● 06.15.14

● Links 15/6/2014: News Catchup, Build-up for Another Iraq Invasion

Posted in News Roundup, Site News at 10:49 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

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• My how the times have changed. At one point, HP and Microsoft were sharing friendship bracelets and having slumber parties. In fact, over the last decade, HP was a major player with Microsoft. Those days are gone. The juggernaut that was once Microsoft is slowly toppling and companies like HP are seeing the writing on the wall. That writing includes the likes of Android, Linux, iOS — platforms perfect for mobile and embedded systems.

• To that end, Hewlett Packard has decided to kick Microsoft to the curb and develop their own operating system that will power all of their future devices. In particular, HP is working on a device they call “The Machine.” This new device will be made up of several new technologies — including a new type of memory — and will run a new operating system based on…

• Wait for it…

• Linux.

• A recurring Linux joke / horror story is running the command rm –rf /. Imagine if it actually happened? What would or could you do to recover?

• Linux specialist Kyle Kelley recently decided to see what happened if he launched a new Linux server and ran rm –rf / as root.

• This command is the remove (delete) command, with the flags –rf indicating to run recursively down all folders and subfolders, and to force deletion even if the file is ordinarily read-only. The / indicates the command is to run from the top-most root directory in Linux.

Desktop

• That system is Wine, a software “go-between” that lets users run Windows applications without a copy of Microsoft Windows. Wine isn’t an operating system in its own right, just a layer that sits on top of free systems like Linux. It doesn’t run every Windows program but offers seamless compatibility on many of the most recent and popular applications. Used in conjunction with a free graphical operating system like Ubuntu, it’s an option that could save you up to £80 on Microsoft’s current asking price.

Server

• Enterprises want to move into hybrid cloud services now and will probably spend the next several years making that move, according to Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. It won’t be an instant transition. He says that VMware, unlike Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, is in a good position to help them do so.

• Lodge was on the road Thursday, visiting InformationWeek offices and other spots in his own “anti-cloud washing” campaign. He had a list of the requirements for a hybrid cloud and explained why some cloud services that talk about providing hybrid services probably can’t really do it. In case you’re wondering, he means Amazon Web Services, which struck a nerve inside VMware when it announced the AWS vCenter management portal, the connection between the VMware vCenter management console and Amazon’s EC2.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

• While EXT4 didn’t see any exciting changes for the Linux 3.16 merge window, the XFS and Btrfs file-systems are continuing to receive a great deal of upstream improvements.

• The 3.14.7, 3.10.43, and 3.4.93 stable kernel updates are available; each contains another long list of important fixes.

• Software engineer Thomas Gibbons remembers from an early age working with his father to set up mail servers in their home in Kidderminster, England. His dad, Christopher Gibbons, a BT (British Telecom) engineer, was always eager to teach him about things he expressed interested in, he said via phone this week.

• “He got me into programming as well. I’m where I am today because of my father’s faith in me,” Gibbons said. “Whenever I wanted to learn something, he said ‘Great, we’ll learn it together.”

• Matthew Garrett sent in the x86 platform driver updates on Tuesday that are going into the Linux 3.16 kernel. This pull request is interesting for Dell Latitude laptop owners.

• For developers and debug-willing Linux enthusiasts, the Intel GPU Tools 1.7 open-source release is now available.

Graphics Stack

• The first beta driver in NVIDIA’s forthcoming “Release 340″ driver series for blob-using Linux users is now available.

• Another OpenGL 4 extension has landed in Mesa by Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center crew for the Mesa 10.3 release at the end of the summer.

• Mesa, an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification and a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics, is now at version 10.2.1.

• Wayland 1.5 is released. It’s a pretty exciting release, with plenty of features, but the most exciting thing about it is that we can begin work on Wayland 1.6!

• … No, I’m serious. Wayland 1.6′s release schedule matches up pretty well with GNOME’s. Wayland 1.6 will be released in the coming weeks before GNOME 3.14, the first version of GNOME with full Wayland support out of the box.

• The Linux graphics benchmarks we have to publish today at Phoronix are some tests of the Intel “ILO” Gallium3D driver that is independently developed by LunarG as an unofficial alternative to the classic Intel Mesa DRI driver that’s officially supported by the Intel Open-Source Technology Center.

• At Apple’s recent WWDC event besides announcing a new 3D graphics API, Apple also announced Swift, a new programming. However, Apple developers don’t yet know — or can’t admit — whether Swift will ultimately be open-source or made to be cross-platform.

Benchmarks

• After last weekend delivering 30-way Intel/AMD/NVIDIA 2D Linux benchmarks this weekend I have some results comparing the GeForce GPU performance for 2D operations between the open-source Nouveau driver and the closed-source proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Wine or Emulation

• Wine 1.7.20 was delayed an extra two weeks due to outside scheduling conflicts, but that new release is now available. While the release schedule was twice as long, the release isn’t too particularly exciting.

• Found within Wine 1.7.20 is X11 drag and drop fixes, more C/C++ run-time functions have been implemented, fixes for more memory issues found by Valgrind, OLE storage fixes, and various other bug-fixes. This release has 88 bug-fixes found within this development version after the extended cycle.

Games

• E3 and all of its shiny new game launches may be winding down, but the gaming goodness is just getting started. Friday morning, games site GOG.com launched its summer games sale, unloading a slew of games at dirt-cheap prices, with deals being swapped out day-by-day and even hour-by-hour.

• Linux is slowly becoming a gaming alternative, but it’s still a long way from consoles and Windows. How long will it take to see Linux represented at the E3 Expo in full effect, just like all the other platforms?

• Making predictions is very hard, especially about the future. This simple statement from physicist Niels Bohr explains very well why it’s difficult to anticipate what will happen in the world of technology. Some things evolve faster than we can predict and others seem to stagnate…

• Ever since Valve released Steam for Linux, I had been hoping that Sid Meier’s Civilization V would come to the platform. In truth, I didn’t actually expect it to happen – not even after Beyond Earth was announced for Linux. As the game was announced for the OS earlier this week, though, this is one of those times I’m glad reality diverged from my beliefs.

• Team Fortress 2, the online multiplayer game developed by Valve, has been updated and a number of fixes have been implemented.

• Team Fortress 2 has been available on the Linux platform for some time now and the developers have released lots of patches for the game already.

• 2K and Firaxis Games announce that the Linux version of Civilization V has been released and the port has been made by Aspyr Media.

• When summer arrives, many games sites starts to sell out cheap games. We have found several games that works perfectly on Linux.

• Linux’s gaming potential is about more than SteamOS and blockbuster ports. Earlier this year, GOG.com announced plans to bring a bevy of classic games to Ubuntu and Mint Linux this fall, with more than 100 games expected to be available at launch. Expect them to work just fine with SteamOS when the operating system finally launches sometime in 2015, too.

• Speaking of Steam, it’s not the big-name games but the indies that are driving Steam for Linux’s true growth. After launching with a mere 60 native games just over a year ago, Steam for Linux now stands at more than 300 games strong—tremendous growth in a very short time. More and more games—like Europa Universalis IV, and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Dota 2, and Starbound—are starting to launch Linux versions alongside Windows counterparts.

