● 06.28.13

● Links 28/6/2013: MintBox is Out, Google Builds Android-powered Game Console

Posted in News Roundup at 4:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this episode: Where in the world is Edward Snowdon? Richard Stallman is now internet famous. Adobe and Citrix open source their stuff. Canonical’s Ubuntu Phone now has its own club. Eben Upton gets a Silver Medal and the Ouya games console is available now. Hear our discoveries, the sound of people’s brains, and your own mindvoices in the Open Ballot.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, fellow at the Linux Foundation.

Graphics Stack

• AMD developer Alex Deucher has published a patch series, consisting of 165 changes, that significantly improves support for the runtime power management features in the Linux kernel’s Radeon driver. With the patches, the driver can now handle not only AMD’s DPM (Dynamic Power Management) but also ASPM (Active State Power Management, used on PCIe devices) for several series, from the R600 family to the Southern Islands, which are used by the Radeon HD models 2400 to 7970 and some models from the 8000 family.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Source SDK updated with Oculus Rift, Linux and Mac mod support

• Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and Half-Life 2: Lost Coast have been in beta form on Linux since early May while Half-Life 2: Deathmatch has been in beta on Linux since March. After much testing by Linux gamers, Half-Life 2 is now deemed by Valve as stable on Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The mobile market shows no signs of slowing down. Android devices are flying of the shelves along side of Apple iOS products such as the iPhone, while Microsoft and Canonical hope to play catch up. This picture is more than telling, not only does it show the current market share of each operating system, but its particularly telling that Android and Linux mobile devices are consider two different systems. We’ll get to that later.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Konqi is a part of the KDE family for a long time now. He has not only been part of our software and promotion activities, he has also made several real-life appearances on his own, or with his girlfriend Katie, and as a movie star. He has looked over the shoulders of many KDE developers and the plush version has been part of quite some kid’s lifes, including mine.

• For some people, KDE 4 is so full of features that is becomes confusing. Among the new features missing in KDE 3 that KDE 4 brought, one that seems to be criticized a lot is the desktop cashew. Yes, that little yellow thing on your upper right corner of your screen:

• The second beta of the 4.11 releases of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform is available. The beta 2 release announcement has highlights, links to release details and download instructions. The development focus is on bug fixing, polishing and general stabilization.

Distributions

• Parsix GNU/Linux, a live and installation DVD-based on Debian that aims to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop optimized operating system, is now at version 5.0 Test 2.

New Releases

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Yesterday, we have learned the sad news about the death of Ron van Pomeren, aka Arvi Pingus. He was deeply involved in the Dutch Mandriva community, as well as in international forums, and lately he was very interested in the development of our association. More important, for many of us he was a friend, even a mentor.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Knoppix 7.1 was released for the annual Linux Magazine CeBIT edition with some add-ons which are not usually installed because of their non-free licenses. A public release was planned shortly after, but as things developed, there were far too many new and exciting developments and updates pending, such as an early EFI edition of the syslinux bootloader, two more kernel generations with improved hardware support, translations and improvements for the blind-friendly ADRIANE desktop included in Knoppix, to make the proposed release schedule. New things need testing, and so, we are just ready now for a first release of – now – version 7.2 for public testing. Apologies to all who waited for an unexpected long time for the 7.1. public relese, which is now superseded by version 7.2.

• Klaus Knopper says, “Knoppix 7.1 was released for the annual Linux Magazine CeBIT edition with some add-ons which are not usually installed because of their non-free licenses. A public release was planned shortly after, but as things developed, there were far too many new and exciting developments and updates pending, such as an early EFI edition of the syslinux bootloader, two more kernel generations with improved hardware support, translations and improvements for the blind-friendly ADRIANE desktop included in Knoppix, to make the proposed release schedule. New things need testing, and so, we are just ready now for a first release of – now – version 7.2 for public testing. Apologies to all who waited for an unexpected long time for the 7.1. public release, which is now superseded by version 7.2.”

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu 13.10 isn’t due out until October, but one of the nice things about open source operating systems is that most of the development takes place in public. (I know, Ubuntu’s been getting some flak for working on skunkworks projects, but let’s ignore that for a moment).

• Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that you can take early builds of the next-generation of Ubuntu for a spin any time you like. Just don’t expect them to be bug-free.

• As many of you are probably aware, we are working on the Mir display server that is designed to provide a fast, efficient, and extensible display server across phone, tablet, desktop, and TV. Our ultimate goal is a fully converged Unity 8 running on top of Mir ready for the next LTS timeframe, and in 13.10 we plan on making our first step in that direction.

