
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Announcements
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The GNOME Project is proud to release GNOME 3.12 today. The next milestone release in the GNOME 3 series includes many new features, enhancements and updates, as well as new capabilities and APIs for application developers. The new version continues to improve the GNOME 3 user experience and includes many small bug fixes and enhancements.
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Packaging
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As a result of the work that has been going into increasing the portability of GNOME this cycle, I’m happy to announce the availablility (on “day 0″) of a virtual machine image of GNOME 3.12.0 running on FreeBSD.
New Features
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GNOME 3.12 was released today and it includes some important changes such as proper HiDPI support, improved Wayland support, various enhancements for the core GNOME applications as well as 3 new preview applications.
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1 new GNOME Videos, 1 updated Bluetooth panel, 2 new thumbnailers, 9 grilo sources, and 1 major UPower rework.
I’m obviously very attached to the GNOME Videos UI changes, the first major UI rework in its 12-year existence.
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Pre-release
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Tarballs are due on 2014-03-24 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.12.0 newstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that will probably be too late to get in 3.12.0. If you are not able to make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late, please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll the tarball for you!
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I wanted to make one more post before the imminent release of 3.12 showing how gedit changed in this cycle, but the recent series of posts by Matthias feature plenty of gedit images and left me without fresh screenshot material
Boxes
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I just rolled out Boxes 3.11.92, which is going to become 3.12 in a week. Apart from lots of fixes and minor improvements like addition of keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility for example, there are some note worthy changes against 3.10
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Ubuntu
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So I did a bit more hacking on PackageKit, appstream-glib and gnome-software last night. We’ve now got screenshots from Debian (which are not very good) and long application descriptions from the package descriptions (which are also not very good). It works well enough now, although you now need PackageKit from master as well as appstream-glib and gnome-software.
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Steve Langasek of Ubuntu Technical Board had raised his concerns when the proposal was made, “I am very concerned about this proposed support timeline. 2 years and 3 months means that the support period would end the same month that 16.04.1 is likely to be released. Given that our policy has been to not recommend (or advertise in the UI) LTS upgrades until the first point release, this effectively gives users zero margin between the dropping of security support for Ubuntu-GNOME 14.04, and the first upgrades to Ubuntu-GNOME 16.04.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Collaboration Summit
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At an exclusive gathering at the Linux Collaboration Summit, some of the crème de la crème of Linux developers talked about what’s going on with the Linux kernel today.
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Open source software was first introduced in the enterprise by developers who used it in secret. CIOs and other managers would assert there wasn’t any open source within their walls only to uncover multiple skunkworks projects built on and with open source. Over the last decade, the use of open source software and tools has gone mainstream and today developers and managers alike understand and reap the benefits. Today no one gets fired for using open source.
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At the Linux Foundation’s Linux Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only event for top Linux and open source developers, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Foundation, said in the keynote: “Open source will be the new Pareto Principle.” By that, he meant that 80 percent of technology value—whether it’s from smartphones, TVs, or IT—will be coming from open source software development with only 20 percent coming from proprietary programming.
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Companies are increasingly turning to collaborative software development to build their products and services and speed innovation, keynote presenters at Collaboration Summit told us this morning. But how does this process actually happen? Open source directors from Intel, Citrix and the OpenDaylight Foundation shared some of their secrets of collaborative development in an afternoon panel discussion, moderated by Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. Below is an edited version of the conversation, which covers the rise of open source foundations, how to attract top engineering talent, how to manage open source developers, and more.
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Open source and collaborative software development has evolved in recent years to become an essential part of technology industry innovation, said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin in his opening keynote at Collaboration Summit today.
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Kicking off one week’s time will be the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Napa Valley, California.
Releases
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Linus Torvalds has announced the immediate availability of the eighth and most likely the last Release Candidate in the 3.14 branch of the kernel, although this should have been the final version.
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Kernel Misc,
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systemd 212, a system and service manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts, which provides aggressive parallelization capabilities and uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, has been released and is now available for download.
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Alejandra Morales announced the Cryogenic Linux kernel module on the LKML today. Cryogenic aims to reduce system power consumption by “enabling cooperative clustering of I/O operations among the various applications that make use of the same hardware device. In order to achieve this target, Cryogenic provides an API that enables applications to schedule I/O operations on SCSI and network devices at times where the impact the operations have on energy consumption is small.”