• It’s still not quite the year of Linux on the desktop, but one thing’s for certain: Linux’s gaming prospects are looking brighter than ever before.

• While LGP was once the leading source for providing Linux-native games, these days there isn’t much to say for them and their web-site remains offline one and a half months after trying to do a server upgrade.

• Crytek has been after hiring Linux programmers for years now and a Phoronix reader pointed out there’s a fresh job posting for working at Crytek in Frankfurt, Germany on the OS X and Linux versions of CryENGINE. The job posting is for an engine programmer working on Linux and Mac to maintain the support for CryENGINE, contribute to the development of CryENGINE’s OpenGL renderer, maintain and improve low-level engine subsystems, ensure the reliability of their UNIX-based build systems, provide training, and carry out other tasks.

• Sid Meier’s Civilization V was announced today by Aspyr Media for Linux and SteamOS. The release targets SteamOS on current-gen hardware and is supporting Ubuntu 14.04. Future Civilization V Linux updates will expand the range of supported graphics cards.

• An updated version of the open-source OpenRA engine is out, the project with the goal of being a libre/free real-time strategy project recreating the original Command and Conquer titles.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• First I would like to say that this release would not have been possible without the excellent user community effort that arrived to help by lending their time and knowledge, after the very bumpy beta debut. Thanks to all of you.

• Team members also deserve recognition for tolerating difficulties with the beta and internal frustrations that needed to be addressed. Kudos. Now on with the release notes.

• The latest addition to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries is Elua, a Lua-based Just-in-Time application runtime stack.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This is one of our first interviews with the excited attendees of the Randa meetings and today you shall get a glimpse into the mind, workings and makings of Cristian Oneț who has been with KDE since quite some time now and has been a prominent contributor.

• The KDE Project developers have revealed that the second Beta version of the next-generation Plasma workspace has been released.

• Plasma Next has been built to eventually replace the current KDE Plasma, which seems to have run its course. This doesn’t means that the current Plasma used by the KDE project won’t be supported anymore, just that a change is coming in the near future.

• The Google developers have launched a new version of their Chrome browser, but this is just the development branch. It’s possible that some of the features integrated in this version of the browser will never make it to Beta and Stable.

• Google Chrome Dev is the place where the developers implement new features and where the majority of fixes are added. There have been very few times when the Dev release wasn’t large, and this is not one of those times.

• Before you follow my instructions to install Plasma 5 on your system, keep in mind that Plasma 5 is under heavy development and the stable release has not been made. Since it’s in development stage, there are (as expected) issues. Some of the issue you should be aware of include the missing wallpaper, icons may stop working now and then and Plasma Network Manager is missing as well.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Sorry for a bit belated post. In the last month I attended GNOME.Asia, held in Beijing this year, in conjunction with FUDCon APAC. The conference was perfectly organized and I had a lot of fun with the enthusiastic people. Congratulations to the organizers on the successful event.

• One day while hanging around at the #gnome-design IRC channel, Allan Day made me aware of the fact that default avatars in GNOME could use a revamp. Sounded like a nice adventure, so I began following an exciting yet challenging path, aiming to find the treasure that is good avatar conceptual design.

• This may not be such a big deal on Linux, where distributions generally have ‘their’ theme, not to mention the many packaged and readily available themes. So, basically no Linux user ever sees the default GTK+ theme. The situation is very different on other platforms, where GTK+ is often bundled with applications, and it may not be easy to install themes, or get the bundled GTK+ to use them.

• The latest change abound for GNOME 3.14 is a new default theme for the GTK+ tool-kit.

Distributions

• This article is a review of the latest edition of Antergos – Antergos 2014.05.26, a desktop distribution based on Arch Linux. Like Manjaro, another Arch Linux-based desktop distribution, it is a relatively young distribution, and like its parent distribution, is a rolling release distribution.

• A rolling release distribution is an install-once-update-forever distribution. That is, once a system is installed, there’s no need to reinstall when a new version is released.

• The Antergos installer offers a choice of six desktop environments – Cinnamon, GNOME 3, KDE, MATE, Openbox and Xfce. This review features materials from test installations of the Cinnamon, GNOME 3, and KDE desktops.

New Releases

• MythTV, a Digital Video Recorder and home media center hub featuring automatic commercial detection/skipping, intelligent schedule recording, parental control, remote administration, and many more other functions, is now at version 0.27.1.

• There were some nice items in the feeds on this unluckiest day of the month. Jack Germain says Pinguy OS is about as good GNOME as you can get. Andrew Powell asks Is Ubuntu’s Unity Really All That Bad Nowadays? And GamingOnLinux.com says Linux is “heating up” over at Steam. These stories and more on this Friday the 13th.

• Pinguy OS is easy to misjudge as being too basic for serious users. There is little to do but launch your applications and go about your computing tasks. It may not satisfy power users who like to control navigation with keyboard shortcuts and advanced system settings. However, if you are a normal computer user who just wants your system to work from the start, Pinguy OS has a lot going for it.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• Mandriva SA is proud to announce the official Europe launch of the “out of the box” QNAP IT Management Station with its partner QNAP (Quality Network Appliance Provider) Systems, Inc., that aims to deliver comprehensive offerings of cutting edge network attached storage (NAS) and network video recorder (NVR) solutions featured with ease-of-use, robust operation, large storage capacity, and trustworthy reliability.

Arch Family

• Few months ago I wrote about Xulrunner/AArch64 patches. Today I was able to make use result of them.

• The Arch-based Manjaro Linux distribution is out with its 0.8.10 update for its flagship Xfce version plus their editions for KDE, Openbox, and minimal “net” environment.

Red Hat Family

• The same week as Red Hat announced the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, the CentOS community is now out with a public QA release for testing.

• After three and a half years in development, a major milestone update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat’s flagship Linux platform, debuts.

• Many of you probably noticed (or were gleefully anticipating) the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 today. Which means it’s a really super day to be a Red Hat employee — seeing the culmination of so much open source work come together as the next major version of our flagship product is pretty inspiring.

Fedora

• Fedora 20 was released last December and the Fedora 21 schedule puts the next release as no earlier than mid-October, but there’s already a call for delaying this next version of Fedora Linux.

• Eariler this week, Mozilla released version 30 of their popular web browser, Firefox, and now Firefox 30 is available in the official Fedora Repositories for Fedora 20 (the Fedora 19 update is still in the testing phase).

• If you are missing a software in Fedora, it’s possible to ask for it and maybe someone will pick it up and make a rpm package for it.

• The feature proposal is moving forward for replacing the Yum package manager with the next-generation DNF solution for Fedora 22.

Debian Family

• Getting MATE ready for Debian has been hard work for the MATE Packaging Team, but it looks like they’ve pulled it off.

• “The MATE desktop environment is a fork of what was formerly known as the GNOME v2 desktop environment. The MATE upstream developers have performed a really good job in integrating the old GNOME code with latest technologies like DConf an GSettings.’

• The anonymous operating system that Edward Snowden used to evade the National Security Agency has more than doubled in popularity and use in the last year since the NSA whistleblower first made headlines.