• Earlier this month, shortly after Intel announced their latest-generation Haswell processors, Apple rolled out their new 2013 MacBook Air laptops. From a hardware perspective, the new MacBook Airs are incredible. The 13-inch MacBook Air can get a 12-hour battery life with Intel Haswell CPU. The 11-inch model continues being an ultra portable computer and has excellent performance with its Core i5 Haswell processor and HD Graphics 5000. As soon as the Haswell MacBook Airs went on sale, I bought an 11-inch model for Linux testing. Ubuntu can be installed and run on the new Apple MacBook Air, but the experience is less than desirable.

• For those curious about the Mir Display Server development but aren’t actively following its Bazaar development repository, the development continues to be dominated by Canonical and here’s some numbers looking at the current development statistics surrounding Mir.

Flavours and Variants

• Last year the Linux Mint project in association with CompuLab introduced the mintBox, a tiny Linux Mint computer about the size of a cable modem. “It’s tiny, it’s silent, it’s extremely versatile,” so said Clement Lefebvre, founder of Mint. Well, today, Lefebvre previewed the next generation of MintBox.

• Mir display server will be the default choice in Ubuntu 13.10, while Kubunut will remain on X, citing community development.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Ballnux

• If you own a HTC One, but you are not very attached to its sense UI and just wish you had waited a little more and got the ‘Google Edition’ HTC One from Play Store, well, the developer community has granted your wish. Just after the Google Edition HTC One went on sale in the US, some hacker modified the ROM on the device and made it available for any GSM HTC One device.

Android

• Google Inc. is developing a videogame console and wristwatch powered by its Android operating system, according to people familiar with the matter, as the Internet company seeks to spread the software beyond smartphones and tablets.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• Japanese firm Systena Corp. announced the first Tizen-based tablet, which also appears to be the first Tizen product of any kind. The unnamed Systena Tizen tablet offers high-end features including a 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 system-on-chip, 2GB of RAM, and a 10.1-inch, 1920 x 1200-pixel display.

• The Systena tablet offers robust specs that come close to matching the most powerful Android tablets currently on the market. The slate incorporates an unnamed 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 processor along with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 32GB of flash. The 10.1-inch display offers impressive 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution. Additional listed features include WiFi, a microSD slot, and a 2-megapixel rear-facing camera, as well as a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcast live today from Hadoop Summit 2013 in San Jose, discussing the Hadoop Driven Business and the challenges arising from massive Hadoop adoption in terms of security and governance.

• Their guest, Aaron Davies-Morris, Managing Director, Worldwide Professional Services with Intel, talked about his company’s current business strategy.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox is an ever evolving beast, and that includes both its friendly orange fox logo, and its Beta channel browser. Today Mozilla unveiled the fourth Firefox logo, a (slightly) less textured and glossy icon for its favored web browser. Meanwhile, the latest update for for Firefox Beta brings access to the company’s Social API and, consequently, Share buttons to the platform — so Facebook fanatics can have one-click sharing of images, articles, videos and links from the Firefox toolbar. The new Beta is also getting a Mixed Content Blocker that prevents HTTP (read: nonsecure) content from loading on HTTPS websites. Plus, there’s a new Network Monitor feature to let devs see how quickly individual page components load and optimizations for OS X 10.7 that enable its scrollbar style and and the scroll bounce behavior Apple fans love.

BSD

• Eric is pleased to announce that GhostBSD 3.1 is now available! This release is a respin of 3.0 including many bug fix. GhostBSD 3.1 does not include any updated package or new feature its only to fix issue that some user had find.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Legendary FSF founder Richard Stallman is being honoured as one of this years additions to the Internet Hall of Fame.

• Previously, the program attempted to be smart: the “white” arrow tool would auto-select an object and start editing it. Clicking outside would deselect it.

Project Releases

• Puppet Labs has released version 3.0 of the commercial edition of its open source configuration management tool, Puppet. With Puppet, administrators and developers define the required configuration settings using a domain specific language (DSL) – the actual implementation of those settings on the machines being what Puppet handles. Thanks to work from partners such as VMware, Cisco and Juniper, not only can compute resources be configured, but also storage and networking. In terms of performance, the addition of a centralised storage service with PuppetDB has brought a 200% improvement in agent run times and catalog compilation time has dropped by 60%. The developers say this should support twice the number of nodes that the previous versions supported.

• The first beta version of XBian 1.0, a media centre Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer, is now available. Since the alpha, the developers have made XBMC Frodo 12.2 the default; that version of XBMC contains many Raspberry-Pi-specific changes. SuperRepo, the add-on repository for XBMC, is also included by default, giving users access to over 1000 add-ons that can be installed from within the media centre application.