Wayland
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Originally XWayland served as an X.Org module by which modified DDX hardware drivers could be loaded on the system so they could offer their 2D support. However, given the advancements of GLAMOR, that is being used instead so we can have one unified XWayland DDX without the need for having patched drivers for hardware support and should work on just about any platform that has OpenGL support. GLAMOR tends to still be slower than the hand-written 2D paths in the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-intel DDX, but there’s still a lot of optimizations and code rewrites taking place of the code now that it’s moved from being a standalone library to living within the X.Org Server.
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The Ozone-Wayland developer team is proud to announce our next source release based on Chromium 35.0.1897.8.
Display Server Debate
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Canonical showed wisdom recently by dropping its own Upstart and chose systemd which it initially criticized as NIH, invasive and ‘hardly justified’. The Free Software community is expecting that Canonical will show prudence and drop their MIR and adopt Wayland. Canonical has great ambitions with Ubuntu, their struggle is much bigger so it may be wise for them to use limited engineering talent to tackle the issues Ubuntu is facing in desktop and mobile space by using the technologies being develop by the larger Free Software community.
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Robert Ancell, a Canonical employee and Mir developer, wrote a blog post yesterday entitled “Why the display server doesn’t matter.” In the personal blog post, Ancell argues that for too many years the X display server has been in use but finally we’re reaching two new contenders for next-generation display servers: Mir and Wayland-based compositors. Robert Ancell states, “The result of [applications accessing the display server via a tool-kit and hardware/drivers becoming more generic] is the display server doesn’t matter much to applications because we have pretty good toolkits that already hide all this information from us. And it doesn’t matter much to drivers as they’re providing much the same operations to anything that uses them (i.e. buffer management and passing shaders around).”
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AMD
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This week I was out at the Game Developer’s Conference not with a focus on games but to learn about some changes they AMD currently pursuing for their Linux driver model. If this new Linux driver model goes through, the Catalyst Linux driver will be more open, but it’s not without some risk. Read more in this Phoronix exclusive story.
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Intel
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XenGT is designed just not for 3D graphics acceleration within guest instances but also for media acceleration and GPGPU compute acceleration. There’s use-cases for XenGT within cloud computing, data centers, rich virtual clients, multi-screen infotainment, and other areas. With other Xen GPU pass-through solutions there is no ability for both the host and guest operating systems to each access the same GPU simultaneously but they must be independently assigned at this time as there isn’t a guest virtual GPU driver as in the case of VMware SVGA2 or VirtualBox Chromium. With Intel’s XenGT solution, however, there is sharing support — multiple VMs can access the same graphics processor due to its full virtualization. XenGT is pushed as offering performance, features, and sharing capabilities.
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This tool allows easy installation of drivers for Intel graphics hardware. The newer version is available for Ubuntu 13.10 and Fedora 20 users only. Ubuntu 13.04 /Fedora 19 users can install this utility but they won’t receive upgrades to newer Graphics Stack. This utility doesn’t support versions below Ubuntu 13.04 and Fedora 19. Support for 13.04 will be dropped next month with the release of 14.04.
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While there have been pre-releases of the xf86-video-intel 3.0 X.Org driver going back to last September, it’s still not ready to be released, but a new feature update was made available.
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NVIDIA
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For current and potential owners of NVIDIA GeForce 700 series graphics cards that are curious about the graphics driver situation on Linux, under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the latest open and closed-source NVIDIA drivers with the latest “Kepler” and “Maxwell” graphics cards. Here’s what you need to know now if trying to use the open-source Nouveau driver with these very latest NVIDIA graphics processors.
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Nouveau’s main set of open-source NVIDIA Linux driver changes for the Linux 3.15 kernel has been merged into drm-next, but don’t get your hopes up too high.
If you were hoping there was finally proper re-clocking / dynamic power management or other breakthroughs for this open-source NVIDIA Linux GPU driver, there isn’t anything real exciting like that for end-users with Linux 3.15. The main changes to this drm-nouveau-next pull is the first stage of ongoing GPU fault recovery support, initial support for the Maxwell GPUs, and various fixes throughout the entire driver.