• The Amnesic Incognito Live System, known widely as Tails, was booted up 11,107 times per day in the last month, according to its developers. That number equates to a boot once every seven seconds or 344,328 boots over the entire month.

• Debian is a big system. At the time of writing, the unstable distribution has more than 20,000 source packages, building more then 40,000 binary packages on the amd64 architecture. The number of inter-dependencies between binary packages is mind-boggling: the entire dependency graph for the amd64 architecture contains a little more than 375,000 edges. If you want to expand the phrase “package A depends on package B”, there are more than 375,000 pairs of packages A and B that can be used.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mark Shuttleworth is hosting his keynote right now for the latest Ubuntu Online Developer Summit. Mark mostly talked about Ubuntu Phone, the forthcoming BQ phone hardware, Unity 8, OpenStack, LXC / Docker, and cloud computing in general… During the question and answer period, he was just asked about Mir driver support.

• The latest Internet-based Ubuntu Developer Summit ended yesterday. For those not up to speed on your Phoronix reading, here’s a recap of the most interesting topics.

• Ever since the Mir announcement made by Canonical last year, the community has met the decision with some resistance. The Ubuntu developers have explained on numerous occasions why they chose this path for their systems and it all has to do with control.

• After testing the developer’s build of Ubuntu Touch smartphone OS in 2013, the company behind Ubuntu Linux (Canonical) has finally confirmed that it will soon release its first batch of entry-level smartphones running the open-source operating system later this year. The company has teamed up with Meizu and Bq to be its initial Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). As compared to the open source Firefox OS released last year in consortium with Alacatel, the mobile edition of Ubuntu is not an HTML 5 or browser-based ecosystem. Similar to Android, it loads native Ubuntu applications (messaging, phone, and camera) flawlessly, even with the absence of wireless connectivity.

• Canonical has just released a new Ubuntu 14.10 image that only comes with the new Unity 8 as the default desktop environment, but don’t expect it to become one of the main releases in October.

• Now, don’t get me wrong – when it comes to choice of desktop interface it’s a very subjective matter and often a matter of taste and what you, as the user, finds most comfortable and/or productive. Still, browse through various forums, comment sections or blogs across the internet concerning Unity or even Linux desktops in general and you’ll still likely find plenty of negativity towards Canonical’s flagship desktop offering. However, I do believe some of the common criticisms leveled at Unity are based on some of the early incarnations of that desktop. Is it really so bad nowadays?

• Of course, amongst all the perceived ‘hate’ and general negativity for Unity, there are also users with positive reactions who either are new to Unity and find it to be a good, stable and easy to use desktop or they are users who once disliked Unity based on it’s earlier versions but since trying out the Unity of today (say, Unity as it stands in Ubuntu 14.04) have had a change of heart.

• Besides figuring out SSD caching and other features for Ubuntu Server 14.10, developers at Canonical and other stakeholders are figuring out Ubuntu Server’s future with systemd in the long-term.

• Ubuntu developers are moving forward with their plans to support Click packages on the Ubuntu desktop.

• A question and answer session was held today during the Ubuntu Online Summit for those interested in the Mir Display Server and next-generation Unity 8 desktop with its focus on convergence.

• Canonical developer Michael Hall says that there are over 10,000 unique users running Ubuntu phone OS on their devices. Where did this number come from? Did they tracked the number of download? No, that would be too vague to conclude how many users are actually using the mobile OS.

• Ubuntu Phone users have to log into their Ubuntu One account (U1 file storage and music was discontinued this year), so that they can get updates or manage applications, just the way it works with Android, iOS or Windows 8. This gives Canonical the ability to know how many users used their U1 account to connect to the store and that’s where these numbers are coming from.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Marvell has posted detailed datasheets on its previously opaque Armada 370 SoC, used in Linux-based NAS systems from Buffalo, Netgear, and Synology.

• Samsung have delivered several Tizen powered Smart cameras and now according to a new leak, they are getting ready to deliver another Tizen based flagship model named the Samsung NX1. The expected announcement of this new Camera is thought to be at the Photokina event in September.

• Codethink demonstrated its Baserock Linux stack running the new Linux 3.15 kernel and an open source graphics driver stack on Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 SBC.

Phones

• The UK Online electronics retailer MobileFun have listed the Tizen based Samsung Z (SM-Z910F) as a unlocked smartphone on their site, with a release date to be confirmed. We are expecting a Russian launch event soon and MobileFun have confirmed directly to Tizen Experts that they are looking at stocking the Samsung Z in the near future, and will also be looking at selling a range of accompanying accessories.

Android

• Early reports are suggesting OnePlus One devices are finally ready to begin shipping to customers.

Free Software/Open Source

• A couple of years ago, I needed an oscilloscope for a fun electronics project I was working on: a 500W Tesla coil. I’d already spent quite a bit of money importing a kit of parts for the project from the United States, so the budget for the scope was pretty tight.

• If there is a “right way” to come in to open source, then surely this is it. So many people answered to say that their first brush with open source projects was that they spotted a problem somewhere in a tool they were using, and offered a fix. Open source is the combined effort of countless humans doing exactly this, and I was pleased and encouraged to find this as the biggest chunk of responders.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Mozilla has pulled a “Chrome” by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.

• FireFox OS is the smartphone operating system from Mozilla. It is based on web technologies and FireFox OS apps are written in HTML5. Using WebGL FireFox apps can access the hardware elements of the smartphone and provide experience like a true native app. FireFox For Android 29 is bringing the Open Web Apps ecosystem to Android.

• Mozilla has today extended its Open Web App repackaging to Android.

• Users of Firefox for Android are now able to install apps from the Firefox Marketplace, and have them install and behave like a regular Android app.

• “As a developer, you can now build your Open Web App for Firefox OS devices and have that app reach millions of existing Firefox for Android users without having to change a single line of code,” said the announcement blog post.

• The Mozilla Foundation and chip maker Spreadtrum have partnered with two Indian vendors to launch ultra-low-cost smartphones in the next few months. Spreadtrum said the phones could cost just $25.

• Mozilla has officially released Firefox 30 for all supported operating systems. Firefox 30 is minor release as compared to 29 that came in with many new changes and complete user interface design. Some new features have been introduced in both desktop and mobile versions including the addition of new languages. Series of changes in were also implemented in the developer version of Firefox 30.

SaaS/Big Data

• The deal, which ownCloud, Inc. announced June 11, involves 18 research and applied science universities in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany. Together, the institutions—which are collaborating under the name Sync & Share NRW—serve up to 500,000 users who will take advantage of ownCloud’s file syncing technologies, the company reported.

Databases

• As we’ve been covering recently, Icehouse, the next major release of the OpenStack cloud platform, is picking up steam. One notable thing about Icehouse is that it has introduced a new database-as-a-service feature, focused on building and managing relational databases, called Trove.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

Education

• Preparations are under way for the biggest change in the UK’s approach to computing education – but Raspberry Pi’s education expert Clive Beale reveals that the government is not putting enough money where its mouth is

BSD

• The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

• This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

• The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Compiler Collection version 4.7.4 has been released.

• I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ddrescue 1.18.1.

Licensing

• I’ve had my disagreements with Joyent’s management of the Node.js project. In fact, I am generally auto-skeptical of any Open Source and/or Free Software project run by a for-profit company. However, I also like to give credit where credit is due.