Openness/Sharing

Leftovers

• For many years after the de facto industry standardization on the MP3 format, the primary problem remained music acquisition. There were exceptions, of course: serious Napster addicts, participants in private online file trading or even underemployed office workers who used their company LAN to pool their collective music assets. All of these likely had more music than they knew what to do with. But for the most part, the average listener maintained a modestly sized music catalog; modest enough that millions of buyers could fit the entirety of their music on the entry level first generation iPod, which came with a capacity of 5 GB. Even at smaller, borderline-lossy compression levels – which weren’t worth using – that’s just over a thousand songs.

Science

Health/Nutrition

• More than six months after a big defeat in California, the movement to label foods containing genetically modified organisms appears to be picking up steam across the country.

• In the past three weeks, Connecticut and Maine passed labeling bills, the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the first time approved a non-GMO label claim for meat products, Chipotle began voluntarily labeling menu items containing GMO ingredients online, and, perhaps most notably, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted last week to give the U.S. Food and Drug Administration funding to label genetically modified salmon if the agency approves the fish.

• These are all small steps compared to what California’s Proposition 37 would have accomplished – since the populous state consumes a significant share of groceries in the United States, some speculated that food giants would have reformulated their products to avoid creating two supply chains – but the string of victories has many in the so-called ‘Right to Know’ movement confident the tide is turning in their favor.

• “It’s simply a matter of time,” said Scott Faber, who serves as executive director of Just Label It, a national advocacy campaign. Faber, who is vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, used to be a lobbyist for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which actively lobbies against mandatory labeling initiatives.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The United States’ decision to supply arms to the Syrian rebels is being met and challenged with an equally impressive flow of money from a place the Pentagon is intimately familiar with: itself.

• The recent NSA revelations of widespread surveillance on American citizens should be cause for intense protest. Surely it will be, as a day of nationwide mass action to restore the Fourth Amendment has been planned for the Fourth of July. But any awake American can see that PRISM is only one sock on a long line of dirty laundry. The list of U.S. government abuses and failures to protect stretches far and wide, an alphabet soup of depravity: PRISM, NDAA, CISPA, SOPA, Patriot Act, the Monsanto Protection Act, drones, secret kill lists, Guantanamo Bay, DNA tests, Abu Ghraib, Afghan Massacre, Keystone, Tar Sands, Hanford. I’m certain you’ll think of more.

• While PRISM and the rest of the gang are individually sordid, when combined they are the track marks of a far more pervasive, widespread, life-wasting problem. One that has systematically attacked not just the Fourth Amendment, but also the First, Second, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and 10th. No matter how hard we advocate for the Fourth Amendment now, others will fall so long as this substance burns through the veins of the Republic.

• This is your government on war.

• There’s one measure that quietly passed in the House along with Friday’s massive defense bill that libertarians may like: a ban on drone strikes against U.S. citizens.

• The idea that the United States military could target citizens with Hellfire missiles from an unmanned aerial vehicle caught prominence when Sen. Rand Paul held an epic 13-hour filibuster demanding to know whether the Obama administration thought it had the authority to carry out such a strike.

• The main problem for Edward Snowden is that he ran away. That’s not Edward Snowden’s problem; it’s America’s problem. The idea that Edward Snowden decided to flee overseas in order to deliver his revelations of massive US government surveillance is awkward for the United States politically, and difficult for a lot of Americans on the emotional level.

• Actor George Clooney was quoted by the January 2012 issue of Esquire magazine as having asked President Obama: What single issue keeps him awake at night? The president’s answer: Pakistan.

• Clooney said, “I get that” and the “question of whether Zardari’s government is actually in control or whether the military is. And how close the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or whoever else, is to having their hands on real weapons of mass destruction. It’s the closest government there is to allowing those weapons to either be used or sold…”

• Clooney, of course, does not really ‘get it’. He was regurgitating the myths propagated against Pakistan. Hopefully, an intelligent and rational leader like Obama does ‘get it’. Such dire conclusions, portraying Pakistan as the “nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction”, have been concocted from fact and fiction, old and new, by Pakistan’s enemies for reasons that are not secret.

• Campaigners for greater accountability at New York’s powerful police force have seized on a report that details for the first time the extent of the collaboration between the CIA and the NYPD in the years after 9/11.

• In the years after the attacks on September 11th, 2001, the NYPD had at least four “embedded” CIA officers in their midst. And because at least one of the officers was on unpaid leave at the time, the officer was able to bypass the standing prohibition against domestic spying for the agency and help conduct surveillance for the police force. In his words, he had “no limitations.”

• The director of the CIA has outlined plans to launch a new campaign aimed at keeping the organization’s operations secret. The memo, issued by director John Brennan, was itself leaked late on Wednesday.

