● 07.15.14

● Links 15/7/2014: New Plasma, Google Announces Project Zero

Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• There is an interesting trend going on in the PC market. Android powered smartphones have overtaken the total PC shipment. Which means Microsoft’s operating system is no more the dominating player in the market. We all understand that the post-PC era belongs to mobile devices as average users can do much more on their smartphones they they used to do on their Windows powered PC, sans mobility. But that’s not the only trend Microsoft is worried about, the real threat is somewhere else. Interestingly as Windows powered PC market is declining, sales of Google’s Chromebooks is picking up. Chromebooks are the #1 best sellers on Amazon.com.

• Do the maths. Millions are buying small cheap computers that do for them what bulky PCs used to do: compute and communicate. Those small cheap computers even do it better, being small and cheap (bonus for no extra charge). If M$ does give away its OS for small cheap computers or pay people to use its OS, everyone will know that the value of M$’s OS on desktop PCs and servers is about $0, too. The endgame is that M$ cannot just compete on price for consumers’ gadgets. M$ will have to compete everywhere and actually work for a living from now on. That will lower their margins considerably. That will cut into their bottom line. That may not maintain their market share anywhere near where it is now.

• To the regular consumer, Chromebook may not be a very cheap device but mind you, if you know the right places to shop, you can actually get a Chromebook that’s as cheap as $200. Now news doing rounds suggest that they could get cheaper than that. MediaTek has reportedly added a new experimental entry-level ARM Cortex A7 board to the open source Chromium OS repository. This will be used in place of the Cortex A15/A7 hybrid that is used by Samsung- not to forget the Intel Celeron chips that are used in other Chrome devices. In theory, this will make Chromebooks and Chromeboxes cost even less than $200, but will be offering sluggish speed.

• When it comes to selecting the best Linux desktop experience, there are a number of different factors to consider. In this article, I’ll explore 10 Linux distributions that I personally believe are the best all around desktop options.

• I’ll segment each off for newbies or advanced users, customization vs. pre-configured, along with how each performs on standard PC hardware commonly used in most homes.

Server

• Every year, the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is released. A list filled with machines containing tens of thousands of nodes and capable of cranking out enough petaflops per second to make your head spin.

Kernel Space

• E2fsprogs, a tool that provides the filesystem utilities for use with the ext2 filesystem and that also supports the ext3 and ext4 filesystems, is now at version 1.42.9.

• The development of E2fsprogs is progressing slowly and each new version managed to be quite impressive, especially if we take into account that it’s made by only one man. The new version of E2fsprogs, 1.42.11, comes with more new features, changes, and fixes than the previous release.

• According to the changelog, support has been added so that mke2fs can now create hugefiles that are aligned relative to the beginning of the disk, a bug that was causing e2fsck to abort a journal replay on a file system with bigalloc enabled has been fixed, sanity checks have been implemented so that mke2fs will now refuse insanely large flex_bg counts specified by the -G option, the ke2fs program is now able to provide a better metadata layout for moderately large flex_bg counts, and the mke2fs program will now check the kernel version number to determine whether the lazy_itable_init option is supported.

• Also, a description of ext4′s mount options has been added to the ext4 section 5 man page, the chattr man page has been improved, resize2fs will not try to calculate the minimum size of a file system, and a file descriptor leak in debugfs has been corrected.

Graphics Stack

• It’s been quite a while since the previous driver release by AMD for the Linux platform and it looks like the company still isn’t ready to promote a stable version. This means that the Linux users will have to contend with yet another Beta. At least it comes with a few fixes.

Applications

• A console application is computer software which is able to be used via a text-only computer interface, the command line interface, or a text-based interface included within a graphical user interface operating system, such as a terminal emulator (such as GNOME Terminal or the aforementioned Terminator). Whereas a graphical user interface application generally involves using the mouse and keyboard (or touch control), with a console application the primary (and often only) input method is the keyboard. Many console applications are command line tools, but there is a wealth of software that has a text-based user interface making use of ncurses, a library which allow programmers to write text-based user interfaces.

• LFTP 4.5.3, a sophisticated file transfer program with a command-line interface that supports FTP, HTTP, FISH, SFTP, HTTPS, and FTPS protocols, has been released and is ready for download.

• Mailnag, an email notifier that was initially developed for GNOME Shell only, was updated to version 1.0 recently, getting numerous changes such as a plugin system for easy extensibility and also, the application is now desktop-independent.

Proprietary

• Dropbox 2.10.2, a client for an online service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere, has been released for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

• The Dropbox client is a very popular application on the Linux platform, but its developers don’t seem to notice that. Most of the new versions ignore Linux users and focus mostly on the Windows and Mac OS clients, and this particular build is no different.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• When it comes to gaming, Linux has taken major steps forward. What once was a deserted island for gamers has now become a growing arena for both gaming fans as well as game developers. With each passing week, we see more and more gaming franchises debuting on this platform. Thanks to the massive investment of Steam in Linux, you can now have a full-fledged gaming experience without booting up your Windows installation.

• Epic Games has begun financially supporting the open-source Blender modeling software to improve the workflow for artists with Unreal Engine 4.

• Terraria a very popular 2D sandbox game is alive once again thanks to a renewed push from developers, and in a recent update they noted Linux will be looking into after Mac (and Mac looks close). The game itself is something that helped make sandbox games as popular as they are today.

• Vendetta Online 1.8.299, an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) from Guild Software Inc., has been released with a number of small but important features.

• The Vendetta Online developers have made a number of smaller changes to the multiplayer game, but some of those modifications don’t apply to the regular platforms. You will find quite a few fixes that are designed only for Android.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Next time you’ll start your updated Plasma 5 session’s KDE Wallet system, it’ll eventually start migrating your wallets. The precondition is that you’re doing that on a system that also has KDE4 and that you previously used that installation’s KDE Wallet system. If your system doesn’t have a KDE4 wallet daemon, then nothing will happen.

• Last weekend we had a really nice sprint Deventer, which was hosted by Irina and Boudewijn (thank you very much!). We spent two days on discussions, planning, coding and profiling our software, which had many fruitful results.

• Plasma 5.0 is wrapping up and we have all learned a LOT in the first few months of the Visual Design Group’s existence. One thing is clear though. If any of us had any doubts about whether an open approach to visual design can produce great results, most of those doubts have been assuaged. I’m super-proud to be part of this community and the quality of the results we have produced. It is really exciting to see the participation and the optimism by everyone involved!

• July 15, 2014. KDE proudly announces the immediate availability of Plasma 5.0, providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE’s workspace offering. The new Breeze artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability. Central work-flows have been streamlined, while well-known overarching interaction patterns are left intact. Plasma 5.0 improves support for high-DPI displays and ships a converged shell, able to switch between user experiences for different target devices. Changes under the hood include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5.

• I was fixing a friend’s computer this weekend and she asked me to install her evernote client to keep things in sync, sigh… it’s a java application and I really didn’t wanna install that but well, she needed, so I went to the developer website and WHOA, It went to Qt.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• you would think that, in 2014, implementing a code of conduct for conferences or conventions would not be a controversial topic. sadly, you’d also be mistaken. there are various contrarian positions about implementing anti-harassment policies; most, if not all of those positions are wrong.

Distributions

New Releases

• GParted Live 0.19.1 Beta 1-2, a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that can be used for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions with the help of tools that allow managing filesystems, is ready for testing.

• 4MLinux Allinone Edition 9.1 Beta, a Linux distro focusing on the Maintenance (system rescue Live CD), Multimedia (e.g. playing video DVDs), Miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and Mystery (Linux games) 4M editions, is now available for download and testing.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• “Open source gives us brand permission to enter a ton of categories,” said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.

• A few weeks ago, I covered the news that Google had released Kubernetes under an open-source license, which is software to manage computing workloads across thousands of computer servers and leverage docker containers. We’ve also covered Google’s announcement that some vey big contributors have joined the Kubernetes project, including IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack. They are working in tandem on open source tools and container technologies that can run on multiple computers and networks.