• Developers won’t be required to sign contributor license agreements before contributing to the open source software platform, although Node.js will still be distributed under the MIT License.

Openness/Sharing

• In late November 2012, the Open Source Malaria (OSM) team gained a new member who lived and worked almost 1700 kilometers away from the synthetic chemistry hub at the University of Sydney. Of course, collaboration across continents is not unusual for scientists, but until recently, recruitment in less than 140 characters certainly was.

• When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.

• As its base layer, DINAA adapts governmental heritage management datasets for broader open and public uses. DINAA is an exercise in open government data and community data sharing based on open source standards and ethics. DINAA (from construction, through rollout, and into future planning) is an example of how digital is simply the way we do archaeology now, and what that means for us as professionals and social scientists.

Science

• F1000Research, a scientific journal with a strong focus on open access and life sciences, operates quite differently than even the average open access journal. The team there uses new approaches to publishing scientific research; a few of their most noteable characteristics are:

• References and citations are what make the scientific and academic worlds go round. Everyone has their own system for keeping track of their research, from dumping everything onto a desk, to dumping everything into a folder (I like to call this the Pensky Method), to dumping everything into folders on a computer.

• As scientists and researchers develop new and better methods for collecting data, from new sensor technology to advancements in data mining techniques, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed grows accordingly. For big data, you need big clusters, and OpenStack has proven to be an important tool for many scientific institutions seeking to manage and orchestrate their machines and workloads.

Open Hardware

• Two MIT grad students offer up DIY brain-recording gear

Programming

• In my last few articles, I looked at several different Python modules that are useful for doing computations. But, what tools are available to help you analyze the results from those computations? Although you could do some statistical analysis, sometimes the best tool is a graphical representation of the results. The human mind is extremely good at spotting patterns and seeing trends in visual information. To this end, the standard Python module for this type of work is matplotlib. With matplotlib, you can create complex graphics of your data to help you discover relations.

Leftovers

• This May 22, 2013 file photo shows Internal Revenue Service (IRS) official Lois Lerner on Capitol Hill in Washington. The IRS says it has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy. The IRS told congressional investigators Friday it cannot locate many of Lois Lerner’s emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed that year. Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. The IRS was able to generate 24,000 Lerner emails from 2009 to 2011 because Lerner had copied in other IRS employees. But an untold number are gone. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

• Science says lasting relationships come down to—you guessed it—kindness and generosity.

• People in the UK should stop being “bashful” about being British, the prime minister has urged.

• Writing in the Mail on Sunday, David Cameron said the country should be “far more muscular” in promoting its values and institutions.

• He repeated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s call to promote “British values” in the classroom following the Trojan Horse claims in Birmingham schools.

Security

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Documents released under FoI reveal ‘enhanced collaboration’ plans, raising questions over independence of UK deterrent

• The removal of nuclear weapons from Scottish soil should be part of a post-independence constitution, according to Scotland’s deputy first minister.

• Tony Blair has urged western governments to recognise that they need to take an active role in the Middle East, saying the west should consider military options short of sending ground troops.

• The former prime minister said there was a huge range of options available, including air strikes and drones as used in Libya.

• Blair was speaking on UK morning TV shows after writing a lengthy essay setting out how to respond to the Iraq crisis, including his belief that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was not the cause of the country’s implosion.

• Tehran hints at cooperation with US to aid Nouri al-Maliki as jihadist group threatens to take Baghdad

• All roads lead to Baghdad and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is following them all, north from Syria and Turkey to south. Reading Western headlines, two fact-deficient narratives have begun gaining traction. The first is that this constitutes a “failure” of US policy in the Middle East, an alibi as to how the US and its NATO partners should in no way be seen as complicit in the current coordinated, massive, immensely funded and heavily armed terror blitzkrieg toward Baghdad. The second is how ISIS appears to have “sprung” from the sand dunes and date trees as a nearly professional military traveling in convoys of matching Toyota trucks without explanation.

• Political convergence between Republicans and Democrats has successfully passed popular legislation.

• He affirmed that after the 9/11 attacks, the US has ordered its tools in the Persian Gulf to close windows of terrorism, but after the outbreak of the crisis in Syria, it sent billions of Dollars through the Persian Gulf Arab states to the terrorist groups to kill the Syrians.

• Rahmat, meanwhile, hates and fears the drones, which deal death and destruction from above in a land where there’s already too much of both. Directly and indirectly, they cut him off from a better future, and even fuel support for the Taliban.

• “For me the research was about figuring out what that world is like,” said Nacer. “There’s a great website, Living Under Drones, that’s exactly what it is, what life under drones is like. It’s terror, all the time, because drones are up there 24/7.”

• One party chooses to concentrate on the destruction of a State Department/CIA outpost in Africa…

• Bergdahl Critics Didn’t Howl When Bush Freed Prisoners

• These developments include the June 5 Islamabad High Court order to lodge a murder case against ex-CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, the June 6 Karachi Airport attack by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of the Govt-TTP talks, the rising terrorist activities of the Haqqani network across the border in Afghanistan and the May 31 release of a US soldier who was reportedly being kept in the Waziristan tribal belt by the Haqqanis.

• What happens if China or North Korea start to undertake the same actions as the United States is taking? Japan will also face a similar problem as its Self-Defense Forces plan to introduce three UAVs in five years starting this fiscal year.

• The U.S. Military’s Campaign Against Media Freedom

• Footage from the scene then showed protesters upturning several diplomatic cars parked in front of the embassy. The vehicles also had their number plates ripped off and were covered by graffiti. Someone drew several swastikas in the colors of the Ukrainian flag on one of the cars.

• The U.S. formally ended its occupation of Japan, while maintaining a vast military presence, in 1952. The economy, largely due to U.S. military special procurements, had finally revived to the 1937 level during the Korean War, then grown to 150% of that level by 1952. There was stability; labor demonstrations and protests against U.S. bases were common and sometimes violent, but there was nothing remotely resembling civil war. It surely was a success story, from Washington’s point of view, if not necessarily from the point of view of the Japanese obliged to forego neutrality in the Cold War.

• An additional explanation of slow growth is now receiving attention, however. It is the persistence and expectation of peace.

• Going to Iraq for the first time was like lighting a lighter and putting it under your hand. You get burnt badly, but the lighter company got to make money. You should have learned the lesson.

• Now Republicans want us to do it again. They want us to put our hands on the lighter again, because they probably get paid for buying the lighters or that’s how they control the mindset of misinformed Americans.

• Republican leaders are not idiots (they are smart and know a majority of Americans have below average IQ (thanks to glorification of not going to school, dropping out or making it to expensive to get any education) and they won’t be able to fully understand these issues so they hit where they know it will work. And they are doing it again with Iraq, making us all forget it it was a fraud and Bush should be serving life time sentence for murder of innocent men & women or US armed forces as well as innocent Irqis.

• According to your website you’ve got about six jobs, Google says you own seven or eight houses and you privately jet about the world a lot visiting media moguls, their wives, their ranches and their yachts.