• The ‘Honor the Oath’ campaign has the intention of reinforcing “our corporate culture of secrecy” according to the memo, which was obtained by Associated Press. The document had been labeled unclassified and for official use only.

• Brennan wrote that the campaign is a result of a CIA security review conducted last summer by the organization’s former director, David Petraeus, after “several high-profile anonymous leaks and publications by former senior officers,” were identified, according to Brennan.

• On Capitol Hill Thursday, an intimate briefing between CIA Director John Brennan and the top two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee exploded into an impromptu and classified briefing on Syria with top leaders at the State Department, CIA, White House and Congress.

• According to a New York Times article published yesterday, a recently disclosed CIA report found that “four Central Intelligence Agency officers were embedded with the New York Police Department in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, including one official who helped conduct surveillance operations in the United States.”

• A newly declassified report by the CIA Inspector General was critical of the arrangement, which allowed one of the CIA officials, who was on leave from the agency, to participate in domestic surveillance

• U.S. intelligence agency has become a secret killing machine

• [...]

• This secretive “shadow war” — or the so-called “way of the knife” — is mostly being waged by the CIA (via its influential Counterterrorism Center), U.S. special forces operations and private military contractors (with their less than stellar results) in dangerous places like Pakistan, East Africa and Yemen.

• This secretive “shadow war” — or the so-called “way of the knife” — is mostly being waged by the CIA (via its influential Counterterrorism Center), U.S. special forces operations and private military contractors (with their less than stellar results) in dangerous places like Pakistan, East Africa and Yemen.

• The Associated Press obtained the memo yesterday, marked unclassified and for official use only.

• But Amazon is already storing CIA documents — just not necessarily those the agency would like.

• The sudden change in objectives is likely a direct result of Edward Snowden’s recent actions. By informing the media of the government’s surveillance programs, the CIA needs to insure that information is not so easily leaked again on such a great and reputation-damaging scale.

• In an article published in January of 2005, William Blum sets out the background of the CIA involvement in the arrest of Nelson Mandela. Ultimately Mandela was convicted and was jailed for a total of 28 years. By the time Mandela was released in February of 1990, his stature had changed dramatically and then President George Bush Sr. telephoned Mandela to say that Americans rejoiced at his release. Blum points out that this was the same George Bush who once was head of the CIA and who was second in power during an administration that worked closely with South African Intelligence service to provide information about Mandela’s African National Congress. The African National Congress was seen by the US as part of the “International Communist Conspiracy”.

• According to a recently declassified Inspector General report the CIA embedded four intelligence officers inside the New York Police Department even though an Executive Order and the National Security Act of 1947 explicitly forbid the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance. The report, completed in 2011, says that officers believed there were no limitations on their activities and the scope of their work went beyond foreign intelligence.

• Yes, there was a sign they missed – Edward Snowden had something inside him shaped like a conscience, just waiting for a cause.

• It was the same with me. I went to work at the State Department, planning to become a Foreign Service Officer, with the best – the most patriotic – of intentions, going to do my best to slay the beast of the International Communist Conspiracy. But then the horror, on a daily basis, of what the United States was doing to the people of Vietnam was brought home to me in every form of media; it was making me sick at heart. My conscience had found its cause, and nothing that I could have been asked in a pre-employment interview would have alerted my interrogators of the possible danger I posed because I didn’t know of the danger myself. No questioning of my friends and relatives could have turned up the slightest hint of the radical anti-war activist I was to become. My friends and relatives were to be as surprised as I was to be. There was simply no way for the State Department security office to know that I should not be hired and given a Secret Clearance.[1]

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Unusually robust spring floods in the U.S. Midwest are flushing agricultural runoff—namely, nitrogen and phosphorus—into the Gulf and spurring giant algal blooms, which lead to dead zones, or areas devoid of oxygen that occur in the summer.

• The forecast, developed by the University of Michigan and Louisiana State University with support from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates a Gulf dead zone of between 7,286 and 8,561 square miles (18,870 and 22,172 square kilometers). The largest ever reported in the Gulf, 8,481 square miles (21,965 square kilometers), occurred in 2002.

Trade/Finance

• The administration has come under intense pressure to suspend the privileges in recent months — first after a factory fire there killed 112 workers last November and then after an eight-story factory building collapsed in April, killing 1,129 workers.

• One of the points that many people have made concerning most countries in the world is that they’re loathe to challenge the US on many things, even when they’re in the right, because they’re so reliant on the US for trade. The US regularly lords this fact over countries in seeking to get its way. In fact, US officials had been very strongly suggesting to Ecuador that if it decides to take in Ed Snowden and grant him asylum, that there could be consequences for trade under the Andean Trade Preference Act that both countries are signed to, but which needs to be renewed next month. Specifically, US politicians suggested that they might not allow the renewal if Ecuador granted asylum.