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds criticized Nvidia in 2012 at Aalto Talk as “the single worst company we have ever dealt with.” Along with him many other members of the open source community previously criticized Nvidia’s proprietary hardware and software, which made open source alternatives difficult.
Overlap
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NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD are not always rivals and they proved that by organizing a joint panel at the Game Developer Conference 2014 in San Francisco to explain to developers how they can unlock the amazing potential of OpenGL.
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03.26.14
Posted in News Roundup at 3:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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BattleBlock Theater, a 2D action platformer developed and published by The Behemoth studio, will be released on Steam for Linux.
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When opening the box to the SilverStone Raven RVZ01 there is a disclaimer printed on the packaging in multiple languages about being a “unique product” and recommending users first reading the included manual. This statement isn’t just some marketing verbage to build up hype or purchasing confidence in the product, but with being able to accommodate up to a 13-inch PCI Express graphics card and four drive bays within this petite mini-ITX chassis, it truly is a unique product. Today at Phoronix we’re looking at SilverStone’s Raven RVZ01 mini-ITX chassis, the SFX 450W ST45SF-G power supply, and SST-CP11 SATA cabling for building a great Linux HTPC or your own Steam Machine/Box Linux gaming system.
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A new open source game engine has been launched by the name of Maratis. It is a portable open source, visual game engine that can be used both by game developers and artists alike.
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Here was the major news last week from the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco as is relevant to Linux gamers.
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Gaming on Linux is picking up and so is the demand for more and more games to be available on the platform. Witcher 3 users now want the game to be made available on Linux at the same time when it hits other operating systems. Linux users are requesting CD Project Red to consider Linux as a standard platform for the Witcher 3 along with their other games in development.
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Maxthon has launched its first cloud browser for Linux. The release is partly in response to requests from Maxthon’s users, but also because the open-source operating system has become speedier, says Karl Mattson, the company’s vice president.
“If people haven’t taken a look at Linux for a while, they should take a second look because it’s a great product. The chorus of people emailing us asking for Linux has gotten a lot louder,” says Mattson.
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Pitivi, a free and open source video editor for the Linux platform based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, is now at version 0.93 Beta and it’s available for download.
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Because Bitwig is an application that’s sure to attract a lot of musicians, who have a disproportional influence extending far beyond the musical community, it’s news. If Bitwig leads musicians to try Linux, they’ll lead others, and that can’t be a bad thing for everybody’s favorite free OS. Now if only the plug-in vendors see it that way. Only time will tell, but there’s something in the air.
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03.25.14
Posted in News Roundup at 2:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Human Rights
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Mariam Kirollos, a women’s rights activist, said on Twitter that the dean should be “interrogated and expelled” and that “investigations into the incident should start immediately”.
Intervention
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Raúl Capote is a Cuban. But not just any Cuban. In his youth, he was caught up by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). They offered him an infinite amount of money to conspire in Cuba. But then something unexpected for the US happened. Capote, in reality, was working for Cuban national security. From then on, he served as a double agent.
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Something else must be added instantly. It is no good thinking that the vote was somehow forced by the barrels of Russian rifles. The imagery is familiar, time-tested Cold War stuff with obvious truth in a lot of cases. And scarcely would Putin be above intimidation. But it does not hold up this time, if only because there was no need of intimidation.
The plain reality is that Putin knew well how the referendum would turn out and played the card with confidence. Washington and the European capitals knew, too, and this is why they were so unseemly and shamelessly hypocritical in their desperation to cover the world’s ears as Crimeans spoke.
This raises the legality question. There is blur, certainly, but the legal grounding is clear: International law carefully avoids prohibiting unilateral declarations of independence. In any case, to stand on the law, especially Ukraine’s since the coup against President Viktor Yanukovych last month, is a weak case in the face of Crimeans’ expression of their will.
There was a splendid image published in Wednesday’s New York Times. Take a look. You have a lady in Simferopol, the Crimean capital, on her way to something, probably work. Well-dressed, properly groomed, she navigates the sidewalk indifferently between a soldier and a tank.