• A new round of comments from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko has revealed Pentagon waste was even more staggering than previously imagined, with billions likely spent on war materiel that was not only never used, but never even sent to Afghanistan.

• The present problems of Iraq are 100% down to our murderous invasion and occupation.

• As Iraq faces a growing insurgency in the north that is threatening to pull the country apart, the country’s Ministry of Communications has blocked access to a number of social media sites on Friday.

• Wealthy Gulf neighbours and the West fear for the stability of Yemen, which shares a long border with the world’s top oil exporter, Saudi Arabia.

• Computer Weekly can illustrate how a UK network connection forms part of a US weapons targeting system that has slaughtered civilians in anti-terrorist attacks gone wrong.

• The illustrations add credibility to a legal challenge begun last month over a 2012 contract BT won to build the UK branch of the system – a fibre optic network line between RAF Croughton in Northamptonshire and Camp Lemonnier, a US military base in Djibouti, North Africa.

• British officials had been slow to finger the BT contract under human rights rules because they said there was no evidence to suggest the UK connection was associated with US drone strikes, let alone any that had gone wrong.

• Eventually, being in charge of this new kind of death-from-above exacts an emotional and even hallucinatory toll, building up to a crescendo with shattering consequences.

• Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s largest and most influential human rights organizations, is facing an unusual amount of public criticism. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, and a group of over 100 scholars have written an open letter criticizing what they describe as a revolving door with the U.S. government that impacts HRW’s work in certain countries, including Venezuela. The letter urges HRW to bar those who have crafted or executed U.S. foreign policy from serving as staff, advisers or board members. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth has defended his organization’s independence, responding: “We are careful to ensure that prior affiliations do not affect the impartiality of Human Rights Watch’s work. … We routinely expose, document and denounce human rights violations by the US government, including torture, indefinite detention, illegal renditions, unchecked mass surveillance, abusive use of drones, harsh sentencing and racial disparity in criminal justice, and an unfair and ineffective immigration system.” We host a debate between HRW counsel Reed Brody and Keane Bhatt, a writer and activist who organized the open letter.

• Former US President George H W Bush celebrated his 90th birthday today by making a tandem parachute jump near his summer home in Maine, fulfilling a promise made five years ago despite having lost the use of his legs.

• Their reality is seen in bipartisan politicians creating a deficit of trillions of dollars to fund the unlawful wars of choice against Afghanistan and Iraq, and then failing to anticipate and provide adequate care for the large number of wounded veterans returning home. The long delays and cover-ups in treating veterans at the Phoenix VA medical center and elsewhere indicate that no soldiers are left behind—until they come home. Never mind that there would be no need for such extensive medical care for “wounded warriors” if former President George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney– and their neocon advisors—had not launched these unnecessary, illegal pre-emptive wars.

• Queensland parents Neill and Bronwyn Dowrick are demanding federal authorities provide hard evidence to show the Islam convert and English language teacher had been “radicalised’’ and become a foot soldier in the Holy War.

• Apparently in a belated but calculated reaction, Pakistan strongly condemned Thursday the two incidents of drone strikes near Miranshah in North Waziristan which reportedly killed at least 16 foreign militants amid suspicions the two countries coordinated over the attack in the aftermath of a Taliban siege of Karachi airport.

• Reports earlier quoted two unnamed government officials as saying Islamabad had given the Americans ‘express approval’ for the strikes. Underlining Pakistan’s alarm over the brazen Taliban attack on the airport, just weeks after peace talks with the militants stalled, the top officials told Reuters a ‘joint Pakistan-US operation’ had been ordered to hit the insurgents.

• Another official said Pakistan had asked the United States for help after the attack on the country’s busiest airport on Sunday, and would be intensifying air strikes on militant hideouts in coming days.

• The intriguing aspect of the revival of the drone strikes is whether they have been restarted with the ‘express approval’ of Pakistan.

• At a time when the American CIA’s targeted killing programme in the tribal areas of Pakistan was winding down, some recent developments seem to have made the US resume its deadly drone strikes after an unprecedented break of six months.

• After an unanticipated long break, the American CIA resumed its controversial drone programme in Pakistan’s restive North Waziristan tribal region raising concerns among its critics whether Islamabad has given a tacit go-ahead for fresh strikes.

• When CIA Director John Brennan — then the White House counterterrorism adviser — laid out the Obama administration’s new approach to fighting Islamist terrorism on June 29, 2011, he mocked conservatives who suggested that Islamist extremists were plotting to re-establish a caliphate across the Middle East.

• “Coming into my freshman year, I was very interested in the history of intelligence and espionage, which was something I didn’t know much about. I ended up working with two great professors – one of whom actually spent 30 years as an undercover CIA officer during the Cold War – and continued researching the CIA even after my career focus shifted to business and finance.”

• The CIA doesn’t need a brand. If anything, the agency is supposed to be all about discretion and secretiveness, meaning that it should be defined solely by its conspicuous absence. In fact, if the CIA ever wanted to run a TV ad, it should consist of 30 seconds of silence and a black screen. People would be left scratching their heads, unsure about who would even pay for such a thing, let alone what the objective was. And that would be the whole idea.

• What made Doctor Zhivago such a bitter pill for Khrushchev’s regime to swallow? Unlike Solzhenitsyn’s book, which was a head-on indictment of Soviet crimes, Pasternak’s novel was a poetic and abstract work, most of whose literary energy goes into miraculously vivid descriptions of weather and nature. Indeed, Doctor Zhivago was Pasternak’s first and only novel; before he started writing it, in 1945, he had been famous as a lyric poet and translator of Shakespeare. It was partly Pasternak’s great stature as a poet—he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times on the strength of his verse alone—that made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to deal with him. If even Stalin, in his massacre of Soviet writers, had taken care to spare Pasternak, how could Khrushchev—who was supposed to be presiding over a “thaw” in Soviet cultural life—dare to silence or jail him?

• Australian mining magnate Clive Palmer, in 2012, had accused the United States Government of funding environmental group Greenpeace via the CIA to undermine Australia’s coal mining sector. He was reportedly angry at Greenpeace’s plan to use lawyers to thwart future coal mining projects and claimed that funding is coming from an American environmental charity, the Rockefeller Foundation. He alleged it is funded by the CIA and is trying to harm Australia’s industry and help American interests.

• America’s neocons won’t let go of their Middle East delusions, now trying to leverage the worsening crisis in Iraq into an excuse to return U.S. forces to that tragic country while also escalating military involvement in Syria, a compounding of misjudgments, say Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett.

• The US has a disastrous record of involvement in ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts in Central America.

Transparency Reporting

• Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson, also known as “Siggi Hacker”, will tomorrow arrive in Reykjanes District Court to face charges of embezzlement, fraud, and theft adding up to about 30 million ISK.

• DV reports that Sigurður faces a total of 18 counts of the charges, ranging from funneling millions into a private bank account from Wikileaks to using the accounts of companies to which he did not belong to buy everything from laptops to fast food.

• The FTA granted greater rights to US investors. These included Colorado-based Newmont Mining, which had billions of dollars of interests in the area affected by protests.

• Newmont, the world’s second-largest gold-mining company, holds a majority stake in Yanacocha, one of the world’s largest gold mines. Newmont is now developing the Conga mine, the biggest ever foreign investment in Peru.

• Another cable, sent on June 5, provides an account of the outbreak of violence. Police sources cited by the ambassador said about 600 police moved on the blockade outside Bagua involving thousands of protesters.

• Police started firing after a group of about 60 of their own became isolated and surrounded by the Amazonian protesters. Police sources claim that protesters triggered the violence by firing on a helicopter that was shooting tear gas into the crowd in support of the isolated police.

• The police shot dead 10 protesters. Human rights groups later reported six indigenous men as missing, presumed dead.

• The very day 33-year old Michael Hastings died last year, he was busily contacting friends and associates including WikiLeaks to report that he was under an FBI investigation. He feared that his car had been tampered with, and even went so far as to ask a neighbor friend if he could borrow her car just hours before his death. Hastings also announced that he was about to release a major bombshell of a news story involving covert operations deployed by US intelligence agencies, specifically targeting current CIA Director John Brennan. The UK’s Daily Mirror published an August 15, 2013 article stating the CIA contractor Stratfor’s president claimed that Brennan was on a “witch hunt” for investigative journalists, which of course is consistent with the Obama administration.

• Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko handed to the US Embassy in Kiev inside information on the forging of a coalition government in 2006, according to Wikileaks data.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• In the face of expanding energy regulations, stepped-up Democratic attacks and the ongoing fight over Obamacare, the billionaire Koch brothers and scores of wealthy allies have set an initial 2014 fundraising target of $290 million which should boost GOP candidates and support dozens of conservative groups—including a new energy initiative with what looks like a deregulatory, pro-consumer spin, The Daily Beast has learned.

• Campaigners have managed to keep the Congo national park free from drilling just as protected sites elsewhere are being cravenly redrawn

Finance

• Lord Lucan was smuggled out of Britain to a remote Greek monastery by a former MI5 agent after the murder of his children’s nanny.

• The sensational claim is made in a new book which tells how spook James Gurney helped to mastermind the elaborate escape.

• Gurney says he moved the fugitive from a country pub in Kent to a remote safe house in Wiltshire before they boarded a flight from Heathrow to Greece.

• The last decade in Canada has seen the strengthening of the instruments of repression of the Canadian State such that we can now begin to describe and analyze the neoliberal containment state as a specific set of policies and institutions. These policies and institutions are aimed at containing the growing social ‘disorder’ and emerging resistance that have resulted from 30 years of the neoliberal economic order.

• It’s no secret that the city of Detroit is not the thriving industrial city that it once was, but as things decay over time, it’s sometimes hard to notice just how drastic some of the changes have been. Redditor Scarbane has compiled a startling collection of images from Google Street View showing just how much things have deteriorated in just a few years. These pictures broke my heart a little bit…

• Every year taxpayers subsidize Walmart – the world’s wealthiest corporation 1 – to the tune of $7.8 BILLION!

• HUH? Walmart, America’s largest private employer, raked in $17 billion in profit last year 2; its owners, the Walton family, have more wealth than the bottom 42% of Americans combined 3. But every year, Walmart’s poverty wages and extensive tax dodging cost taxpayers $7.8 BILLION in subsidies.

• Mr. Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was the only person on board the aircraft, an airport official said.

• The auction of the 29,000 bitcoins is scheduled to take place on the 27th of June over 12 hours. Interested bidders need to register themselves by 12 p.m. EST of 23rd June. They are also required to make a deposit of $200,000 through wire from a bank within the US. In addition, the participants need to provide a government issued ID and prove that they are not affiliated or related in anyways to either Ulbricht or Silk Road. All the bitcoins will be broken up into 10 chunks with each bidder able to bid on multiple chunks.

• Looking to buy some Bitcoin? The US government has plenty to sell. It’s put up for auction the more than 29,000 bitcoins that it seized from the underground drug sales site Silk Road earlier this year, all of which are currently valued at close to $18 million. The auction will occur and close later this month, and bidders won’t be required to purchase the entire, expensive chunk. Instead, it’ll be broken up into 10 chunks, most of which are worth about $1.8 million, and interested parties can bid on as many chunks as they want.

• According to The Week, protestors said that the cup’s $1 billion budget should have been used to support the country’s poorest regions through government funded programs.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ABC-VEgasWhen a husband and wife allegedly murdered two police officers and a bystander in Las Vegas, the story received a lot of coverage. But it was coverage that mostly failed to call the crimes “terrorism,” despite the alleged killers leaving behind a note that said, “The revolution is beginning,” and a Revolutionary-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag closely associated with both the Patriot and Tea Party movements (Hatewatch, 6/9/14). The couple, both white, were also associated with far-right causes and had expressed extreme hostility toward authorities.

• When a reporter fabricates stories, or passes along government lies as truth, people can get killed.

• Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters by Andrew Kreig (Eagle View Books 2013) is a comprehensive expose of the wealthy corporate interests who are the real power behind the federal government. Kreig orients his book around Obama and Romney, the major presidential candidates in the 2012 elections. However in discussing Mitt Romney’s hidden ties to the financial oligarchy, he also explores the Bush family’s Wall Street connections, the history and structure of the Mormon Church (especially as it relates to corporate America) and Karl Rove’s role in orchestrating Republican dirty tricks and voting fraud. Presidential Puppetry is meticulously researched and sourced, with a 17 page bibliography and 110 pages of footnotes and references.

Censorship

• Twitter has suspended at least six accounts affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the extremist group gaining ground in Iraq and Syria since fighting escalated this week.

• Egyptian security forces confiscated copies of a human rights group’s newsletter, saying the publication threatened the government, the head of the group said Sunday.

• Gamal Eid, the head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information, said police seized 1,000 copies of the publication, entitled Wasla, or Link, from the print shop the night before, also arresting a worker at the press.

• A Tribe Called Red’s Ian “Deejay NDN” Campeau has become one of Canada’s most high-profile First Nations activists. As his Ottawa-based electronic music crew have surfed EDM’s wave to unprecedented heights — including a Juno Award for breakthrough group and Rolling Stone shoutout — Campeau has used his public profile to raise awareness about respecting Aboriginal culture.

• Steve Coogan has become a patron of Index on Censorship, the international organisation that promotes and defends the right to freedom of expression.

• “We are delighted that Steve has agreed to be a patron of Index,” said its newly appointed chief executive Jodie Ginsberg.

• “Comedians, writers and performers often bear the brunt of attempts to stifle free expression – in both authoritarian regimes and in democracies.”

• Coogan said: “Creative and artistic freedom of expression is something to be cherished where it exists and fought for where it doesn’t. This is what Index on Censorship does. I am pleased to lend my support and patronage to such an important cause.”

• A new report by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN) has strongly condemned “soft censorship” by governments and regulators as a “very serious threat to media independence and the very viability of media companies”. WAN, which is the umbrella organization of newspapers representing more than 18,000 publications and 15,000 online sites in 120 countries around the world, has urgently called for rapid action to stop this blatant repression of media and press freedom.

• Censorship in China affects many popular Internet services and websites, but there are ways to make do

Privacy

• Surfing the Internet?? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is watching your every move on Web, and this time even more closure.