• Bitcoin, the world’s foremost digital currency, has finally made it to Miami, and this week Planet Linux Caffe in Coral Gables will become the first business in the city to accept the decentralized digital currency as payment for items on its menu, says owner Daniel Mery.

• If this news means nothing to you, maybe you should attend the Day of Bitcoin Secrets seminar hosted by HackMiami and Miami-Coral Gables Open Source Group at Planet Linux Caffe Thursday, June 27, at 6:30 p.m.

• Max Zahn, founder of the new website Buddha on Strike, is currently on strike in front of Goldman Sachs. I asked him a few questions about what he’s up to.

• The decades-long effort to privatize public services and assets is hitting some bumps, with state and local governments reconsidering whether for-profit companies should be allowed to indiscriminately profit off of taxpayer dollars with limited accountability.

Censorship

• The US Army confirmed on Thursday that access to The Guardian newspaper’s website has been filtered and restricted for its personnel. The policy is due to classified documents described in detail in the stories.

• The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey, as reported in Thursday’s Herald, but Armywide.

• The US army is blocking access to coverage of PRISM leaks on the Guardian and others news websites at its bases, following the newspaper’s publishing of leaks related to the US espionage program.

• Once again, the US government appears to be taking an incredible head-in-sand approach to the various leaks about NSA surveillance. The latest is that the Defense Department is now telling everyone in the DoD to block access to The Guardian’s website, which was seen very clearly after it was discovered that the US army is blocking access to the Guardian’s website from all Army computers.

• Press TV has conducted an interview with Ralph Schoenman, political commentator, about the latest decision by European satellite provider, Intelsat, to take Iranian channels off the air by July 1. What follows is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Privacy

• Revelations of mass snooping programs from GCHQ and the US National Security Agency have shown up the UK’s laws governing surveillance as totally ineffective, MPs have said.

• Conservative MP David Davis and Labour deputy chair Tom Watson said Prism, and its UK counterpart Tempora, had highlighted that parliamentary supervision over surveillance was “completely useless”.

• “Our supervision procedures are completely useless, not just weak as we thought,” said Davis, speaking at an Open Rights Group meeting chaired by Watson. “Let’s say the foreign secretary signs this off. It then comes up in the House of Commons – what does he say? That we never comment on security matters. There’s no accountability to Parliament.”

• Labour’s Tom Watson and Tory David Davis say Guardian revelations mean data communications bill is probably doomed

• To some people, the PRISM revelations have been deeply shocking. The idea that the authorities could be spying on pretty much all our activities on the internet was something that they had never really believed – indeed, they had thought that those of us who had been going on about this kind of thing were, to be blunt, paranoid geeks. Now that Edward Snowden has brought it out in to the open, that’s not something so easy to maintain.

• NSA spying whistleblower Edward Snowden’s statements have been verified. Reporter Glenn Greenwald has promised numerous additional disclosures from Snowden.

• [...]

• This is especially concerning given that the people who created the NSA spying program in the first place say that information gained through spying will be used to frame Americans that the government takes a dislike to.

• Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

• “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

• Millions of websites and billions of people rely on SSL to protect the transmission of sensitive information such as passwords, credit card details, and personal information with the expectation that encryption guarantees privacy. However, recently leaked documents appear to reveal that the NSA, the United States National Security Agency, logs very high volumes of internet traffic and retains captured encrypted communication for later cryptanalysis. The United States is far from the only government wishing to monitor encrypted internet traffic: Saudi Arabia has asked for help decrypting SSL traffic, China has been accused of performing a MITM attack against SSL-only GitHub, and Iran has been reported to be engaged in deep packet inspection and more, to name but a few.

• The reason that governments might consider going to great lengths to log and store high volumes of encrypted traffic is that if the SSL private key to the encrypted traffic later becomes available — perhaps through court order, social engineering, successful attack against the website, or through cryptanalysis — all of the affected site’s historical traffic may then be decrypted at once. This really would open Pandora’s Box, as on a busy site a single key would decrypt all of the past encrypted traffic for millions of people.

• Russian president brings end to mystery over whistleblower’s whereabouts after days of confusion

• Speaking in Senegal at start of his African tour, US president tries to calm frenzy surrounding NSA whistleblower, currently believed to be in Moscow

• An obscure feature of SSL/TLS called Forward Secrecy may offer greater privacy, according to security experts who have begun promoting the technology in the wake of revelations about mass surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ.