• The CentOS 7 Linux operating system became generally available July 7, providing users with a freely available desktop, server and cloud operating system platform. CentOS, an acronym for Community Enterprise Operating System, is based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 enterprise OS, released June 10. Unlike RHEL 7, which is a commercially supported enterprise Linux release that requires users to have a paid subscription, CentOS is free. That said, CentOS lacks the support, services and certifications that Red Hat provides its RHEL subscribers. CentOS does, however, provide the same basic technologies as RHEL 7, but for those who don’t need or want the additional enterprise-grade commercial services, CentOS is a free alternative. Red Hat is now an official support and partner of the CentOS community, as well, ever since a surprise announcement in January. CentOS inherits the same XFS file system used in RHEL 7, which provides a file system that can scale up to 500 terabytes. Docker container virtualization support is also part of the CentOS 7 platform. In this slide show, eWEEK examines the CentOS 7 Linux operating system.

• The second Alpha version of Scientific Linux 7.0, a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, is now available for download and testing.

• The developers of Scientific Linux 7.0 have moved very fast and, just a week after the first Release Candidate, a new development release has been made available. Given the short development period since the first Alpha, it’s actually surprising that the devs managed to get all those changes and improvements in.

• “Fermilab’s intention is to continue the development and support of Scientific Linux and refine its focus as an operating system for scientific computing. Today we are announcing an alpha release of Scientific Linux 7. We continue to develop a stable process for generating and distributing Scientific Linux, with the intent that Scientific Linux remains the same high quality operating system the community has come to expect.”

Debian Family

• The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

• Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian 7 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old “wheezy” CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Jane Silber is the CEO of Canonical, a 650-employee software company best known for two things. Its Linux operating system, named Ubuntu, that competes with Windows and Macs, and its bold plan to take on Apple, Google, and Microsoft with soon-to-be released phones/tablets/internet TV devices.

• Some hits and some misses as Canonical tries to cover everything from the smartphone to the desktop to the cloud.

• The City of Munich has become one of the most prominent examples of a city administration that switched from Microsoft products to open source, and it looks like Canonical and Ubuntu were an instrumental part of that change.

• As it’s been some months since last running any Linux vs. Mac OS X performance benchmarks, up today are benchmarks of the latest OS X 10.9.4 release on a Haswell-based Apple MacBook Air compared to running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the same hardware with also upgrading against the Linux 3.16 development kernel.

Flavours and Variants

• The newly launched Linux Mint 17 is now based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and all the next major releases will use the same codebase, which will be Linux Mint 17.1, 17.2, and 17.3. The upcoming Linux Mint 18 will be based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if everything goes according to plan.

Devices/Embedded

• The follow-up to 2013’s upgraded Cubieboard2 single- board computer (SBC), the Cubietruck was originally known as the Cubieboard 3. A departure from the family’s traditional narrow circuit board layout led to a name change prior to launch and, if nothing else, it helps differentiate the more powerful design from its predecessor.

• Today, the Raspberry Pi foundation have announced the release of an updated version of the Raspberry Pi model B, known as the B+ (the official announcement is here). There have been a couple of tweaks to the design over the past couple of years, but this is the first major revision. The big news is that it still has the same CPU, SoC and memory (which means that it should run exactly the same software as the previous version). However, there have been a number of important improvements across various parts of the board.

• The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced today the launch of the Raspberry Pi Model B+ as the final evolution of the original RPi board while still costing $35 USD.

• IriTech has launched an Indiegogo project for an Android-based “Fidelys” smartwatch with iris recognition technology and a rotating-clicking bezel for I/O.

Phones

• According to Jolla, the newest SDK Alpha 1407 has been released today which is good news for those who want to continue hacking and developing for Sailfish OS and those who just want to start doing it!

Ballnux

• Android L is still some months away from being officially available, but the preview release has given developers enough to port the firmware to HTC’s One M7.

Android

• Apps like Instagram have made photo filters commonplace. I actually don’t mind the vintage look for quick cell-phone snapshots, but a filter can do only so much. At first glance, Repix is another one of those “make your photo cool” apps that does little more than add a border and change saturation levels. It is more than that, however, taking photo modification to the next level and making it art.

• However, it’s still believed to be Android at play here that has been tweaked enough to offer an iOS like UI, claims 9to5Mac.

Free Software/Open Source

• Partition Logic is free software, available under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is based on the Visopsys operating system. It boots from a CD or floppy disk and runs as a standalone system, independent of your regular operating system.

• When I first started The HeliOS Project, I was using Librenet on my personal computer. Libranet had a per-user licensing agreement in order to make the effort pay and a single user license was for 69.00 If I remember correctly. Jon Danzig and I worked out a multiple licensing agreement that we could both live with. The fact is, Jon almost gave those licenses away because he believed in what we were doing. Jon’s untimely death in 2005 eventually resulted in the Libranet venture striking their tents and moving on.

• Making money from open source. To many in the corporate world, that seems like a contradiction in terms. How are you supposed to make money from something that you give away? they ask. It can be done. A number of companies, large and small, have done quite well in the open source space over the years.

• Just ask Patrick McFadin. He’s the chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax, a company that’s embraced the open source way. He’s also interviewed leaders at a number of successful open source companies to gain insights into what makes a successful open source business.

• Earlier this month, I spent a day working in the throwback world of DOS. More specifically, it was FreeDOS version 1.1, the open source version of the long-defunct Microsoft MS-DOS operating system. It’s a platform that in the minds of many should’ve died a long time ago. But after 20 years, a few dozen core developers and a broader, much larger contributor community continue furthering the FreeDOS project by gradually adding utilities, accessories, compilers, and open-source applications.

• Security is a top priority for Google. We’ve invested a lot in making our products secure, including strong SSL encryption by default for Search, Gmail and Drive, as well as encrypting data moving between our data centers. Beyond securing our own products, interested Googlers also spend some of their time on research that makes the Internet safer, leading to the discovery of bugs like Heartbleed.

• The first release candidate to OpenWRT “Barrier Breaker” 14.07 is now available with a large number of changes to this popular embedded Linux distribution primarily for routers and other network devices.

• My personal journey with open source began 18 years ago, and for my friend Robin Muilwijk, more than a decade ago. We sat down in an empty piazza in the heart of Amsterdam’s financial district late one night with my remote podcasting recorded this “call to arms” for open source. If you rely on open source and free software, if you take it for granted, or if you would like to understand how you, like me, can do more to make sure our journey, and that of those that follow in our footsteps, can be accepted by people across the IT divide, then give this podcast a listen.

• Juhan Sonin wants to influence the world from protein, to policy, to pixel. And, he believes the only way to do that is with open source principles guiding the way.

• Juhan is the Creative Director at Involution Studios, a design firm educating and empowering people to feel wonderful by creating, developing, and licensing their work for the public.

Events

• Seen as a meeting place for the free and open source software communities, the Linux Conference is set to be held at the University of Auckland early next year.

Web Browsers

Chrome

Mozilla

• Mozilla organized two national events in India during the month of June this year: Indic FirefoxOS L10n Sprint 2014 and Mozcamp Beta 2014.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• When it comes to Free Software projects, there’s a profound, deep misunderstanding about who does what and how it’s being done. Using the now overused quote, developers write a code “because they have an itch to scratch”, means that there can be twenty different motivations to contribute to Free Software. No one needs to explain or justify his or her contribution. In the real world, one of the most common motivation is money, be it in the form of a salary, a fee, or a transaction involving the developers to fix whatever bug or develop a new feature. Most of the FOSS projects I know -excluding Firefox- do not pay developers directly for fixing bugs except in very specific circumstances and by definition not on a regular basis. The LibreOffice project is no different. The Document Foundation serves the LibreOffice project by financing its infrastructure, protecting its assets and improving LibreOffice in almost every way except paying for development on a regular basis. What this means, in other terms, is that the Document Foundation does not provide support; nor does it provide service to customers. In this sense, it is not a software vendor like Microsoft or Adobe. This is also one of the reasons why there is no “LTS” version of LibreOffice; because the Document Foundation will not provide a more or less mythical “bug-free version” of LibreOffice without ensuring the developers get paid for this. The healthiest way to do this is to grow an ecosystem of developers and service providers who are certified by the Document Foundation and are able to provide professionals with support, development, training and assistance.

Business

• By implementing ODOO, an open source solution for enterprise resource planning (ERP), the University of Coimbra in Portugal can expect to save more than 70 per cent over the next five to six years compared to the costs of a well-known proprietary ERP solution, says ThinkOpen, a Portuguese ERP consultancy. The university is using ODOO (renamed in May from OpenERP) for its five stores.