CIA
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The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he’d narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to send a long-awaited report on the CIA’s interrogation practices to President Barack Obama’s desk for his approval — or redaction.
Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she has the votes on the narrowly divided panel to publicly reveal the executive summary and key conclusions of a 6,300-page report on Bush-era interrogation tactics, a move sure to fuel the Senate’s intense dispute with the CIA over how the panel pieced together the study. That vote is likely to happen sometime this week.
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The President of the United States has one overriding obligation: to uphold the Constitution and to enforce the laws of the land. That is the oath he swears on Inauguration Day. Failure to meet fully that obligation breaks the contract between him and the citizenry from whom he derives his authority and on whose behalf he acts. The consequence is to jeopardize the well-being of the Republic.
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The City of Sunrise, Florida, tried to take a page from the CIA’s anti-transparency playbook last week when it responded to an ACLU public records request about its use of powerful cell phone location tracking gear by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents. And the state police are trying to get in on the act as well. We have written about the federal government’s abuse of this tactic—called a “Glomar” response—before, but local law enforcement’s adoption of the ploy reaches a new level of absurdity. In this case, the response is not only a violation of Florida law, but is also fatally undermined by records the Sunrise Police Department has already posted online.
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This topic is the center of a serious debate between the president of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein and the CIA, especially about spionage on the employers of the panel and about if they acceded to non-authorized information.
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Last week, Senator Ron Wyden spoke to an audience of about 700 in downtown Portland on the current state of our national surveilliance and national security system.
Over the weekend, I finally found the time to listen to it — and man, you should listen to his speech. It is both a high-level overview of everything that’s going on, as well as a specific rundown of Wyden’s concerns about the challenges posed to our civil liberties.
- See more at: http://www.blueoregon.com/2014/03/wyden-cia-fisa-electronic-surveillance/#sthash.vtncHcUG.dpuf
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In a remarkable about-face, the Central Intelligence Agency recently came under attack from one of the Senate’s staunchest defenders of national surveillance in the name of national security. On the Senate floor, Dianne Feinstein dramatically made public her accusation that the CIA spied on her committee’s staff in Congress’ lengthy investigation of U.S. interrogation methods.
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Among the reporter-columnists whose bylines I never miss, Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage of The New York Times is at the top of the list. He is penetratingly factual and stays on stories that are often surprising.
At the bottom of page 12 of the March 14 Times — in what should have been on the front page, garnering Savage another Pulitzer — was this: “U.S., Rebuffing U.N., Maintains Stance That Rights Treaty Does Not Apply Abroad.”
This treaty, signed by our Senate in 1992, is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, Savage notes, “bans arbitrary killings, torture, unfair trials and imprisonments without judicial review” (The New York Times, March 14).
This treaty jumped into the news, thanks to Savage, because, as he states in his opening paragraph: “The Obama administration declared … that a global Bill of Rights-style treaty imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad.”
Wikileaks
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Cables posted on the whistleblowing website show a US ambassador telling Hillary Clinton Wales is ‘not necessarily interested in producing energy/electricity for the rest of the UK’
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The Army private who was tried and convicted as Bradley Edward Manning for leaking U.S. secrets to WikiLeaks is petitioning a Kansas court for a name change, to Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.
Privacy
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When former NSA analyst Edward Snowden revealed the U.S. government’s near-limitless ability to hoard and monitor private communications, it created shockwaves of indignation and forever changed the way we all conduct our digital business.
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Since May 2013, consecutive revelations have increasingly exposed the extent and severity of the extralegal surveillance activities conducted by French authorities. It is time for the French government to break its deafening silence on this issue and allow for an open and democratic debate on the extent of its surveillance practices. This is all the more important following the “Loi de programmation militaire” and these recent revelations regarding the cooperation of network operator Orange with French intelligence services. France must make it a priority to revise its current legislation in order to respect international law on privacy.
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An Oxford debate in late February posed the question: Is Edward Snowden a hero? In an impassioned defense of a patriotism that courageously stands against the abuse of state power, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges said yes, and by a vote of the those present, won the contest.
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Glenn Greenwald wrote on Tuesday that President Obama’s new proposals to overhaul the NSA’s bulk collection of phone data are a vindication of Edward Snowden and the journalists who have been reporting on the revelations contained in the documents he provided.
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Censorship
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A supporter of a bill to protect reporters and the news media from having to reveal confidential sources said Friday the measure has the backing of the Obama administration and the support of enough senators to move ahead this year.
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It’s not much of a secret that Apple sees itself as some kind of supreme overlord of apps for its iProducts. And that supreme overlord has some very puritanical views, it seems: no nudity, no literature, and no immoral comics (censorship claims based solely on Apple’s pure-as-the-driven-snow morality indexer). Far be it from a silly little human like myself to question whether our overlords’ iron-grip is good for the app ecosystem, but with all the questionable decisions that seemed to be made in the name of the app approval process, perhaps it’s time for a more democratized solution, like letting customers decide whether they want something or not.
Jimmy Carter
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Former President Jimmy Carter believes U.S. intelligence agencies are spying on him — so much so, he eschews email to avoid government spies.
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IBM
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Ten days ago IBM issued ”A Letter to Our Clients About Government Access to Data” that, as we reported, swore on all that is good and holy that it did not hand over data to the NSA and would never do such a thing.
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Phone Surveillance
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President Obama is set to announce a new proposal to scale back one of the most sweeping and controversial national-security surveillance programs in U.S. history, according to multiple reports.
Smears
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Mike Rogers is still willing to spread his stupidity to any new outlet that will have him. Despite the NSA and FBI being unable to find any evidence that Snowden colluded with Russian intelligence, Rogers continues to insist the former analyst is a Russian spy.
China
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American officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company would create “back doors” in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.
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The Chinese government called on the United States on Monday to explain its actions and halt the practice of cyberespionage after news reports said that the National Security Agency had hacked its way into the computer systems of China’s largest telecommunications company.
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Chinese technology giant Huawei has said it will condemn the infiltration of its servers on the part of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) should allegations be true, according to Reuters.
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Some people forget this, but the day before the very first of the Ed Snowden revelations, there were plenty of headlines about how President Obama was about to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping, with a major focus of the talk being about how Obama wanted to the Chinese to stop their “cyberattacks” on US companies.
Privacy
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Snowden’s latest revelations show that the National Security Agency has the capacity to store 100 percent of a given nation’s phone calls and store them for a month. Is there no other way of preventing terrorist attacks?
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A Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing three government agencies to get answers about America’s role in Nelson Mandela’s infamous 1962 arrest.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday morning, Ryan Shapiro targets the National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Defense Intelligence Agency for their failure to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests he has filed (read the full complaint below).
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The show is over. The fat lady has finally sung. The fat lady, in this case, is a former White House lawyer, Rajesh De, now the senior legal counsel for the US National Security Agency (NSA).
Last week, De told a statutory body of the US government, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), that the so-called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) corporations – a collection of US companies that were made subject to secret court orders to spy on their customers outside the US – had indeed done just that.
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More and more local law enforcement agencies in the United States are manipulating or abusing public records request laws in order to conceal whether they are using “Stingray” surveillance technology to collect data for law enforcement activities, even going so far as to pretend that records do not even exist.
A “Stingray” surveillance device is, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a device “that can triangulate the source of a cellular signal by acting like a fake cellphone tower and measuring the signal strength of an identified device from several locations.” Such technology has been in use in some form by the FBI since 1995.
The American Civil Liberties Union considers the technology to be the “electronic equivalent of dragnet ‘general searches’ prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.” It maintains that “no statutes or regulations” currently exist to address “under what circumstances ‘Stingrays’ can be used.” There is very little case law to properly limit law enforcement use.
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What will life be like after the internet? Thanks to the mass surveillance undertaken by the National Security Agency and the general creepiness of companies like Google and Facebook, I’ve found myself considering this question. I mean, nothing lasts forever, right?
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Yahoo discovered, as many tech companies did last year, that they had been opted-in to broad surveillance programs operated by the NSA and GCHQ. While these companies had always responded to official requests coming through official channels (the sort of thing detailed in their transparency reports), they were unaware that these agencies were also pulling data and communications right off the internet backbone and tech company servers.