• Every SSL connection begins with a handshake, during which the two parties in an encrypted message exchange perform authentication and agree on their session keys, through a process called key exchange. The session keys are used for a limited time and deleted afterwards. The key exchange phase is designed to allow two users to exchange keys without allowing an eavesdropper to intercept or capture these credentials.

• Taking another page out of the WikiLeaks playbook, Edward Snowden has apparently distributed an encrypted copy of at least “thousands” of documents that he pilfered from the National Security Agency to “several people,” according to Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who first published Snowden’s leaks.

• In the latest scoop on NSA surveillance at The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and James Ball post two different documents leaked to them by Edward Snowden. One concerns “minimization procedures.”

• Citing a top-secret draft report prepared in 2009 by NSA’s inspector general, the Guardian said that the collection of the raw Internet traffic information – described as “bulk internet metadata” – began shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

• Drake and former NSA employee William Binney said Snowden’s leaks confirmed many of their past warnings about the NSA’s growing surveillance efforts in recent decades. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., officials at the agency and President George Bush’s administration chose to disregard the U.S. Constitution and laws against surveillance of U.S. residents and allow the agency to sweep in their communications, said Drake, who was indicted on 10 felony counts that were later dropped.

• After 9/11, Drake said he witnessed the “United States government, in the deepest of secrecy, unchaining itself from the Constitution.”

• The NSA and Bush administration “revoked” the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, giving U.S. residents freedom from unreasonable searches, and “violated the legal regime” against domestic spying that the NSA had operated under since the late 1970s, he added.

• The recent events surrounding Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, gives us the chance to engage in an interesting thought experiment.

• U.S. officials said they canceled the bulk Internet metadata program, which didn’t collect the content of communications, in 2011. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said at a conference Thursday the program didn’t justify the privacy concerns, and the data was purged.

• I find it extremely odd that the NSA is wasting its time tapping into the servers of PalTalk.

• However, the NSA subsequently gained authority to “analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States,” according to a secret Justice Department memo from 2007 that was obtained by the Guardian.

• Binney says that ThinThread was built to track electronic activities — phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media , etc. — and map them to collect “all the attributes that any individual has” in every type of activity and build a real-time profile based on that data.

• Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-whistleblower-william-binney-was-right-2013-6#ixzz2XVhZHfzt

• Newly disclosed classified document suggests firms allowed spy agency to access e-mail and phone call data by tapping into their “fiber-optic cables, gateway switches, and data networks.”

• The year was 1975 and remarks were made by then-Idaho Sen. Frank Church, who headed a special committee to investigate overreaches by U.S. intelligence operations.

• The U.S. National Security Agency for over two years collected masses of raw data on the email and Internet traffic of U.S. citizens and residents, the website of Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday, bringing to light another mass surveillance program that affected Americans.

• Citing a top-secret draft report prepared in 2009 by NSA’s inspector general, the Guardian said that the collection of the raw Internet traffic information – described as “bulk internet metadata” – began shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

• Revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance program of the e-mails and phone records of Americans have been a boon to makers of commercial encryption programs such as Hushmail and Silent Circle. Yet unless customers bother to read these programs’ service agreements, they may not realize these companies—just like tech giants Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO)—honor requests for customer data made by governments and courts in cases involving potential security threats.

• The Bush White House authorized the NSA to collect US records following the 9/11 attacks, documents show

• Another leak sheds more light on the NSA’s controversial intelligence gathering operations

• Intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden is likely to reveal much more information about the global surveillance programs of the US National Security Agency, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange says.

• ”I believe we will see a lot more detail, a lot more information,” Mr Assange said on Friday.

• He said Mr Snowden’s disclosures of US signals intelligence and internet surveillance programs published by The Guardian and The Washington Post offered a ”bird’s-eye perspective” but the fine detail was essential for the leaks to achieve lasting political impact.

• Earlier this month, Mozilla launched an anti-NSA spying campaign called Stop Watching Us. The goal of the group is simple – pressure Congress into passing laws that remove the NSA’s ability to gather data on American citizens. In just two weeks, the petition has already proven itself to be a success.

• More than half a million people have signed an online petition demanding Congress more fully probe the recent revelations about the National Security Agency.

• Of course, there is a basis of legality for the NSA’s surveillance programme, as found in the PATRIOT Act. This point was recently discussed by David Simon, creator of cult TV series The Wire, who argued that in respect to telephone tapping, Americans have little to fear. Yet even one of the act’s authors, Republican congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, has argued that it has been misapplied to justify the programme. Furthermore, given what we know about the programme, it is difficult to know whether or not there exists anything resembling sufficient oversight, massively undermining the American people’s ability to determine the extent of the intelligence community’s actions.

• This isn’t much positive to say about the virtues of Congressional oversight in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks of the NSA’s vast domestic surveillance apparatus. Congress has been little more than an active participant in the systematic violation of Americans’ rights and privacy.

• The Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years, new documents reveal.

• According to two leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian on Thursday, a secretive surveillance program that put email and Internet metadata into the hands of the United States government was authorized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama through 2011.

• Not surprisingly, neither the Fourth Amendment nor the freedoms against tyranny that it protects are honored by Holder or the other architects and construction crews erecting the surveillance state.

• Top-secret draft report from 2009 by the NSA’s inspector general shows development of ‘collection of bulk internet metadata’ under program launched under Bush

• It looks like we might be on to a new phase in the Edward Snowden saga: anonymous government officials going to compliant media outlets to complain that his revelations have made it easier for terrorists to evade capture.

• THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh.”

• We might live in an age of persistent and pervasive surveillance. The recent revelations about the secret National Security Agency programs aimed at collecting vast amounts of data on Americans and foreigners seemingly confirm what tinfoil-wearing netizens have feared for years: They’re watching us; technology has turned against its users.

• The National Security Agency has claimed that it doesn’t intentionally gather emails sent between U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, but an unnamed tipster claimed today that it has no way of actually filtering domestic emails out.

• Professionally operated, distributed and independent Tor infrastructure for anonymity and anti-censorship online.

• While the world parses the ramifications of the National Security Agency’s massive snooping operation, it’s important to remember an earlier government attempt at data collection and, more important, how a group of hackers and activists banded together to stop it.

• In the early 1990s, the military was petrified that encryption technologies would leave them blind to the growing use of mobile and digital communications, so they hatched a plan to ban to place a hardware patch that gave the NSA backdoor wiretap access, the so-called “Clipper Chip“.

• It’s relatively easy for the National Security Agency’s spooks to break outdated Web encryption after vacuuming up data from fiber taps, cryptographers say. But Facebook is still using it.

• After many false starts it’s a research field that is just now coming of age – when harnessed, particles can perform staggeringly powerful computation.

• As he tries to elude arrest, Edward Snowden’s heart will be pounding and his palms sweating, writes Nick Leeson, the man who brought down Barings Bank and someone who knows what it is like to be the world’s most-wanted

• Ecuador has cancelled whistleblower Edward Snowden’s travel pass, apparently due to concerns about the influence of Julian Assange.

• Dan Roberts scoops that 26 senators, led by Oregon’s Sen. Ron Wyden, have sent a formal letter to DNI James Clapper asking whether its spy programs “essentially relied for years on a secret body of law.”

• By its very nature, covert intelligence work creates almost insoluble problems for a democracy.

• In a democracy, after all, power is exercised with the consent of the people. If the people don’t know about the powers being exercised, they can’t offer consent. But if they do know about the powers being exercised, those powers, almost by definition, are no longer covert.

• You see the problem.

• In the three weeks since Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s widespread surveillance programs, the legislative response to his revelations on Capitol Hill has slowed to a glacial pace and public obsession has noticeably shifted from a debate on national security versus privacy to Snowden’s latest whereabouts.

• Some of the Internet companies at the heart of the outcry over U.S. government surveillance today joined with human rights and press freedom groups, including CPJ, in calling for greater government disclosure of electronic communications monitoring.

• Files show vast scale of current NSA metadata programs, with one stream alone celebrating ‘one trillion records processed’

• A survey by Ponemon Institute of 4,205 business and IT managers around the world found that more than half now transfer sensitive or confidential data to the cloud, while taking various approaches to encrypting that data.

• Around 70 people attended our PRISM and Tempora event in Parliament yesterday, hosted by Tom Watson MP. The speakers, Caspar Bowden, Simon McKay and David Davis MP, helped give context to some of the recent claims on surveillance made by the government.

• For the first time, encryption is thwarting government surveillance efforts through court-approved wiretaps, U.S. officials said today.

• The disclosure, buried in a report by the U.S. agency that oversees federal courts, also showed that authorities armed with wiretap orders are encountering more encryption than before.

• The revelation comes as encryption has come front and center in the wake of the NSA Spygate scandal, and as Americans consider looking for effective ways to scramble their communications from the government’s prying eyes.

• The US and Britain claim they have operated within the law. But they are not our laws and we shouldn’t be subject to them

• As Edward Snowden will have discovered by now, the airport transit lounge constitutes the most superficial travel experience on the planet.

• For Wolfgang Schmidt, who used to head East Germany’s feared spy service, the NSA’s reported spy program “would have been a dream come true.”

• The National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance capabilities would have been “a dream come true” for East Germany, a former lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police told Matthew Schofield of McClatchy.

• Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany, peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, when he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

• “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

• I’m disappointed to see that renowned libertarian legal scholar Richard Epstein is persisting in his defense of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. This time, he co-authors with the American Enterprise Institute’s Mario Loyola in a Weekly Standard essay blasting the “Libertarians of LaMancha”—among whose ranks I have the dubious distinction of being named specifically. As with Epstein’s previous op-ed on this topic, which I responded to here, there are both factual mistakes and some broader conceptual problems. So many, alas, that to prevent this from becoming unwieldy, it’s better to divide my reply into two posts, each dealing with one of the NSA programs the authors discuss.

DRM

Civil Rights

• Jeff Olson, the 40-year-old man who is being prosecuted for scrawling anti-megabank messages on sidewalks in water-soluble chalk last year now faces a 13-year jail sentence. A judge has barred his attorney from mentioning freedom of speech during trial.

• According to the San Diego Reader, which reported on Tuesday that a judge had opted to prevent Olson’s attorney from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial,” Olson must now stand trial for on 13 counts of vandalism.

• A few of the amendments represent significant improvements to the NDAA of 2012 and 2013. The acts passed for those years infamously permitted the president to deploy U.S. military troops to apprehend and indefinitely detain any American he alone believed to be aiding enemies of the state.

• The bill would prohibit state employees from cooperating with federal enforcement of sections 1021 and 1022 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) that purport to allow arrest and detention without charge or trial on U.S. soil.

• The Act authorized $662 billion in funding, “for defense of the United States and it’s interests abroad.” Central to Hedges’ suit, a controversial provision set forth in subsection 1021 of Title X, Sub-title (d) entitled “Counter-Terrorism,” authorizing indefinite military detention of individuals the government suspects are involved in terrorism, including U.S. citizens arrested on American soil.

• The SASC, by contrast, has altered the transfer provisions to make them less stringent, requiring the SecDef’s decision on whether to certify a transfer to be based on the Period Review Board’s findings that the detainee is no longer a threat to national security. The Senate bill would also allow transfers required to effectuate a court order and transfers where the detainee has been tried in a court and either acquitted or convicted and completed his sentence. The Senate bill requires that the SecDef ensure that action has or will be taken to mitigate the recidivism risk for the detainee, as well as that he find that the transfer is in the national security interest. There would be congressional notification required, too: the SecDef must notify the committees with jurisdiction at least 30 days prior to the transfer or release.

• Tim Donnelly’s AB351, a bill which starts the process of stopping “Indefinite Detention” under the NDAA and other so-called federal “laws,” has passed the State Assembly and is up for an important State Senate committee hearing and vote on June 25th. Your action is needed right now to help this bill move forward!

• Last Friday, Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell signed a sweeping nullification bill providing broad protections against indefinite detention, violations of the Second Amendment and blocking implementation of a federal identification program in The Last Frontier.

• A FAMILIAR face appeared in many of the protests taking place in scores of cities on three continents this week: a Guy Fawkes mask with a roguish smile and a pencil-thin moustache. The mask belongs to “V”, a character in a graphic novel from the 1980s who became the symbol for a group of computer hackers called Anonymous. His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world.

• Troop reinforcements and armour have been brought to army bases near cities ahead of protests this weekend aimed at forcing the Islamist president out, security officials have said.

• Clashes between supporters and opponents of President Mohammed Morsi erupted, killing at least one person in the coastal city of Mansoura.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Supreme Court ruled last Monday that Generic drug makers can’t be sued for defective designs when their previously FDA-approved products cause injuries link here. That might appear to be a questionable decision. But it is also a victory for competition and lower prices in a product line that raises already high medical care costs.

• Felix Salmon has an engaging blog on how the world benefits from Chinese piracy link here. His argument is simple; we benefit from cheap imports that seem to be copies (good or not so good but serving the same purpose) of something we also make. The article takes off from a Foreign Affairs piece, entitled Fake It Til You Make It link here whose argument is that we all benefit. We get cheap imports and cheaper domestic manufactures, they get cheap goods and the foreign exchange to buy competitive imports. And the competition forces the pace of innovation both at home and abroad, a process that seems to have slowed.

Copyrights

• Governments can impose copyright levies on sales of printers and computers, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said in a 27 June ruling.

• Given that Chinese copying has benefits as well as costs, and considering China’s historical resistance to Western pressure, the fact is that trying to push China to change its policies and behavior on intellectual property law is not worth the political and diplomatic capital the United States is spending on it.

• That this is not a trivial matter in law is the fact that the constitution states that patents and copyrights are justified “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” If they are not doing that, they are unconstitutional.

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