BSD

• JabirOS, the distribution formerly powered by Ubuntu that changed to a FreeBSD base and then proclaimed itself an independent FreeBSD fork, is trying to invent its own user-interface.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GSRC remains one of GNU’s less known programs and is an easy way to download and install GNU software.

• More toolchain goodness this month, with several new features making their way into the sources…

Openness/Sharing

• Interested in keeping track of what’s happening in the open source cloud? Opensource.com is your source for what’s happening right now in OpenStack, the open source cloud infrastructure project.

Programming

• Invented 23 years ago, Python’s discovery as a great tool for first-timers has been more recent. The beginner-oriented Raspberry Pi has certainly influenced Python’s new role as a teaching tool, but also its increasing adoption at organizations like Google, Yahoo and NASA that make it valuable to know even after a programmer is no longer a beginner. In modern times, it has routinely been ranked as one of the eight most popular programming languages since 2008.

Standards/Consortia

• The Khronos Group has shared details about their BoF sessions to be hosted next month during SIGGRAPH and it includes detailing the next-generation OpenGL / OpenGL ES specifications.

Leftovers

• Disturbances have taken place in Buenos Aires after Argentina’s national team lost the World Cup final 1-0 to Germany. Police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse angry fans.

• [...]

• Despite the late Sunday clashes, the majority of Argentinians have accepted the loss with dignity. Earlier in the evening, thousands of fans came to the Obelisk monument, waving the national flag determined to party in celebrate reaching the World Cup final.

• But the generations of denigration of Scotland’s history, its reshaping to suit a Unionist agenda where the backwards and benighted Scots were brought in to the political and economic glories of the Union and British Empire, underlies so many of the attitudes to Scottish Independence today. Every culture has a right to reference its roots and history without ridicule – and the denial of the authenticity of genuine popular cultural heritage is a particularly pernicious form of ridicule, especially when it is built on lies drummed home in schoolrooms over centuries.

Science

• On Saturdays, the head of the landmark Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Program at the U.S. Geological Survey leaves his straw-bale house, where bees burrow in the walls, and goes to his office—for pleasure. From his desk, a recycled segment of a lane from a bowling alley, he pores over bee specimens with a microscope.

Security

• Prime minister David Cameron has announced a £1.1 billion spending package for the UK’s defence industries, which includes funding to tackle cyber crime and cyber terrorism.

• At the end of June I mentioned LZO and LZ4 security issues were uncovered while coming to light in the past week was another potential LZ4 security vulnerability for the lossless data compression library.

• Last week, when a blog announced to the wild that it was possible to overflow a pointer within LZ4, I immediately produced a fix within the next few hours to protect users, without checking how the code would naturally behave in such circumstance. After all, one assumption of 32-bits memory allocation was broken, so as a rule of thumb, I accepted the idea that it must have broken something.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• There are still more questions than answers regarding a drone Israel claims to have shot down.

• According to the Israeli Defence Forces Twitter account, “An aerial drone from Gaza infiltrated Israel a short time ago. IDF forces shot it down with a Patriot missile above Ashdod.”

• Ever-enterprising Israelis dragged plastic chairs and sofas up to a Sderot hill to eat popcorn, smoke hookahs and cheer when explosions lit up the night sky over Gaza in a photo posted by Danish reporter Allan Sørensen with the caption, “Clapping when blasts are heard.” A follow-up story in Kristeligt Dagblad said over 50 Israelis had transformed the hill, dubbed the Hill of Shame in an earlier war, into “something that most closely resembles the front row of a reality war theater.” The photo has caused outrage online, where commenters have blasted “the morality of a people so skewed that murder is a public spectacle.” Spectators say they were there to “look at Israel creating peace” and “see Israel destroy Hamas.” They inexplicably fail to mention the part about burning children. Oh Israel, what have you wrought?

• Roberts is repeating Israel’s claims that rockets launched from Gaza toward Israel were smuggled into the occupied territory by Syria and Iran–assertions whose validity is often accepted by US media without much scrutiny (FAIR Blog, 3/11/14).

• Nonetheless, her point is that the threat of US military force would stop allowing people to “get away with anything they want to get away with.”

• Iran has consistently told the world that it has no interest in developing a nuclear weapon. As of right now, there is no evidence that they are.

• A documentary that looks to shed light on a little-known Canadian factoid, Camp X: Secret Agent School, offers an in-depth look at a top-secret Second World War training camp near Whitby, Ont., that became North America’s first secret-agent school.

• I’m not speaking of the CIA, but they have been involved in Syria since before the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. It was shortly after that attack that a U.S. news report surfaced claiming that the CIA was funneling Libyan arms to the rebels in Syria, and it turns our that even before President Obama recently publicly authorized the CIA to train and equip select rebel groups, they had already been training them in Jordan.

• Gen. Hiftar was betrayed by Gaddafi, was approached by the CIA, moved to the USA, and now says he’ll purge Libya of jihadists. Really?

• It’s no secret that the Kurds see the civil war in Iraq as their opportunity for independence, but until now the US has publicly insisted on keeping Iraq a unitary state, even to the point that the Kurds began complaining that the US was the main obstacle to their national aspirations. Privately, however, it appears that the CIA has begun investing in infrastructure in Irbil as part of their effort to gather intel on ISIS.

• Author Nelson Denis inked a deal with Nation Books to tell the story of the 1950 incident when two island towns were bombed by the U.S. Army.

• Security sources said a leading Western-backed rebel was shot dead in the Jordanian capital of Amman. They identified the dead man as Maher Rahel, a commander in the Free Syrian Army, said to responsible for the deployment of rebels trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the Hashemite kingdom. “The killer fired one shot and fled,” a source said. The assassination of the FSA commander was said to have taken place on late July 11 near a traffic circle in western Amman. The sources said Rahel, 27, commanded the Liwa Al Mujahideen Brigade, linked to FSA and deployed in southern Syria.

• Jordan, where the US Central Intelligence Agency has been covertly training Syrian rebels for more than a year, is reluctant to host an expanded rebel instruction programme, US officials say.

• The June drone strikes killed nearly 19 militants, including a high-level Haqqani network commander, Haji Gul, and two senior Afghan Taliban leaders. Pakistan’s foreign ministry condemned the strikes, calling them a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. However, other media reports said that Pakistani government officials privately coordinated with U.S. authorities on the attacks. The Washington Post reported in October that Pakistani government officials have for years secretly endorsed the drone program and received regular classified briefings on drone strikes from their U.S. counterparts.

• After decades of lively public debate, New Zealand abolished the death penalty for murder in 1961. It is not widely known that the death penalty for treason remained on the statute books until it was also abolished in 1989.

• What, exactly, does the United States stand for in the Middle East? More important, what would the average Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian or Yemeni say that it stands for? The suggestion that the United States is retrenching might seem absurd, given that Yemenis can hear the buzz of drones overhead. The notion that the United States is in the business of supporting democratic pluralism might clash with their reading of our Egypt strategy or our will-they-or-won’t-they waffling over whether to actively support Syrian opposition fighters. Day by day, with chaos blossoming, it becomes clearer that if we do have a strategic narrative for the Middle East, we certainly have not articulated it effectively. In marketing terms, we are not making the sale.

• Israel has ordered three Jews suspected in the kidnapping and killing of a Palestinian teenager held until Friday as they made their first court appearance.

• Israeli naval commandos have launched an early morning raid on a beach in the north of Gaza City, as the coastal enclave suffered the bloodiest day yet of the six-day Israeli assault, with 54 Palestinians reported killed.

• The raid came amid continuing speculation that Israel would launch a ground offensive in Gaza, a move likely to sharply increase the number of civilian casualties. So far, 166 people have been killed including 30 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

• Much of the world is horrified at Israel’s latest slaughter of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip but the continued power of the Israeli Lobby over Official Washington has silenced any protests against the imbalanced infliction of death, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar observes.

• However, the U.N. Office for Humanitarian Affairs said Sunday that civilians made up the majority of Palestinian casualties over the past six days – 133 of 168 killed and nearly half of more than 1,100 wounded. And a human-rights researcher said some of Israel’s strikes appear to have violated rules of war.

• Israel’s military said it downed a drone along its southern coastline on Monday, the first time it encountered such a weapon since its campaign against the Gaza Strip militants began last week.

