Reply With Quote
Microsoft, China clash over Windows 8, backdoor-spying charges
http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-c...tag=CAD090e536
Sad thing is, if there is anything that will stop this, it is big business not wanting to lose that money.
Unless rich people value their budding police state over making money.
Microsoft, China clash over Windows 8, backdoor-spying charges
http://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-c...tag=CAD090e536
Cellphone operator reveals scale of gov't snooping
LONDON (AP) — Vodafone, one of the world's largest cellphone companies, revealed the scope of government snooping into phone networks Friday, saying authorities in some countries are able to directly access an operator's network without seeking permission.
The company outlined the details in a report that is described as the first of its kind, covering 29 countries — in Europe, Africa and Asia — in which it directly operates. It gives the most comprehensive look to date on how governments monitor the mobile phone communications of their citizens.
The most explosive revelation was that in a small number of countries, authorities require direct access to an operator's network — bypassing legal niceties like warrants. It did not name the countries.
"In those countries, Vodafone will not receive any form of demand for lawful interception access as the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link," the report said.
The report itself reflects the concern now being raised regarding privacy rights around the world. Though Vodafone is a global company, it consists of separate subsidiaries, all of which are subject to domestic laws of the countries in which it operates.
"The need for governments to balance their duty to protect the state and its citizens against their duty to protect individual privacy is now the focus of a significant global public debate," the company said in the report. "We hope that ... disclosures in this report will help inform that debate."
The findings will alarm civil rights advocates already in arms over the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency systems administrator whose leaks have exposed some of the agency's most sensitive spying operations.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights group Liberty, described the findings as a worst-case scenario infringement into civil rights.
"For governments to access phone calls at the flick of a switch is unprecedented and terrifying," Chakrabarti said in a statement, adding that the Snowden revelations showed the Internet was already being treated as "fair game."
"Bluster that all is well is wearing pretty thin - our analogue laws need a digital overhaul," she said.
http://m.sfgate.com/business/technol...ng-5533174.php
Good. I'm planning on doing IT overseas anyway
Friedersdorf replies to Kinsley and Linker:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...-leaks/372381/Let's ground the decision about publishing classified information in reality.
In reality, the government often does serious damage to the U.S. by making the wrong judgment call on classification. Officials are the most biased judges when it comes to these decisions because, often times, the truth reveals their own incompetence or illegal behavior, and suppressing the truth always inflates their relative power and importance. There is no more biased decider than government officials.
In reality, journalists making "wrong calls" on classification have done so little damage that it's hard to cite examples that show any lasting harm. There aren't horror stories in which America was gravely damaged due to journalists spilling a precious secret (though government often predicts disasters that never come). We've gotten along quite well for decades without prosecuting any journalists, even though there were countless leaks in that period. There were some threats of prosecution in that period—and virtually all of them reflected badly on government in hindsight.
Kinsley and Linker can only gesture at hypothetical harms that could occur if journalists published without fear of prosecution. They ground their whole position in a thought experiment rather than in decades of lived experience. Alarms are raised about vesting too much responsibility in journalists of "dubious" credentials. Fear is stoked at the superficially frightening idea that cute animal curators at BuzzFeed could wind up making the call. But no one explains how these people would come into America's top secrets. In what world will the cute puppy aggregator find himself holding a list with the names of every undercover CIA agent? And even then, wouldn't he probably not publish?
In reality, it is almost always seasoned national-security reporters who get sensitive leaks. Linker implies that if they were the ones making the call he'd feel much better about my standard. Well, in practice, isn't that exactly how things typically work?
Mathematicians weigh in: http://www.ams.org/notices/201406/rnoti-p623.pdf
http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...ing-sentencingGallagher warned that the long sentence would nonetheless set a precedent for journalists. “Basically,” he said, “if you share a link to publicly available material without knowing what’s in it – maybe it could contain stolen credit card info – you could be prosecuted.”
“Any journalist that uses hackers as sources is extremely chilled by this,” Gallagher added.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speec...uld-we-say-526By my count, the Obama administration has secured 526 months of prison time for national security leakers, versus only 24 months total jail time for everyone else since the American Revolution. It's important – and telling – to note that the bulk of that time is the 35 years in Fort Leavenworth handed down to Chelsea Manning.
It takes a bit of digging to find all this information. As my public service for the day, here's a rundown of every leak case, the sentence (if there was one), and its current disposition.
Pre-Obama Cases
- Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo (1973). Famous national security whistleblowers prosecuted for releasing the Pentagon Papers. Sentence: Charges dropped after revelations that President Nixon's henchmen burglarized Ellsberg's psychoanalyst looking for dirt and tried to bribe the judge in their case with the directorship of the FBI.