• Although privacy is now guaranteed under article 23 of the new constitution, an “NSA-like” agency – the Technical Agency for Telecommunications (ATT) – was also created back in November. Fears remain that Tunisia may not yet have turned the page on the Ben Ali surveillance era in spite of its new constitution.

• One year after Edward Snowden exposed the spying at the NSA, can the internet be re-set?

• The revelations drew international criticism, and led to the resignation of more than 33 DAS agents, more than a dozen of arrests and the eventual dismantling of the intelligence agency.

• So Secretary of State John Kerry thinks that Edward Snowden should “man up” and return to the United States. Well, fair enough, but should Kerry and other senior government officials “man up” and tell the public about the extent of spying on U.S. citizens as well as on our allies? Should they not reveal the civilian casualties of our drone strikes in allied countries such as Pakistan or Yemen?

• Kerry also states that Snowden “should trust the American system of justice.” Tragically, the system is doing nothing to halt the illegal drone strike bombing in countries with whom we are not at war, nor the long-term imprisonment of individuals without bringing them to trial. It seems that the American system of justice has fallen far short of its ideals. The NSA and CIA are totally unaccountable to either Congress or the Courts.

• US pushing local police departments to keep quiet on cell-phone surveillance technology

• Wyden made news last year when he caught Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper in an obvious lie. Asked whether the National Security Agency collects “any type of data at all on millions of Americans,” Clapper said, “No, sir.” Wyden said he had written numerous letters to Clapper and NSA’s then-head Keith Alexander, seeking clarification on the agency’s programs.

• Rarely do you get a chance to ask a just-retired FBI director whether he had “any legal qualms” about what, in football, is called “illegal procedure,” but at the Justice Department is called “parallel construction.”

• Law and computer science both have their codes, but they’re disparate. Legal code is often fuzzy and qualitative. Computer code is precise and quantitative. Not surprisingly, law and computer science tend to attract different people. It’s not that the twain shall never meet; it’s just that they seldom do.

• No, the pro-Hillary activists aren’t tapping your phones, but they are just as humorless as the spy agency when mocked. In November, we reported that the NSA and Homeland Security Department were none too pleased about parody products sold online using an altered image of their logo, such as a T-shirt with: “Peeping while you’re sleeping” inside the NSA seal and under that, “The NSA, the only part of the government that actually listens.”

• Congressman Steve Stockman Friday asked the National Security Agency to turn over all its metadata on the email accounts of former Internal Revenue Service Exempt Organizations division director Lois Lerner for the period between January 2009 and April 2011.

• The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals said no this week to tracking your movements using data from your cell phone without a warrant when it declared that this information is constitutionally protected.

• Yes, this is exactly what you think it means. The NSA can listen to your conversations and use your camera when you power off your phone. Sounds crazy, but it can happen.

• India’s new Bharatiya Janata Party government has come under pressure to scrap Aadhaar, the program which aims to enroll all of the country’s residents through biometrics.

• Last month, we wrote about how the USA Freedom Act was completely changed at the last minute in secret. This was even after the bill had been marked up and approved unanimously by two committees (Judiciary and Intelligence). Then the White House (read: NSA) came in and basically changed the bill around entirely, such that some say it’s even worse than before. Earlier this week, it even came out that the very author of the USA Freedom Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, was frozen out of the final negotiations on his own bill, such that the final product looked nothing like the original. While some in Congress tried to warn their colleagues that the bill they were voting on had been changed in secret, many Representatives didn’t fully comprehend what happened, and the bill passed.

• JOHN Kerry, the United States Secretary of State, has stepped in to oversee the investigation of reports that the National Security Agency is intercepting and recording all cell phone conversations in The Bahamas, with the ability to store them for up to 30 days.

• Thought the NSA was bad? Local police and the Obama administration are hoovering cellphone location data from inside your house, and a crackdown could lead to surveillance reform

• In a 2013 Pew Internet poll, for instance, 86 percent of internet users reported “taking steps online to remove or mask their digital footprints.” This ranged from encrypting email to clearing cookies and masking internet protocol (IP) addresses to avoiding using their real name on virtual networks. The same poll found that 68 percent of users believe existing privacy protection laws are inadequate. The poll says nothing of mobile data privacy.

• A year on from Edward Snowden’s revelations around state sponsored mass surveillance programs, some of the major players in the online and technological world (including Google, Mozilla, Twitter and Reddit) have launched the Reset the Net campaign.

• The program aims to increase people’s awareness and uptake of privacy and security tools so they can better resist surveillance, particularly that conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

• I would like to give a brief history lesson to those who have either forgotten the past or wish to ignore it. In 1933, the German Reichstag passed the Enabling Act in response to a terrorist attack. It gave Chancellor Adolf Hitler the power to enact laws without the involvement of the legislative body.

• Thousands of demonstrators might be camped outside GCHQ in Cheltenham for three days later this summer.

• Activists who are angry at reports that GCHQ and its American sister agency NSA have developed large programmes of mass surveillance of phone and internet traffic are calling for a three-day protest outside the ‘doughnut’ in Hubble Road from August 29 to September 1.

• Google just bought Skybox Imaging for $500m to gain access to its capability to take real-time, high-resolution satellite images/videos of the whole world daily. Last week Google sources told the WSJ that Google was planning to spend $1-3 billion on “180 small, high capacity satellites at lower altitudes than traditional satellites” to enable two-way Internet access. In April, Google bought Titan Aerospace – which makes solar-powered, high-flying drones that Titan calls “atmospheric satellites” — for Internet access to remote areas and for disaster relief. And in March Google CEO Larry Page shared his ambitions that Project Loon “could build a world-wide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet.”

• The Times cited Fellwock’s claim that the United States had encircled the Communist world with at least 2,000 electronic listening posts on land or on naval vessels or aircraft. It discussed his description of CIA covert action in Thailand, the NSA’s role in finding Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia, and the stationing of the electronic intelligence ship USS Liberty near the Israeli coast, where our the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) attacked it, killing 34 Americans. Throughout, the article treated Fellwock as a whistleblower, not a traitor.

• Nine states this year placed new legal limits on police cellphone surveillance after revelations that law enforcement agencies across the country are gathering cellphone data of thousands of people at once, often without warrants or without regard to whether they are criminal targets.

• On June 12, 2014 Senator Wyden asked for permission to address the U.S. Senate regarding the Intelligence authorization bill. There he spoke of the contributions of whistleblowers.

• A whistleblower (whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes misconduct, alleged dishonest or illegal activity occurring in an organization.

• Over 150,000 French people have supported a petition urging President Francois Hollande to grant NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in France after his refugee status expires in Russia in July.

• Oliver Stone may have purchased the film rights to Edward Snowden’s life story, but it seems as if the French are aiming for the rights to Snowden’s freedom by petitioning to grant him political asylum.

• Earlier this week, Simon Davies, the “Privacy Surgeon,” published a global analysis of the impact of the Edward Snowden revelations over the past year. The report, entitled A Crisis of Accountability demonstrates that, despite many strong and sweeping declarations, the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have failed to take meaningful action in the wake of the Snowden revelations.