• The drone came from Gaza and was shot down near the southern city of Ashdod, the military said. It did not say what the drone was carrying and there was no immediate confirmation from Gaza on the use of unmanned aircraft.

• On Saturday evening, Hamas issued a warning, saying it was going to bomb Tel Aviv at 9 p.m. It did, and luckily the rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome. Sunday morning the IDF issued a similar warning to all residents of “the northern Gaza Strip,” saying it will attack the entire area at noon. Can anyone see the difference? Does saying you’re going to attack a civilian area exempt you from responsibility for the civilians you target? I don’t think so.

• As a Friend (Quaker) who believes there is “that of God” in everyone and therefore every life is sacred, I am deeply concerned about the proliferation of lethal unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones.

• The United States is leading the way in this new form of warfare where pilots on U.S. bases kill people by remote control, thousands of miles away. Drones have become the preferred weapons to conduct war due to the lack of direct risk to the lives of U.S. soldiers, but these drone strikes have led to the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians in many countries.

• A proposal for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas from the Egyptian government late yesterday was flatly rejected early today by the armed wing of the Palestinian militant group. The notice was posted on the group’s website.

• Why are Western liberals always more offended by Israeli militarism than by any other kind of militarism? It’s extraordinary. France can invade Mali and there won’t be loud, rowdy protests by peaceniks in Paris. David Cameron, backed by a whopping 557 members of parliament, can order airstrikes on Libya and British leftists won’t give over their Twitterfeeds to publishing gruesome pics of the Libyan civilians killed as a consequence. President Obama can resume his drone attacks in Pakistan, killing 13 people in one strike last month, and Washington won’t be besieged by angry anti-war folk demanding ‘Hands off Pakistan’. But the minute Israel fires a rocket into Gaza, the second Israeli politicians say they’re at war again with Hamas, radicals in all these Western nations will take to the streets, wave hyperbolic placards, fulminate on Twitter, publish pictures of dead Palestinian children, publish the names and ages of everyone ‘MURDERED BY ISRAEL’, and generally scream about Israeli ‘bloodletting’. (When the West bombs another country, it’s ‘war’; when Israel does it, it’s ‘bloodletting’.)

• A group of Israeli filmmakers have added their voices to those pleading for a ceasefire to the attacks by their Government on the Gaza Strip.

• U.S. officials say Israel should not have to accept rocket fire aimed at civilians. But what about other nations?

• The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies exploit social media to keep the endless war on terror alive.

• Last month, Islamic insurgent took control of two main Iraqi cities, Mosul and Tikrit, and openly challenged the pro-West Government in Baghdad.

• ISIS is portrayed as a Sunni-extremist group that split from Al-Qaeda. However, recent details leaking out suggests that the rise of ISIS is being ‘shaped and controlled’ out of Langley, Virginia and other CIA facilities in the States with the objective to spread chaos in world’s second largest oil state Iraq.

• Palestinian militants resumed rocket attacks on Tel Aviv on Monday after a 24-hour lull in strikes on the Israeli commercial capital, and Israel kept up its air and naval bombardments of the Gaza Strip despite growing pressure for a ceasefire.

• The Arab League yesterday called for world powers to end Israel’s devastating bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

• Egypt also proposed a truce to start early today to be followed by talks on easing the flow of goods into Gaza.

• The Israeli military said it downed a drone launched by militants in the Gaza Strip on Monday, the first time it encountered an unmanned aircraft since the start of its offensive last week, as new Israeli airstrikes pushed the death toll from a weeklong Israeli offensive to at least 175.

• Israel began its campaign against militants in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip last Tuesday, saying it was responding to heavy rocket fire from the densely populated territory. The military says it has launched more than 1,300 airstrikes since then, while Palestinian militants have launched nearly 1,000 rockets at Israel.

• The Israel Defense Forces tweeted the following Sunday: “An aerial drone from Gaza infiltrated Israel a short time ago. IDF forces shot it down with a Patriot missile above Ashdod.”

• Red Alert, which alerts users every time a rocket is fired into Israel, has already been downloaded 780,000 times. It could give you peace of mind. Or it could make you hysterical.

Transparency Reporting

• A SWEDISH court is set to consider whether an arrest warrant for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be repealed.

• In 2008, Obama griped that the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege “more than any other previous administration” and used it to get entire lawsuits thrown out of court. Critics noted that deploying the state secrets privilege allowed the Bush administration to shut down cases that might have revealed government misconduct or caused embarrassment, including those regarding constitutionally dubious warrantless wiretapping and the CIA’s kidnapping and torture of Khaled el-Masri, a German car salesman the government had mistaken for an alleged Al Qaeda leader with the same name. After Obama took office, his attorney general, Eric Holder, promised to significantly limit the use of this controversial legal doctrine. Holder vowed never to use it to “conceal violations of the law, inefficiency, or administrative error” or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency of the United States Government.”

• In light of a year’s worth of historic revelations about government subterfuge and mass surveillance, President Barack Obama’s early promise to oversee the most transparent administration ever now seems spectacularly ill-fated.

• Let’s go over that again. The federal government claimed the power to kill its own citizens, denying them the rights to due process and trial by jury, and tried to keep that memo from ever seeing the light of day. Hey, but at least you’ll know who has been visiting the White House.

• Over 30 years ago, I was in Mexico City when an electrifying story suddenly dominated all the papers. It claimed that the CIA had made numerous attempts to assassinate Castro. I was shocked. Then I reminded myself that I was in a Third World country, and this might be political propaganda. When the American press ignored it, I dismissed it. Twenty years later, we learned it was true.

• The FBI’s meetings with a WikiLeaks defector in Denmark were illegal and the Danish authorities knew about it, the whistleblowing organization claims in a criminal complaint filed with the East Jutland Police.

• Recently released e-mails shine further light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (C.I.A) late 2010 high-level meetings with New York Times and government officials centering on WikiLeaks and Chelsea (Bradley) Manning. The emails convey the difficulties that the C.I.A and numerous government agencies had in grappling with WikiLeaks’ seismic release of Collateral Murder, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, and Cablegate documents. The released C.I.A emails, published by NYT eXaminer, reveal the ways in which almost a dozen Obama administration functionaries colluded to disparage WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as engaging in conspiracy to commit espionage with Manning. A number of the officials involved in these meetings with the New York Times later went on to launch campaigns to discredit other whistleblowers.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Germany produced a record 50 percent of its electricity needs through solar panel at the start of June, breaking a huge milestone on its march to renewable energy.

Finance

• Billionaire Hungarian-American oligarch George Soros is an extremely concerned humanitarian who can be counted on to put his considerable bank balance where his concerns are. Lately, those concerns have included Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states; Syria; immigration rights in America; the U.S. banking system; and the Great Lakes region of Africa, where all the mining opportunities just happen to be. Perhaps he could lay off the generosity long enough for us to recover from it all.

• You can buy a lot with £76,000 ($130,000). That’s how much the average London home has appreciated over the past year.

• U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for failure to pay more than $20,000 in withholding tax…

• Bitcoin Comic1At the recently concluded CoinSummit in London, a preview of a comic was unveiled that’s sure to intrigue Bitcoin enthusiasts and common people alike.

• Large corporate capitalism is a breed apart from smaller scale capitalism. The former can often avoid marketplace verdicts through corporate welfare, strip owner-shareholders of power over the top company bosses and offload the cost of their pollution, tax escapes and other “externalities” onto the backs of innocent people.

• Always evolving to evade the theoretically touted disciplines of market competition, efficiency and productivity, corporate capitalism has been an innovative machine for oppression.

• Take productive use of capital and its corollary that government wastes money. Apple Inc. is spending $130 billion of its retained profits on a capital return program, $90 billion of which it will use to repurchase its own stock through 2015. Apple executives do this to avoid paying dividends to shareholders and instead strive to prop up the stock price and the value of the bosses’ lucrative stock options. The problem is that the surveys about the impact of stock buybacks show they often do nothing or very little to increase shareholder value over the long run. But they do take money away from research and development. And consumer prices rarely, if ever, drop because of stock buybacks.

• Metal thefts, which have caused blackouts and traffic accidents, are on the rise in states across the country. A new Ohio state law aims to tackle this problem by regulating scrap yards.

• In May, an international trade agreement was signed that effectively serves as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of world markets. While the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) negotiations were not censored outright, they were barely mentioned in our media. This marginalisation and secrecy was in stark contrast to the global historical importance of what was agreed upon.

• Kirchner’s problems are the most pressing. On June 16, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a decision of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordering Argentina to pay in full the claims of a group of creditors, who hold roughly $1 billion in Argentine bonds, about 1 percent of the country’s outstanding debt. The investors, led by New York billionaire Paul Singer and politically well-connected in Washington, acquired the tag of ‘vultures’ by buying up the bonds at steep discounts and refusing to accept an agreement signed by around 92 percent of bondholders. U.S. courts have also ruled that banks operating in New York must disclose information about non-U.S. assets of the Argentine government.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• How I long to have a Wikipedia entry to call my own! It would be a sign I’d arrived, that I’d made it. It would surely help my career no end. And even though I know myself better than anyone, it is unlikely I could write my own as I’d find it impossible to adhere to the site’s strict rules on neutrality. I’d want my entry to be a gleaming eulogy to all my wonderful achievements. Until yesterday, I might have sneakily paid someone to professionally write or edit a page for me. But thanks to a recent change in Wikipedia’s terms of use, I can’t do that any more, unless my ghost writer declares an interest. I’ll just have to labour on in non-Wikipedia obscurity.

• Sixteen states, more than 500 communities, two million Americans, and now the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, are on-the-record in support of amending the constitution to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in Citizens United v. FEC and related cases and to restore the power of people in elections.

Censorship

• Well this is fascinating. Ronan Farrow, the well-known MSNBC reporter who is also an attorney and former State Department official (and, at times, a subject of much parental speculation), apparently has come out in favor of blatant censorship. Following in the dangerous footsteps of Joe Lieberman, Farrow is apparently angry that internet companies like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter aren’t taking down accounts that he believes are used by terrorists.

• News Corporation Australia has used an inquiry by the nation’s Senate into a proposed Australia/South Korea free trade agreement to suggest internet service providers become copyright enforcers.

• It is a mystery why the Observer failed to name Lord Greville Janner as the paedophile abusing boys from care homes. The facts of this particular boy’s continued molestation, and the existence of the letters to him from Janner, have been public knowledge for decades. I can only presume that Britain’s appalling libel laws, which function solely to protect the very rich from exposure of their misdeeds, are the reason for the Observer’s reticence. My own view is that the gross suppression of freedom of speech in the UK has been insufficiently considered as a major reason for the impunity which the wealthy and the powerful have enjoyed for so long.

• Roughly a month ago, I wrote about Kenneth Eng’s doomed copyright lawsuit against author L’Poni Baldwin for allegedly stealing his techno-dragon ideas. As was pointed out by the judge in the lawsuit’s dismissal, copyright doesn’t apply to ideas — only to the expression of ideas. And Eng’s ideas (and expression thereof) weren’t sufficiently distinctive from a host of other technology-meets-mythology creations. The judge did, however, allow Eng to re-file his complaint, both to refine his copyright claims and to actually make some sort of actionable claim.

• In May, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a subpoena issued to New York Times reporter James Risen. Federal prosecutors have demanded that Risen reveal the name of a CIA agent who was a source for his book “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.”

Privacy

• The company is getting into the intelligence game, developing a cloud system for the CIA that will allow them and other intelligence agencies to share information. Joan Neuhaus Schaan of the Texas Security Forum understands why the CIA wants this.

• The NSA has been caught in lie after lie about its surveillance on Americans.

• It’s been a little over a year since revelations from Edward Snowden’s historic NSA leak started appearing in newspapers around the world, and information about new surveillance programs is still surfacing every month. Last week, The Washington Post analyzed 160,000 NSA records and found that “ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted” by NSA surveillance programs. Four days later, Glenn Greenwald released the names of five distinguished Muslim-American men whose emails were being monitored by the NSA, none of whom are suspected of any wrongdoing.

• Global governments, the tech sector, and scholars are closely following a legal flap in which the US Justice Department claims that Microsoft must hand over e-mail stored in Dublin, Ireland.

• In essence, President Barack Obama’s administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. It’s a position Microsoft and companies like Apple say is wrong, arguing that the enforcement of US law stops at the border.

• In one short week, the UK Parliament is set to ram through a new bill on mass surveillance. It is the “Data Retention and Investigatory Powers” Bill, AKA DRIP.

• When the European Court of Justice rightly invalidated an EU directive forcing telecommunications companies to store data for up to two years on all of their consumers, British Prime Minister David Cameron’s reaction was to countermand the spirit of the ruling and double down on the failed policies of mass surveillance.

• The CJEU ruling was delivered on 8 April, 2014. The government has had 3 months to address the court’s findings. We believe that it is the threat of legal action by Open Rights Group and other organisations that has prompted this ‘emergency’ legislation – not the threat of terrorism or criminal activity. The government should not mislead us about the urgency of this legislation. Given its significance and the threat to our civil liberties, It should not be passed without proper parliamentary scrutiny.

• The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers bill is the most tedious outrage ever, right down to the dreary acronym. But oh, the horrors it will bring …

• New York-based company Wiper releases an app that gives you the ability to delete your texts, photos, and call logs from your phone, your friend’s phone, and the company’s server.

• Tor is the backbone of the anonymous Internet, and clearly the NSA hates it with a passion. Or, at least, it did until it began to realize that Tor nodes were great places to meet terrible people’s IP addresses. Now, Tor itself has never been compromised: It remains secure and anonymous. But to get to Tor, you have to use a Tor node, and to get to a Tor node, you must send info from your IP address to the node’s address. And even before that, you’ve got to download the list of Tor exit and entry nodes from the central authority.

• If you downloaded the privacy software Tor in 2011, you may have been flagged to be spied on.

• That means that if you downloaded Tor during 2011, the NSA may have scooped up your computer’s IP address and flagged you for further monitoring. The Tor Project is a nonprofit that receives significant funding from the U.S. government.

• Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden is investigating the economic harm he said is being caused by the National Security Agency’s surveillance methods.

• The public disclosure of emails by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, could be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”, according to a letter fro the US Department of State responding to a FOIA request by online publication, The Desk.

• Remember in May when the National Security Agency said it found one email from Edward Snowden to the NSA office of general counsel?

• The NSA released that email shortly after Snowden said in an interview with NBC host Brian Williams that the agency had copies of emails from Snowden “raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of its legal authorities.”

• The National Security Agency has acknowledged it retains a record of e-mail communications from former contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden, but says those records are exempt from public disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

• A fresh set of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the UK intelligence agency can manipulate online polls and debates, spread messages, snoop on YouTube and track Facebook users.

• UK eavesdropping nerve center GCHQ has developed tools to manipulate online polls, ramp up page views for articles, and obtain private photos on Facebook. That’s according to Glenn Greenwald’s latest trawling of documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

• According to new documents released by Glenn Greenwald and FirstLook.org (provided by none other than by the “Boy-Who-Must-Not-be-Named” as far as the NSA is concerned),the GCHQ has dedicated an entire wing of its surveillance arm to actively monitoring and manipulating the status of petitions, organizations, and websites at will in order to influence the public opinion.

• The Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) – Britain’s National Security Agency (NSA) equivalent – commands a wide-ranging set of tools that enable it to hack into popular social media and communications outlets and plant false information on the Internet, according to a document published by The Intercept Monday. The long list of options ranges from inflating the results of online polls to allowing the agency to monitor Skype communications in real time, though the details of that capability remain murky.

• The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.

• Nearly six in 10 people around the world express confidence in President Obama even as his approval rating in the United States is near an all-time low, according to a poll released Monday.

• Klaus Scharioth, Berlin’s former ambassador to the US, tells DW why Germany’s expulsion of the top CIA official was right and why the current crisis is the biggest challenge yet for transatlantic ties.

• Worse yet, when Angela Merkel responded by demanding the departure of the CIA’s chief of mission, the administration was dismissive — expressing annoyance that Merkel had publicly denounced a practice that the “intelligence community” views as standard-operating-procedure. Obama should instead view Merkel’s gesture as an occasion to take dramatic steps to reassure a country in which only 27% of the public views the United States as trustworthy, and 46% consider it an aggressive power.

• In 48,643 interviews in 44 countries, Pew also found that the United States is more favorably viewed than China in all areas of the world except the Middle East.