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Reaching back into the relatively recent past, the US Dept. of Defense also confirmed that Shell was or had been under investigation for allegedly conspiring to violate US espionage laws by targeting classified technologies.
Drones
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According to The Washington Times, as of November of last year, the United States, Britain, and Israel were the only countries to have fired missiles from drones.
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A global shift toward drone warfare is already under way, meaning Americans currently mostly disinterested in the debate may one day be up for a rude awakening. Governments the United States finds unsavory will end up pointing to America’s clandestine drone program as a precedent. “That’s where you have the problem,” the Brookings Institute’s Peter Singer told The Washington Times.
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The United States has boycotted the U.N.’s drone investigation, arguing that the U.N.H.R.C. lacks the expertise and narrowness of focus to be effective at policing drone warfare. With little domestic outrage over the killings of civilians like the victims of the Yemen wedding massacre, it’s hard to see why our government would give human-rights activists the time of day. After all, did you hear about the fancy realtors using drones to create marketing videos for high-value properties?
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Former President Jimmy Carter sat down with HuffPost Live on Tuesday, throwing some cold water on the Obama administration’s use of drones.
When asked about his stance on the policy, Carter said he “would not” rely on drone warfare, arguing that they kill innocent people and aggravate hatred toward the United States.
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The U.S. has committed egregious misdeeds in the name of reducing the risk of terror by a tiny—or even non-existent—margin.
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The new program could put more of a Yemeni face on killings that have been carried out by U.S. drones.
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Obama has deported more individuals than any other president, he supports coal and nuclear power, and his big victory in repealing the Bush era tax cuts came with a reinstating of the payroll tax, imposing on Americans a more regressive and costly tax system than before. Obama also defends the use of drones to kill Americans abroad, and he refuses to make any serious changes in an NSA surveillance program that runs roughshod on the civil liberties of Americans. And in 2008 he took more money in from Wall Street than any presidential candidate in history.
CIA
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The National Transportation and Safety Board, NTSB, is still conducting continuing research into a jet crash in Mexico in the autumn of 2007. The jet was carrying 3.7 tons of powdered coke and is just one of several cases that point to deep corruption within the American bureaucracy.
The jet, a Gulfstream II, that crashed was one aircraft that was affiliated with an ongoing US covert operation called Mayan Jaguar. Recently released court records reveal that the jet was just one of tens of aircraft sold to Latin American cartel organizations. Narco News reported recently that several of the jets sold through Mayan Jaguar have been used to move cocaine into Europe, via Africa. The aircraft were being observed and traced by US law enforcement and intelligent agencies that were responsible for Mayan Jaguar.
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Washington’s role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.
Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries on earth with fewer people than Wales, yet under the reformist Sandinistas in the 1980s it was regarded in Washington as a “strategic threat”. The logic was simple; if the weakest slipped the leash, setting an example, who else would try their luck?
The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US “ally”. This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington’s coups — in Australia. The story of this forgotten coup is a salutary lesson for those governments that believe a “Ukraine” or a “Chile” could never happen to them.
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This meant developing policy outside of FISA and keeping most of Congress in the dark.
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In twin letters sent Wednesday to the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid renewed charges of unconstitutional CIA spying on the Senate, first made in a speech March 11 by the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein.
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Watching Dianne Feinstein tear into the Central Intelligence Agency on the Senate floor the other day brought to mind a 1970s-era television commercial about a margarine supposedly indistinguishable from butter.
“Chiffon’s so delicious, it fooled even you, Mother Nature,” says the narrator.
“Oh, it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” she replies, her voice becoming steely as she raises her arms to summon thunder and lightning.
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Nearly a decade after the CIA ended its clandestine programme of kidnaps and torture in the wake of September 11, there has still not been a full reckoning of what happened.
PR Strategy
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As we’ve pointed out before, nearly every document released has been the result of court orders in FOIA lawsuits pursued by the ACLU, EFF and EPIC. Others have been compelled by executive orders (Obama’s surveillance reforms) or are nothing more than official statements and press releases. There’s no transparency here, no intrinsic effort to “foster greater public visibility.” The agency has been forced out of the shadows and its awkward embrace of openness is nowhere more apparent than at its Tumblr blog.
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