Civil Rights

• The US government used informants and spies to coax Osmakac into making “radical YouTube videos”. The FBI eventually got him to buy fake weapons, with money the FBI gave him, and then arrested him on felony charges. Osmakac’s trial is like many others in the US, where the government prosecutes Muslims and Arab-Americans for pre-emptive crimes–crimes the FBI sets up, but that are not actually committed. Osmakac’s defense said that the FBI entrapped a mentally ill man.

• The federal prosecutors are using recordings from two FBI informants who had been spying on Osmakac or months. However, he had been talking with and led on by FBI informants for much longer. Sami Osmakac’s brother Avni Osmakac, said he had “seen agents around his house every day since 2010.” Their house frequently had undercover police vehicles parked nearby. Back then Sami had worked as a grocery stocker for a local market. This is where they think he met the first government informant. From there he spent over a year being coaxed and pushed by agents into making “radical YouTube videos”. He was eventually guided into buying fake weapons with money given to him by the FBI. Government videos show FBI informants teaching and pushing Sami into committing acts of terrorism.

• Osmakac was using government money to buy government weapons, Tragos said. The FBI was on “both sides of this transaction.”

• Michael Hastings was one of our generation’s best, most driven, and fearless reporters. His work at Rolling Stone changed the course of the American war in Afghanistan. At BuzzFeed, he told the story of the 2012 election and was building a beat on the dark side of Hollywood when he was killed in a car crash at 33, one year ago.

• Michael’s obsessive observation, his drive to figure it out, extended to his own profession. In his last years, he became obsessed with the internet, seeing, more so than most of his peers, that it would be a great home for big narratives. But Michael was ready for the change because he had seen the big changes shaking his business up close, watching the death throes of a great print institution as a young reporter for Newsweek from 2003 to 2008. It turns out that he observed that experience with the same obsessiveness and the same reflection.

• The notorious US private militia group Academi – previously known as Blackwater – trained Brazilian security forces in North Carolina in preparation for the current World Cup in Brazil, as reported by sportswriter Dave Zirin. Zirin pointed to the 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, which revealed that Washington viewed the expected World Cup-related crises as opportunities for US involvement. Zirin wrote that for Washington, “Brazil’s misery created room for opportunism.”

• Capitalism’s bullets follow the World Cup just as they do Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed with the US. Five years ago this month, protests were raging in northern Peru where thousands of indigenous Awajun and Wambis men, women and children were blockading roads against oil, logging and gas exploitation on Amazonian land. The Peruvian government, having just signed an FTA with the US, was unsure how to deal with the protests – partly because the controversial concessions in the Amazon were granted to meet the FTA requirements. According to a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks, on June 1st, 2009 the US State Department sent a message to the US Embassy in Lima: “Should Congress and [Peruvian] President Garcia give in to the [protesters’] pressure, there would be implications for the recently implemented Peru-US Free Trade Agreement.” Four days later, the Peruvian government responded to the protest with deadly violence, leading to a conflict which left 32 dead.

• The war against London’s “anti-homeless” spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action. In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.

• Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements

• U.S. officials thought they saw such an opening on July 2 when Bolivian President Evo Morales, who expressed support for Snowden, left Moscow aboard his presidential aircraft. The decision to divert that plane ended in embarrassment when it was searched in Vienna and Snowden was not aboard.

• The story’s credibility is greatly enhanced by virtue of who wrote it. Duncan Campbell has an unmatched track record for covering the world of spies and surveillance, which includes being the first to reveal the existence of both GCHQ and Echelon, the precursor to today’s Five Eyes surveillance system.

• As the whistleblowing NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden made his dramatic escape to Russia a year ago, a secret US government jet – previously employed in CIA “rendition” flights on which terror suspects disappeared into invisible “black” imprisonment – flew into Europe in a bid to spirit him back to America, the Register can reveal.

• Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can’t not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?

• While many Americans don’t seem to comprehend what’s happening all around them, the U.S government is implementing more methods of surveillance over this society and many of its agencies are acquiring more powerful weaponry. And now we are also seeing state and local law enforcement agencies following this government’s initiative of establishing greater and greater control over the American people. And that most certainly does not bode well for those who still value their privacy and rights under the Constitution.

• It seems as if the U.S. government is waging two Wars on Terror; one in foreign lands against Al-Qaeda and one here within this country and society. So with that in mind let’s examine some of the distinct similarities that are present in the U.S. government’s foreign surveillance and methods of hunting down suspected terrorists around the world and those same strategies and tactics that it and various other law enforcement agencies are using here in America.

• First let’s talk about surveillance. It’s no secret that, for many decades, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been conducting comprehensive surveillance operations on various foreign governments and specific individuals in those countries. That’s been going on for so long that few Americans even give it a second thought.

• In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.

• Senior legislative counsel for the ACLU estimates that if the Senate has its way, 100 U.S. citizens could immediately find themselves in Guantánamo-like indefinite detention.

• After dropping Palermo off, Keys was pulled over by TLC investigators and accused of operating the black Town Car as an illegal cab, according to the lawsuit filed last week in Queens Supreme Court.

• The life of a taxi driver is hard. When cabbies start a shift, they owe about $100 to their company as payment just for the opportunity drive a taxi. They might not break even until halfway through their shift, or maybe not at all that day. In most American cities, they have to work very long hours to make a living.

• During a shift, taxi drivers play a strange form of roulette when they pick up anonymous customers. The customer could be a pleasant family that tips them well, a drunk college kid that vomits in their car, or a violent criminal that robs and assaults them. After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.

• Anyone who has gone through school in the United States knows that history textbooks devote a lot of attention to the so-called “Good War”: World War II. A typical textbook, Holt McDougal’s The Americans, includes 61 pages covering the buildup to World War II and the war itself. Today’s texts acknowledge “blemishes” like the internment of Japanese Americans, but the texts either ignore or gloss over the fact that for almost a decade, during the earliest fascist invasions of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Western democracies encouraged rather than fought Hitler and Mussolini, and sometimes gave them material aid.

• The self-defeating logic of militarised social science targets anti-capitalist ‘extremists’ in the new ‘age of uncertainty’

Internet/Net Neutrality

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The fair use doctrine permits the unauthorized digitization of copyrighted works in order to create a full-text searchable database, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled June 10.

• This week, MPAA chief and former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd praised pirate site blockades as an important anti-piracy measure. Speaking at the IP Summit in London, Dodd said that ISP blockades are one of the most effective tools available. Does this mean that Hollywood will try to get these blacklists in place on its home turf?

• Informing the masses about the activities of settlement-seeking copyright trolls is what FightCopyrightTrolls.com does best, so no surprise that its rivals are now hitting back. In a motion revealed this week, the world’s most prolific filer of lawsuits against BitTorrent users accuses the site of running an Internet hate group that is both “criminal and scary”.

• With the copyright lawsuit factory formerly known as Prenda Law now mired in sanctions, a California company called Malibu Media has become the most litigious copyright holder in the US.

• City of London Police and Hollywood’s Federation Against Copyright Theft are claiming big results in a new government IP crime report. PIPCU say they have suspended 2,359 UK domains and cut off payment to 19 sites, with FACT claiming the closure of 117 pirate sites and the arrest of seven release group members in the past 12 months.

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