• In a new poll from the Pew Research Center, 81 percent (the global median excluding U.S. citizens) of people around the world said it was “unacceptable” for the U.S. to spy on them. Fewer (73 percent) thought it was unacceptable for the U.S. to spy on the leaders of their country and 62 percent were opposed to the U.S. spying on its own citizens.

• A main selling point of the U.S. brand on the international stage has long been summed up with the screech of eagles and one word: “Freedom.” But in the wake of the revelations about U.S. surveillance programs from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year, the world is less convinced of the U.S.’s respect for personal freedoms according to new survey results from Pew Research.

• Recently, news that Facebook had set out to manipulate the emotions of more than 700,000 unwitting “psychological study subjects” (read: its users) in an effort to better understand how they respond to certain content and, in turn, better monetize said users, set off a firestorm about who owns what, when, and how. Are we just finger-tapping pawns in their giant hive machine? Are we being taken for a ride on that Great Monetizing Ferris Wheel, being flipped upside-down until every last penny falls from our pockets?

• Campaign groups concerned with privacy and civil liberties have told a normally secret court that GCHQ is not allowed to access the data it collects from the internet.

• Civil liberties groups took Britain’s spy agencies to court Monday in a bid to limit electronic surveillance, as the country’s government tries to pass legislation to extend snooping powers.

• Intelligence agencies need to intercept a communications “haystack” in order to find their “needle”, which civil liberty groups must accept, tribunal hears

• The AP report on the destruction of The Guardian’s hard drives is just the latest evidence that reporters can’t trust the Obama administration on spying claims

• US government standards for software may enable spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) through widely used coding formulas that should be jettisoned, some of the country’s top independent experts concluded in papers released.

• Such mathematical formulas, or curves, are an arcane but essential part of most technology that prevents interception and hacking, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been legally required to consult with the NSA’s defensive experts in approving them and other cryptography standards.

• But NIST’s relationship with the spy agency came under fire in September after reports based on documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pointed to one formula in particular as a Trojan horse for the NSA.

• The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been urged to hire more crypto experts so it can confidently tell the NSA to take a hike.

• The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been legally required to consult with the NSA’s defensive experts in approving them and other cryptography standards.

• NIST’s primary external advisory board released a report calling for the agency to increase its staff of cryptography experts and implement more explicit processes for ensuring openness and transparency to strengthen its cryptography efforts.

• As a matter of faith, some people believe that God can see and hear everything. But as a matter of fact, the U.S. government now has the kind of surveillance powers formerly attributed only to a supreme being.

• Top “national security” officials in Washington now have the determination and tech prowess to keep tabs on billions of people. No one elected Uncle Sam to play God. But a dire shortage of democratic constraints has enabled the U.S. surveillance state to keep expanding with steely resolve.

• Just a day after a historic trial began that challenges the legitimacy of Britain’s mass surveillance programme, fresh documents have revealed how the GCHQ — the government’s intelligence and information gathering agency, has developed sophisticated tools to manipulate online polls, artificially increase traffic to a website and find private photos of targets on Facebook.

• The NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden has condemned the new surveillance Bill being pushed through the UK’s parliament this week, expressing concern about the speed at which it is being done, lack of public debate, fear-mongering and what he described as increased powers of intrusion.

• The secretive UK investigatory powers tribunal has begun its hearings into the legality of mass surveillance conducted by tapping fiber optic lines, through a Snowden-revealed programme called TEMPORA.

• Emergency legislation announced by the UK government on July 10, 2014, that would grant the British intelligence and law enforcement agencies access to data about millions of people’s communications is a blow to the right to privacy.

• Edward Snowden has spoken out on #DRIP, the surveillance bill that the UK’s major parties have vowed to ram through without any debate.

• Privacy campaigners and lawyers have warned that emergency data legislation currently being ‘railroaded’ through parliament gives the government “sweeping” new surveillance powers, despite assurances from David Cameron and other party leaders that the Bill only maintains current practices.

• Brit spy agency can monitor Skype, manipulate online polls, and “amplify” sanctioned messages on YouTube.

• Two German parliamentarians suspect that their phones were tapped by an intelligence agency, according to Der Spiegel. The allegations come amid a diplomatic row between Berlin and Washington over US espionage.

• The NSA is probably violating myriad foreign countries’ laws, because all countries prohibit foreign spying against themselves. Yet, this hardly justifies the current outrage abroad. The complaining countries are running similar programs.

• What does character have to do with espionage? That question, as much as any details about handlers and cover names and clandestine meeting spots, is what makes the events that led, this past week, to the expulsion of the C.I.A.’s station chief in Berlin feel like an old spy novel. The beguiling way to look at it is in terms of the character of the spy: the way he acts and his attributes, those he takes on in some undercover operation and those that make one wonder about who he is and where his loyalties really lie—about his own character, in the moral sense. But spy stories also lead us to talk, in ways that are more and less useful, about the character of nations.

• FOR this year’s Independence Day bash the US Embassy in Germany picked the historic Tempelhof airport where an allied air lift 66 years ago kept Berlin’s citizens from starving during Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s blockade.

• If there was one clear lesson from the dust-up over Ms. Merkel’s cellphone, it was that such operations against allies are almost certainly not worth the damage caused when they are revealed, as they too often are. This is particularly true of Germany, where there is currently a generally pro-U.S. government whose cooperation is critical to managing the crisis in Ukraine, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and a prospective trans-Atlantic free-trade deal, among other matters.

• Commenting on the execution of a French nobleman by Napoleon, the French diplomat Talleyrand supposedly observed: “It was worse than a crime — it was a blunder.” That consummate expression of realpolitik certainly applies to the alleged U.S. espionage operation in Germany that has strained relations between the two countries.

• During much of the Cold War typewriters were state of the art, so they were the focus of spooks and spies just as mobile phone networks, emails and social networks are today. Techniques were developed to use cheap microphones to listen to key taps and decipher what was being written, spy cameras could peer over typist’s shoulders and undercover agents could photograph and leak documents. Debonair KGB agents were even tasked with seducing typists and winkling information from them. Missile-equipped Aston Martins aside, some of what you see in James Bond films actually went on.

• Germany’s parliamentary committee investigating the National Security Agency is mulling using manual typewriters to make sure American agents don’t snoop on its work.

• Patrick Sensburg, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party who is leading the panel, told a German broadcaster on Monday that the committee needed to do all it can to secure its work from spies’ prying eyes.

• The head of Germany’s parliamentary inquiry into the NSA spying scandal has suggested the government return to using typewriters to protect national secrets from prying eyes.

• On July 10, the German government demanded the immediate departure of the head of the CIA mission in Berlin. Such demands are not unusual, even between ostensible allies. What is unusual is that it should be publicly announced, and with much fanfare. What accounts for what some are already calling an “unprecedented breach” in the very close relations after 1945 between the United States and the German Federal Republic?

• The CIA refuses to hand over its records on notorious East German Stasi head Erich Mielke, a German filmmaker claims in court.

• Politicians claim communciations technology is mistrusted in wake of US spying allegations and NSA surveillance revelations

• As evidence of US spying and surveillance continues to mount, Germany is struggling to secure even basic government documents from prying American eyes, and are forcing officials to take some unusual steps.

• In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about surveillance tactics employed by the NSA, there are increasing concerns about corporate data privacy, and especially about where to house corporate and customer data. The prevalence of cloud computing and cloud-based storage and collaboration services is only exacerbating these concerns. While public pushback and grass-roots reform campaigns are evolving in the US and abroad, the reality remains that banks and financial institutions must operate within jurisdictional parameters. Deciding where to house and how to move your data is an exercise in both understanding the relevant legal regimes and the appropriate application of risk analysis in the decision-making process.

• The organisations that are looking to invent, and dominate the next era of computing are, at their heart, based on advertising revenue, and in the process of owning the future, these companies and their device-based competitors will treat the personal information of consumers as a prized commodity.

• One of the greatest obstacles to achieving that goal is that we live in the age of specialization, where scientists, social analysts, and experts in every field focus in on a particular area of knowledge and study. But almost no one can look at the big picture and connect the dots. Very few disciplines demand the study of data from a vast spectrum of trends, scientific developments, political changes, economics, food supplies etc. Metadata is data about the data on a wide variety of topics, but it is only as good as the the kind of data it collects and its ability to analyze that data. According to Anthony Lowenstein, a writer for The Guardian, “The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 Exabyte’s a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five Exabyte’s.”

• US intelligence agencies are considering basing their recruitment activities in Warsaw or Prague due to growing pressure in Germany following the NSA spying row, according to German media. – See more at: http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/176193,US-spies-to-relocate-to-Poland-after-German-row-#sthash.PH74Toqr.dpuf

• The U.S. approach to spying in that country was different during the Cold War, when it was split between West Germany, allied with the United States in NATO, and East Germany, part of the Communist Warsaw Pact headed by the Soviet Union. Back then it was a target-rich environment for spies from all sides.

• Two German parliamentarians suspect that their phones were tapped by an intelligence agency, according to Der Spiegel. The allegations come amid a diplomatic row between Berlin and Washington over US espionage.

• Against this backdrop, it is hard to qualify the latest scandal as mere stupidity. The N.S.A. revelations could at least be dismissed as an unfortunate but inadvertent result of mission overreach; developing human intelligence sources within the German government is another matter. To many Germans, America’s continuing espionage against one of its supposedly closest allies smacks of arrogance and disrespect.

• The UK’s most secretive court is beginning a week-long hearing – mostly in public – into complaints that GCHQ’s mass surveillance of the internet violates human rights.

• In April the European Court of Justice threw out an EU law that forced companies to retain data for at least six months, saying it breached the right to privacy.

• He told the Guardian: “I mean we don’t have bombs falling. We don’t have U-boats in the harbour.

• “I mean the NSA could have written this draft,” he added.

• “They passed it under the same sort of emergency justification. They said we would be at risk. They said companies will no longer cooperate with us. We’re losing valuable intelligence that puts the nation at risk.”

• T he Data Retention and Investigation Powers Bill announced last Thursday will maintain the authorities’ existing powers rather than add to them, according to the Government.

• It includes measures that ministers say will maintain the balance between security and privacy, including a “poison pill” clause which will terminate the legislation at the end of 2016, forcing the next government to debate and pass a replacement bill.

• Labour has agreed to support the bill but civil liberties campaigners warn it is being rushed through without the necessary examination.

• Britain’s CCTV network is one of the largest in the world, while leaked National Security Agency (NSA) files shone a light on the extent of surveillance of online activity. Sales of the novel spiked in the light of the Edward Snowden revelations last year.

• As you have probably heard, the UK government is using the most underhand of methods to pass a deeply undemocratic and illiberal law that would extend surveillance massively in this country, the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill (DRIP). Here’s the absurd timeline of how it will be pushed through…

• The NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden has condemned the new surveillance bill being pushed through the British parliament this week, expressing concern about the speed at which it is being done, a lack of public debate, fear-mongering, and what he described as increased powers of intrusion.

• Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. “I mean, we don’t have bombs falling. We don’t have U-boats in the harbour.”

• It is suddenly a priority, he said, after the government had ignored it for an entire year. “It defies belief.”

• He found the urgency with which the British government was moving extraordinary and said it mirrored a similar move in the US in 2007 when the Bush administration was forced to introduce legislation, the Protect America Act, citing the same concerns about terrorist threats and the NSA losing cooperation from telecoms and internet companies.

• NSA whistleblower says it ‘defies belief’ that bill must be rushed through after government ignored issue for a year

• [...]

• In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Moscow, Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. “I mean we don’t have bombs falling. We don’t have U-boats in the harbour.”

• US Secretary of State John Kerry has insisted that Washington and Berlin remain “great friends” despite a new spying scandal. Two new alleged cases of espionage have rocked German-US relations over the past two weeks.

• The latest spying revelations, combined with revelations last year that the NSA was targeting Merkel’s cell phone, have sunk German-US relations to the lowest point in a decade. The German public’s anger over American spying has reached a fever pitch; if it weren’t for the media distraction caused by German participation in the World Cup final later today, it would be even worse.

• A noted NSA whistleblower told a group of journalists earlier this week that the NSA is lying when they try to reassure Americans that they “just” collect call metadata, which is information about the caller, recipient, and timing of calls. Rather, the whistleblower says, 80% of all American voice phone calls are recorded and then stored with no plans for disposal.

• The bill is known as the Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA), and it now heads to the Senate for a debate and possible vote, but some politicians and privacy rights groups are concerned that the bill won’t protect average Americans.

• Now, a year and a half after Swartz killed himself, there is the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. CISA is a lot like CISPA, but could end up being even worse. Privacy and civil rights groups including the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are standing up to fight it. In an article about the bill, the ACLU’s Sandra Fulton wrote: CISA “poses serious threats to our privacy, gives the government extraordinary powers to silence potential whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new powers from transparency laws.” The bill has been approved by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and will move to the Senate soon.

• As former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks have revealed, the surveillance nets are everywhere. The agency intercepts data to cellphones and computers, tracks the Web browsing habits of millions of individuals worldwide and, through its Optic Nerve program, downloaded private webcam footage from innocent people. It has even embedded bugs within consumer technology products after intercepting and opening packages shipped through the mail.

• First, you can never have an expectation of privacy. Don’t say anything in an email or any other kind of Internet communication that would get you in trouble if, instead, you drove to Washington and said it to an investigator of the National Security Agency. Because putting it in an email or any other communication means you are, in fact, saying it to the NSA.

• Decades before the NSA mined its first scrap of data, Hitler’s Gestapo—the worst of the worst of the Nazis—perfected the dark art of domestic spying and intimidation.

• Glenn Greenwald’s latest reporting has given us conclusive proof that the NSA has unfairly monitored Muslim Americans. As Sikh Americans, we were very pained to see leaders of civil rights organizations and academic institutions as well as a Muslim American who served the Navy as a JAG officer and worked in the Department of Homeland Security unjustly surveiled. This revelation reminds us of Fred Korematsu and the Japanese American internment, which is, to this day, one of the darkest moments in our nation’s history.

• Classified NSA training documents using the racial epithet “raghead” surfaced this past week in a recent release of documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden put his life on the line in order to expose the US spy agency’s violations of human rights and privacy around the world.

• The U.S. government has been snooping on prominent members of the Muslim-American community, according to documents released by National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden and publicized in a story by Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of the online publication Intercept.

• That story reveals that the NSA and FBI covertly monitored the emails of five Muslim-Americans who have “all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives,” the article said.

• For the last couple of weeks, sections of the cyber security community have been absorbed by questions of greater import that those of the round ball. Is Edward Snowden the only whistleblower, or does the National Security Agency now face a second leaker? If so, what do they know?

• Talking up the power of big data is a real trend at the moment and Google founder Larry Page took it to new levels this month by proclaiming that 100,000 lives could be saved next year alone if we did more to open up healthcare information.

• Reid Hoffman, the founder and chairman of LinkedIn (LNKD), the professional networking site, is a big proponent of trust–between managers and employees and between his company and its customers. So naturally he’s not a fan of the government’s NSA surveillance program.

• Some of the substantial proof of this comes from Cuban spy trials in 2001 and 2006, when US federal prosecutors presented evidence in a Miami courtroom that people had been spying on the US for Cuba and sending encrypted shortwave radio transmissions.

• Edward Snowden is seeking to extend his stay in Russia, where he has been granted asylum from the U.S. after releasing documents on the NSA’s surveillance programs around the world, and officials at the Kremlin confirmed to state media that the new permit is likely to be approved.

• The United States has spent more than US$500 billion on intelligence since 9/11, an outlay that U.S. officials say has succeeded in its main objective, preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack. This fiscal information, published in intelligent estimates colloquially known as the “black budget”, was revealed for the first time nearly a year ago, through whistle-blower disclosures made by Edward Snowden, which were published by the Washington Post.

• BRITISH security services infiltrated and funded the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange in a covert operation to identify and possibly blackmail establishment figures, a Home Office whistleblower alleges.

Civil Rights

• Cage has also worked with the victims of mistreatment and abuse to expose what it sees as British government participation in the secret world of rendition and torture. It also spoken out against the UK’s anti-terrorism laws, saying they are draconian and target Muslims. But it insists it has always conducted its activities legally and clearly states it is opposed to the killing of innocent civilians.

• I’m afraid I don’t have an obvious alternative to “libertarian” that would encompass this third pillar of our present order, and distill the entire structure’s complexity to a single word or phrase. But the third pillar’s heft and importance is too substantial to ignore, and there are all kinds of elements of our age — from “too big to fail” to the Department of Homeland Security, from the design of Obamacare to the nature of our coalition politics, from the political forays of Mark Zuckerberg to the fate of Brendan Eich — that don’t make sense if you can’t sense its shadow, or recognize how big a role it’s likely to play, going forward, in keeping the whole edifice standing up.

• Dallas Northington spent nearly eight years working for Target in loss prevention, roaming the stores and scanning the surveillance cameras. In an episode at the Leesburg Target store in May that he said was typical, a man was allegedly captured twice on video shoplifting, and Northington responded as he said he always did: He called the Leesburg police, made a report and provided them the videos of the two incidents.

• Canada’s Omar Khadr has lost his bid to have his war-crimes convictions tossed after the U.S. government argued a previously secret memo that raised questions about the legal underpinnings of his prosecution was irrelevant to his case.

• As readers of this blog will know, after the Second Circuit released a redacted copy of the OLC’s “drone memo,” those of us who represent Omar Khadr filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review (“CMCR”) arguing that it undermined the validity of his convictions. In due course, the government filed its opposition to the motion, which somewhat predictably argues that the OLC’s analysis is not relevant to the case. As we were about to file a reply, the CMCR denied the motion to vacate, albeit “without prejudice.” Thus, the issue is not going away any time soon.

• Since 2008, the Harper government has been guided by unthinking support for Guantanamo and the military commissions, a blind eye to the violation of Khadr’s legal and human rights, willful ignorance of the law and disregard for decisions by the Supreme Court.

• Khadr’s case is one where wrong has been piled onto wrong over the years, both in Canada and the United States, during the long war on terror. Khadr’s father’s close al-Qaida connections rightly angered Canadians, who felt betrayed. But under international convention, child soldiers in these circumstances are to be rehabilitated, not sent to jail. When all is said and done, this will go down as a dark chapter in our federal government’s willingness to ignore long-held principles of juvenile justice, as well as its obligations to international conventions on children and the rule of law.

• The father of Roman Seleznev has offered a $50,000 reward for information regarding the arrest of his son in the Maldives, including any video or other evidence supporting the reports and witness statements that it was American agents that arrested, questioned and then transported his son to Guam. The case is another example of the United States and the CIA flaunting international laws and forcing countries to allow them free reign.

• The dead bodies of a young married woman and her stepdaughter were found from their house here in village Jurian village.

• UK Foreign Office documents concerning the use of British territory by CIA ‘rendition’ flights show that ministers have been keeping key evidence in their posession from MPs, it has emerged.

• Crucial logs that confirm the British overseas territory Diego Garcia was involved in the CIA’s black site rendition program as a secret prison have been passed to the UK police for further investigation, despite earlier claims that there were no logs.

• CIA agent claims the agency derailed his career because he wrote a novel that cast The Company in a negative light…

• Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates that “about 2%” of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.

• Whistleblower and former Conservative party activist Anthony Gilberthorpe says he provided child prostitutes for a sex and drugs party with top politicians

• Michael Ratner: NSA and FBI spying on the lawful political activity of Muslim Americans, as revealed by The Intercept, is no different than the surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, and other black civil rights leaders

• Have we reached that point? Many think so. A recent poll found 74% of Americans agree the broken political system needs to be fixed first. The poll found that “corruption of government by big money and frustration with the abuses of the political ruling class: incumbent politicians, lobbyists, the elite media, big business, big banks, big unions, and big special interests unites Americans.” And, “the battle lines of the new political order are emerging. When presented with the proposition that ‘the real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but mainstream America and the ruling political elites,’ over 66% of voters agree.”

• One of corporate journalism’s bad habits is framing international stories on the premise that news is what happens to the US. There is no better recent example of this than the story of tens of thousands of children fleeing Central America for refuge in other countries, including, but not limited to, the US. With some exceptions, this story is covered as the US’s “border crisis,” and the latest installment in our supposed immigration debate, with the children little more than nameless symbols of a troubled policy.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• In recent weeks, there have been several notable developments related to the future of Internet freedom and access. Now, The Internet Association, a consortium that includes Facebook, Google, Twitter and Netflix, has a comment filed with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission demanding better enforceable net neutrality rules for boh wired and mobile networks.

• During this open comment period for the FCC’s proposed rulemaking on net neutrality, it’s been great to see hundreds of thousands of comments go in to the FCC on the matter. It’s also been fantastic to see that a number of innovative startups have decided to speak out on how important an open and free internet is for being able to build their businesses, to innovate and to compete on the modern internet. They also point out that the current plan from Commissioner Tom Wheeler would put that all at risk. Here are three interesting ones worth mentioning.

• THE UNITED STATES Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has received over half a million comments about its proposals for the future of net neutrality in that country.

• Ahead of tomorrow’s deadline, a total of 647,000 comments have been sent to the commission expressing views on the future of the internet.

• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) needs to be convinced that Net Neutrality is worth saving.

• The agency has asked members of the public, along with industry leaders and entrepreneurs, to tell it why Internet Service Providers should be banned from traffic discrimination. This comment window is one of the best opportunities we’ve had to make an impact. Comments are due July 15, 2014. Submit your statement in support of Net Neutrality right away using the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s free software commenting tool.

• Net neutrality, the principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, should be a basic right for Internet users. It’s also crucial for free software’s continued growth and success.

• On the July 14 edition of CNBC’s Closing Bell, host Kelly Evans interviewed Harold Ford, Jr. and John Sununu about the FCC’s latest proposed regulations, introducing them as “Broadband for America honorary co-chairs,” without explaining what Broadband for America was. Both Ford and Sununu insisted that the Internet should not be treated as a public utility and claimed that new regulations would slow Internet speeds and innovation.

• An association of more than two dozen technology companies including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Netflix urged the Federal Communications Commission on Monday to create strong, enforceable net neutrality rules for wired and mobile networks.

Intellectual Monopolies

• As Techdirt has reported, corporate sovereignty chapters in TAFTA/TTIP and TPP have emerged as some of the most controversial elements in those agreements. Meanwhile, countries that already have bilateral investment treaties (BITs) with investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms are looking for ways to get rid of them in order to avoid the loss of sovereignty they imply. One nation that already has considerable experience in this area is Bolivia. A new report provides fascinating background information on exactly how it has gone about this (pdf), with valuable lessons for others looking to do the same.

• Democrats in Congress are pumping the brakes on negotiations of a multinational trade pact, worried that a significant bloc of their base would leave the party should the agreement be approved before the November elections.

Copyrights

• Kim Dotcom says he will drop a political bomb just days out from the election and prove Prime Minister John Key misled the public.

• Mr Key has always maintained the first he knew about Dotcom was a day before the raid on his mansion. But Dotcom says that is not true and he has hired the Auckland Town Hall.

• Dotcom says he will drop a political bomb, which goes right to the core of Mr Key’s credibility, five days out from the September 20 election.

• The Internet’s Own Boy is a documentary about computer prodigy, Internet pioneer, and activist hacker Aaron Swartz, but even if you’ve never heard of Aaron Swartz you should see this movie. The story has implications beyond the short life of one man. Through the passion, drama, and tragedy of Aaron Swartz’s life The Internet’s Own Boy describes issues that impact everyone online: censorship, government surveillance, free speech, transparency, and net neutrality.

• Musician steps up to run digital music company that he founded, ahead of launch for gadget and high-def downloads store

• Kim Dotcom’s emerging music service Baboom is inviting would-be investors to grab a piece of what should be an intriguing startup. Speaking with TorrentFreak the senior advisor handling the offer says that not only is it tracking “exceptionally well” but the company is being “overwhelmed” with support from the global indie music industry.

• The American Bar Association has released a detailed white paper advising the Government on how to tackle online piracy. The lawyers recommend several SOPA-like anti-piracy measures including injunctions against companies hosting pirate sites. At the same time, however, they advise against suing file-sharers as that would be ineffective or even counterproductive.

• With its significant entertainment business interests, media giant News Corp has been making its feelings known in the ongoing piracy debate. After targeting Google last month the company says it wants the government to tighten up the law in order to hold Australian ISPs responsible for the actions of their pirating subscribers.

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