- Samuel Morison (1985). Naval analyst who sent pictures of the Soviet navy to Jane's Fighting Ships, a reference book on the world's warships. Sentence: 24 months. He was subsequently pardoned by President Clinton, despite CIA objection.
- Larry Franklin (2005). Pentagon analyst charged with leaking Iran-related intelligence material to lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Sentence: 10 months at a halfway house and 100 hours of community service.
- Obama Cases
- Thomas Drake (2010). NSA whistleblower. Revealed waste at the agency in connection with the Trailblazer Project. Sentence: All espionage charges were later dropped, and Drake pled guilty to a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to a year of probation. The judge called the government's conduct in the case "unconscionable."
- Shamai Leibowitz (2010). Orthodox Jewish FBI translator, concerned about ill-considered Israeli airstrike against Iran, revealed U.S. spying against Israeli diplomats to blogger. Sentence: 20 months. Amazingly, the sentencing judge said, "I don't know what was divulged other than some do ents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea."
- Chelsea Manning (2013). Wikileaks. Sentence: 420 months (35 years). As noted, it's heaviest sentence in history, almost twenty times the pre-Obama record.
- John Kiriakou (2013). CIA analyst and case officer. Kiriakou was the whistleblower who revealed the secret CIA torture program. Sentence: 30 months.
- Donald Sachtleben (2013). FBI agent and contractor alleged to have disclosed to the Associated Press details of a disrupted Yemen-based bomb plot. The wildly overbroad subpoena the Justice Department sent to the AP as a follow-up made national headlines. Sentence: 43 months. Longest ever imposed in civilian court.
- Stephen Kim (2014). State Department advisor who disclosed information about North Korea's plans to test a nuclear bomb to a Fox News reporter. The reporter was investigated by the FBI as a possible "co-conspirator" for mere act of newsgathering. Sentence: 13 months.
- Jeffrey Sterling (case pending). Alleged to have been James Risen's source.
- Edward Snowden (case pending). Revealed secret law allowing wholesale, covert surveillance of innocent people by the NSA. Charges against him carry decades in prison.
Sterling convicted.
more leaks. modern dirty tricks. it isn't just terrorists the NSA targets:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...utations.shtmlA few weeks ago, Glenn Greenwald, while working with NBC News, revealed some details of a GCHQ presentation concerning how the surveillance organization had a "dirty tricks" group known as JTRIG -- the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group. Now, over at The Intercept, he's revealed the entire presentation and highlighted more details about how JTRIG would seek to infiltrate different groups online and destroy people's reputations -- going way, way, way beyond just targeting terrorist groups and threats to national security.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.
in the information war, companies and political activists are targeted too
Citizenfour wins the Oscar for Best Do entary:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/0...-on-hbo-today/n Sunday, journalist Laura Poitras won the Oscar for do entary filmmaking for her movie Citizenfour, which chronicled Snowden's journey and told the story of the journalists who handled the do ents he gave them. In her acceptance speech, Poitras thanked the Academy, the do entary community, and Snowden himself.
"The disclosures that Edward Snowden reveals don't only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself," she said. "When the most important decisions being made, affecting all of us, are made in secret, we lose our ability to check the powers that control. Thank you to Edward Snowden, for his courage, and for the many other whistleblowers."
Poitras won the Oscar together with her producers Mathilde Bonnefoy and Dirk Wilutzky.
Citizenfour had only a limited theatrical release within the US, and it's been notoriously hard to track down through legal streaming means (as of Sunday, it wasn't yet available on iTunes). However, the movie will get its broadcast premiere today, February 23, when it will be shown on HBO. And for UK readers, Channel 4 will show the film on Wednesday evening.
Snowden's much more of an American hero than the psycho killer Kyle.
Snowden risked his freedom and lost, Kyle risked nothing shooting at people at 100s yards distance. The US military "on the ground" kicking in doors and walking patrols risked way more than Kyle.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 02-23-2015 at 11:32 AM.
in fact, both are hailed as heroes and it's hardly unthinkable that some people admire both Kyle and Snowden.Snowden's much more of an American hero than the psycho killer Kyle.
(but of course you're right and that's the only thing that matters, as usual.)
pe ion drive for clemency:
https://www.aclu.org/secure/grant_snowden_immunity
my opinion, well informed, is as "right" as anybody's.
how does it feel never being wrong?
absolutely wonderful, you should strive in that direction, but you have a ways to go, good luck.
Snowden and Greenwald doing an AMA on Reddit right now. Good read.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comment...ras_and_glenn/
Except it's hardly well informed, if it was you'd have known Kyle was on the ground going door to door doing raids with the marines.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...ancellor-says/German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said.
... extortion showing no respect for a key ally, trading partner, etc, etc. "exceptional" USA is a bully
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions