● 08.19.14

● Links 19/8/2014: Humble Jumbo Bundle 2 Betrayal, Mercedes-Benz Runs GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 3:50 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) is now powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and it’s making a firm commitment towards open source and Linux software.

• This is not exactly something completely unexpected. The European Space Agency and openSUSE have been friends for a few years, but now the level of implication manifested by both parties has gone beyond the adoption of a Linux distro.

Server

• Applications running in Linux containers are isolated within a single copy of the operating system running on a physical server. This approach stands in contrast to hypervisor-based virtualization in which each application is bound to a complete copy of a guest operating system and communicates with the hardware through the intervening hypervisor. As a result, containers consume very few system resources such as memory and impose essentially no performance overhead on the application.

• n open-source community resource for complex Docker architectures

• CenturyLink has contributed the Panamax Docker management platform to open source. Panamax is described as a tool (its makers would prefer we said “platform”) for developers to create, share, and deploy a Docker-containerized application.

Kernel Space

• Big week on the Linux Planet as a new Linux kernel release cycle begins and Kernel developers congregate in Chicago for LinuxCon.

• “I’m going to be on a plane much of tomorrow, and am not really supportive of last-minute pull requests during the merge window anyway, so I’m closing the merge window one day early, and 3.17-rc1 is out there now,” Linus Torvalds wrote in his Linux 3.17 rc1 release announcement.

• Almost three years ago, crackers broke into the kernel.org, Linux’s most important site. While no damage was done, it was still worrisome. So, at the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Foundation announced that it was securing Linux’s Git source code repositories with two-factor authentication.

• This week at LinuxCon North America in Chicago is a presentation by Google’s Marc Merlin that’s entitled “Why you should consider using btrfs, real COW snapshots and file level incremental server OS upgrades like Google does.” The presentation does a good job at looking at the state of Btrfs on Linux and comparing it to ZFS.

• Marc Merlin, a Linux admin at Google for more than one decade, is presenting on Thursday at LinuxCon Chicago about Btrfs. His slides are already available for those that can’t make it to the windy city or are looking for an overview of what he’ll be discussing.

• This week at LinuxCon Chicago are two talks about Red Hat’s Kpatch live kernel patching solution to reduce downtime. However, there aren’t any scheduled talks about SUSE’s kGraft solution with neither yet being in the mainline kernel.

• On Thursday at the Sheraton in Chicago will be the “Kpatch Without Stop Machine” presentation by Hitachi’s Masami Hiramatsu while on Friday afternoon will be “kpatch: Have Your Security And Eat It Too!” by Red Hat’s Josh Poimboeuf.

Graphics Stack

• While Mesa is still racing towards OpenGL 4.0 compliance, another OpenGL 4.5 extension can now be crossed off the Mesa TODO list.

• Some Mesa developers have already started tackling some of the easier OpenGL 4.5 extensions and today another can be crossed off the list. Thanks to Tobias Klausmann. GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted is now supported by Mesa. The core work for GL_ARB_conditional_render_inverted is complete and is implemented currently by the Gallium3D-based Nouveau NVC0 (Fermi+), Softpipe, and LLVMpipe drivers. Support will surely come in time for mainline Mesa with this extension for the RadeonSI Gallium3D and Intel drivers.

• Not to be confused with the Radeon R7 graphics cards, AMD today officially announced the Radeon R7 SSD line-up.

Applications

• Git 2.1.0, a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency, has been officially released.

• XBMC 13.2 has been released as one of the last “Gotham” series bug-fix releases before the project renames itself to Kodi.

• Here it is. One of the last versions ever that will be using the XBMC name, as we are renaming XBMC to Kodi. All our future releases will be using the Kodi name. You can read about that here. However lets focus on this release. After three beta releases and a release candidate, we are happy to announce the final 13.2 release. This follows a couple of months after the 13.1 release, and is considered a small bug fix release. Unfortunately we cannot fix all things reported. Below you will find a list of most important fixes included in this release.

• Vuze, a BitTorrent client previously known as Azureus, which is built on Java, has reached version 5.4 and is now available for download.

Proprietary

• Quick update for Viber users: Viber for Linux was updated to version 4.2.x recently, finally catching up with the Windows version. Unfortunately, the application continues to be available for 64bit only.

• The Development branch of Google Chrome, a browser built on the Blink layout engine that aims to be minimalistic and versatile at the same time, is now at version 38.0.2125.0 and is available for all supported platforms.

• The Opera developers have released a new version of their Internet browser and a new build has been made available in the 25.x branch.

• Eltechs is preparing to introduce ExaGear Desktop next month as new proprietary software for running Linux x86 software on Linux ARM using their own virtual machine technology.

• Eltechs claims that ExaGear is great for running a virtual Linux x86 container on ARMv7 hardware. From there you could also run the x86 version of Wine for running x86 Windows programs on ARM hardware. This can already be done right now (using QEMU and other open-source Linux technologies for running emulated software for another CPU architecture separate from the host platform), but Eltechs claims that their binary-only solution “It is like QEMU but 4.5 times faster!”

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Freeciv, a free turn-based multiplayer strategy game, in which each player becomes the leader of a civilization, is now at version 2.4.3.

• Empire: Total War, a real-time strategy game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega, might be a getting a Linux release soon.

• Empire: Total War is one of the most successful games in the entire franchise and now it shows up in the Steam database, under the Linux category. The title might have been initially developed by The Creative Assembly, but those developers only made the Windows version.

• It’s been tough to parse Alienware’s position on the Linux-based SteamOS. At E3 they told us that the Steam Machine will increase Linux gamers by “20, 30 fold, overnight”. But with the first Steam Machines delayed into 2015, they’ve upstaged their own Linux box with a Windows-based living room PC: the Alienware Alpha.

• So who would win in a fight, Alienware? A living room PC running Windows, or the same PC running SteamOS?

• “It depends on what you’re looking for; there’s advantages to both,” said Alienware general manager Frank Azor. “[With] the Linux version I do think you’re going to sacrifice a little bit of content.”

• The Humble Jumbo Bundle 2 was just announced with “$210 worth of awesome games” that can be found on Steam, but before Linux gamers get too excited, they’re mostly left in the dust.

• Of the seven launch games part of the Humble Jumbo Bundle 2, only one of the games is currently available as a native port on Linux: Crusader Kings 2. That game has been available on Linux since early 2013.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• For the first time, Krita has been present at Siggraph! Siggraph is the largest conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques and it has a big trade show as well as presentations, posters, book shops and animations. While Krita has been presented before at the Mobile World Congress, Siggraph really is where Krita belongs!

• I want to thank very much to Mario Fux who organizes these meetings since 2009 and contributed a lot to my participation since I heard about this year’s meeting after the registrations had closed and he still offered to organize the accommodation for me. So, thanks once again Mario. I’d also want to thank everyone present at Randa this year for this great experience. This was my first participation in a KDE event but not the last one for sure

Distributions

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• PCLinuxOS 2014.08, a free Linux distribution aimed at desktop computers and laptops, has been released and it’s now available for download.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Mercedes-Benz is one of the first companies to experiment with autonomous driving and it succeeded. It also looks like the engineers are using Ubuntu and Xubuntu to do the job.

• It’s an obvious comparison: both Ubuntu and Superman are leaders, they are dependable, and they are arguably the most well known of their kind. Both are security minded and concerned with privacy, while Canonical’s laser-like focus in pursuit of convergence is nearly as intense as the red-hot beam fired out of Superman’s eyes!

• Powerful, upfront and well intentioned (sometimes to a fault) the famous Linux distribution has much in common with the most famous superhero of all time.

Free Software/Open Source

• Companies increasingly understand that open source allows them to create faster, cheaper, and more secure products than they did by constantly reinventing the wheel in closed-source development environments. And the drivers of OSS adoption go beyond cost cutting and time savings. Participating in open source communities is a goal in itself—one that gives companies a competitive edge and helps them to attract top talent and influence project direction.

• Here’s a neat little online resource for you, courtesy of Chicago-based GroupOn developer Trek Glowacki.

• Beautiful Open is a compendium of beautifully-designed open source projects, showcasing everything from content management systems (CMS) to Javascript SVG libraries.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Google has made quite a splash with its Chromecast dongle, which performs many of the tasks that set-top boxes do, but Chromecast may be headed for some competition. Android Police has reported that Firefox for Android has gained support in nightly builds for Chromecast, and GigaOM reports that Mozilla is continuing to work on a Chromecast competitor possibly called Matchstick.

SaaS/Big Data

• There is quite a buzz surrounding Platform 9, which came out of stealth mode a few days ago with $4.5 million in venture funding, and interesting plans aimed at the private cloud market. Platform 9′s technology platform is based on OpenStack, and the company is run by a group of VMware veterans.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice is an excellent Microsoft Office alternative that’ll do just about everything you need it to, quickly and efficiently. And in a world without WPS Office, I wouldn’t think twice about recommending it. But while LibreOffice has championed mimicking and even one-upping Microsoft’s apps, the competition was busy marching ahead, developing tools to address the new ways we get to work. The most crucial of these is cross-device support.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Are you in search of an easy way to explain to others what free software is and why it matters? Or are you perhaps wondering why you yourself should be concerned about computer-user freedom? If your answer is yes, then this TEDx talk by RMS is what you’re looking for!

Public Services/Government

• We’re encouraging open-source software and access to government data everywhere it is possible to do it.

Openness/Sharing

Open Access/Content

• I’ve never really understood the debate about how trustworthy Wikipedia is compared with once-printed, more “official” encyclopedia volumes, like the old Encyclopedia Britannica. What rarely made sense to me was the constant assertions that an information system to which anyone could contribute was inherently unreliable because anyone could contribute to it. Sure, you get the occasional vandals making joke edits, but by and large the contributions by the community are from informed, interested parties. The results tend to be close to, if not on par, with traditional encyclopedias.

Programming

• The ISO C++14 draft international standard was unanimously approved and is now clear for publication.

• Branching is, undoubtedly, one of the best and most important features in Git. If you already understand the basics of Git, you can take your knowledge one step further and get the most out of the popular distributed SCM by using one of its core capabilities: tracking relationships.

Leftovers

• On Friday, Rick Perry was indicted by a grand jury on two felony charges for abuse of power. Speaking in Austin on Saturday, his first public statement since the indictment, Perry called the allegations “outrageous” and a “farce of democracy.” Perry is the first Texas governor to be indicted since 1917.

Security

• When tens of thousands of computer hackers hit Las Vegas for a weekend, a drab convention centre is transformed for a very different kind of conference. There are no monotonous PowerPoint presentations or “networking breaks” here. Instead, hackers are bent double over tables, busily dissecting hard drives and picking locks; others huddle in a dark and cavernous room showing off their skills by breaking into each other’s computers. Almost all are making mischief until dawn.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Fighting has reportedly resumed at the strategic Mosul dam in northern Iraq just a day after Barack Obama claimed victory reclaiming it from Islamist militants.

• Judge David Gideon’s words refer not to the use of drones, but the activities of anti-drone activists. He has uttered this phrase from the bench repeatedly in recent months as activists have appeared before him, and the words must have been echoing through his mind as he sentenced Mary Anne Grady Flores, a 58-year-old grandmother from Ithaca, New York, to one year in prison on July 10. Her crime? Participating in a nonviolent anti-drone protest at an upstate New York military base after being ordered by the local courts to stay away from the site. The base is used to train drone pilots and technicians, and to control drone surveillance and strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

• Drones — unmanned flying machines — will soon fill our skies. They conjure up fears, especially among some of my fellow libertarians, of spying and death from above.

• Police in Sydney are trying to block a protest at the opening of the Israeli Film Festival this week as the Gaza war continues to fuel passions in Australia.

• Members of the Palestine Action Group are listed for a hearing on Monday in the Supreme Court of New South Wales ahead of their planned protest outside the cinema on Thursday night.

• New details about compensation in excess of $1m suggest that civilians with no ties to Al Qaida were among casualties

• War is a highly profitable investment for corporations, especially in times of capitalist economic crises, therefore any examination of the illegality and immorality of imperialist military activities should start with an examination of the capitalist system itself.

• Through baking, Abeer al-Hassani has found a way to feed her family and to overcome the trauma of losing her brothers to a US drone strike

• A couple of days ago the Washington Post published an editorial titled “Turkey needs to turn away from Mr. Erdoğan’s repression.” It was stated in the article that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan achieved his ninth election victory and became the 12th president of Turkey. As it was outlined in the title, the article went on by providing evidence for why this strong man should not be left completely uncontrolled.

• The article also touched upon Erdoğan’s victory speech in which he said that he wanted to establish a “new” Turkey and that he would be sensitive to the desires of all the people of the country. After these statements, without changing its course, the article went on to say that the country was facing a deep polarization and some of Erdoğan’s actions in recent years raised suspicion regarding their harmony with democracy. It also raised the question of whether a new Turkey would be different from the old one.

• The article further suggested that Turkey, as a Muslim country, which keeps itself away from radical elements in the region, should have bridged the gap between the Middle East and EU and that this would be highly appreciated. However, this was hindered due to Erdoğan’s “erratic and disconcerting” behavior.

• For example, during his election rallies, Erdoğan criticized Israel with harsh words. It is highly interesting that the Washington Post associates the reason why the ideal of democratic Turkey failed with Erdoğan’s firm stance against Israel, which used brutal and disproportionate force and killed some 2,000 Palestinians. It also claimed that Turkey hosted and protected the militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), which held 49 Turkish people, including a consul, captive and threatened Turkey saying they would bomb the Atatürk Dam by challenging Erdoğan. It is the same ISIS that is said to be trained by the collaboration of the American CIA, British MI6 and the Israeli MOSSAD to wage war against all terror organizations in the region for the security of Israel with a strategy called “the hornet’s nest,” according to what former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden revealed.

• The U.S. Navy said its jet-powered, bat-winged X-47B drone has conducted carrier deck operations and performed maneuvers alongside an F/A-18 fighter jet, marking the first time manned and unmanned aircraft have operated together on the same carrier. – See more at: http://westhawaiitoday.com/news/nation-world-news/navy-conducts-first-series-drone-and-manned-fighter-jet-operations#sthash.BynyIp9i.dpuf

• One of the ironies is that the US pretending to fight ISIS in Iraq, when it is in Syria, too; Washington is using the ISIS to wage new wars in the region and create new military bases, especially in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraq analyst Sami Ramadani told RT.

• The Obama administration and U.S. allies are preparing to rush antitank weapons and other arms to Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq who are battling Islamic militants near Irbil, officials said.

• The CIA had already rushed small shipments of arms to the Kurds in recent days as U.S. airstrikes targeted the militants’ convoys and mortars.

• The deafening silence of the US media and government about the investigation into the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 one month ago reeks of a cover-up.

• In the hours and days immediately after the crash, without a single shred of evidence, US officials alleged that the passenger jet was shot down by an SA-11 ground-to-air missile fired from pro-Russian separatist-held territory in eastern Ukraine. They launched a political campaign to obtain harsh economic sanctions against Russia and strengthen NATO’s military posture in Eastern Europe.

• Picking up on the scent, the CIA attack dogs in the US and European media blamed the crash squarely on Russian President Vladimir Putin. The cover of the July 28 print edition of German news magazine Der Spiegel showed the images of MH17 victims surrounding bold red text reading “Stoppt Putin Jetzt!” (Stop Putin Now!). A July 26 editorial in the Economist declared Putin to be the author of MH17′s destruction, while the magazine ghoulishly superimposed Putin’s face over a spider web on its front cover, denouncing Putin’s “web of lies.”

• That’s my take-away from reading the transcript of her long interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, published Aug. 10. In total, it was Clinton’s description of the world as she sees it and hardly an attempt to highlight her differences with President Obama, as Goldberg and others have written by cherry-picking her answers to some leading questions.

• For example, Clinton does not say it was the U.S. “failure” to aid Syrian rebels that created the vacuum that led to the rise of Islamic State militants.

• Clinton said she had proposed that “if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground.”

• Focusing on this under-reported, critical shift in American foreign policy, Clare Lopez discusses how an American ambassador and others were killed in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11 because the Obama administration decided to promote and defend their narrative that “al-Qaida was on the run,” even as we were outright arming militants affiliated with the terrorist group.

• No mention was made that Iraq’s Christians had been safe and sound under President Saddam Hussein – even privileged – until President George Bush invaded and destroyed Iraq. We can expect the same fate for Syria’s Christians if the protection of the Assad regime is torn away by the US-engineered uprising. We will then shed crocodile tears for Syria’s Christians.

• ARMED HUMANITARIANISM 2.0. That’s the new Western version of old-fashioned 19th century imperialism, now feminised by President Barack Obama’s lady advisors, painted pink and accompanied by saccharine piano music.

• The Obama administration latched onto the plight of Iraq’s Yazidis who were being persecuted by those awful ISIS folks just in time to divert attention from the massacre in Gaza.

Finance

• On top of that, the ongoing march of technology continues to make things cheaper and better (yay, Moore’s Law), but getting a computer that’s twice as powerful for half the price shows up in GDP calculations as half the economic output, rather than 4x the value. That’s why it’s great to see economic historian Joel Mokyr take this issue on in a great Wall Street Journal piece pointing out that too many economists focus on GDP and don’t understand the information age.

• Over the years, more than one politician has been damned as “a bungalow” – as in “there’s nothing upstairs”. And possibly that’s what people thought of the new Tory minister for housing and planning over his suggestion that we should all be “looking to love bungalows a little bit more”. But perhaps Brandon Lewis, who reckons we need more single-storey dwellings for older people, and that this in turn would free up houses for families, has a point.

• The IMF – responsible for mass impoverishment in the developing world – is now forced to admit it got Greece wrong. Its economists admit they exacerbated the near-destruction of the Greek economy after the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Last summer, Christine Lagarde’s organisation first blamed the “fiscal multiplier” – technocratic speak for endangering lifesaving public services. Then, the IMF, in effect, said they had got it wrong merely because they were “over optimistic”.

• But when new issues arise, important shifts can occur before opinion sorts itself into settled patterns. And, on occasion, critical events can jar opinion from settled patterns into a new equilibrium.

Censorship

• Reicherts attacked critics of the reform during a speech in Lyon, France, arguing that anti-Right to be Forgotten groups are covertly working to poison businesses’ and citizens’ opinions with false information.

• “Just as work on the data protection reform has picked up speed and urgency, detractors are attempting to throw a new spanner in the works. They are trying to use the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice [ECJ] on the Right to be Forgotten to undermine our reform,” she said.

• After all Facebook has done, there’s only so much a person can take.

• A sustained clampdown on the Twitter presence of Islamic State (IS) has forced the hardline jihadist group to explore less well-known social media platforms, setting up a string of accounts on the privacy-focused Diaspora.

• The Toronto Transit Commission has removed billboards for a popular escape game after The Toronto Star reported on four complaints about its mental health-themed ads. Modeled on similar games in Japan, “Mystery Room” invites groups of participants to gather clues and work together to try to escape from different rooms in a large building. “Enter if you dare — Escape if you can!” read the dark billboards for the game, listing four rooms called Satan’s Lair, Prison Break, Mummy’s Curse, and Psychiatric Ward. The Mystery Room’s website description for the Psychiatric Ward explained that, “Ward 15 is the place the mentally disturbed were contained. Dr. Johansson had a passion for experimenting on the unanesthetised living…”

Privacy

• Snowden just re-upped for three years in picturesque Russia, a land best known for not being a US military prison. Not exactly ideal, but under the circumstances, not entirely terrible. The government knows where Snowden is (more or less) and many officials have a pretty good idea what they’d like to do to him if he returns, but the NSA is still largely operating on speculation when it comes to what documents Snowden took.

• Among the many actions the Obama administration took in the “post-Snowden” era of insider threats was to appoint a new governmentwide counterintellligence chief.

• The man filling that role, or the “NCIX,” as acronym-inclined national security feds call the National Counterintelligence Executive, is Bill Evanina, 47, a former FBI special agent with a counter-terrorism specialty.

• By treating the Internet as a giant surveillance platform, the NSA has betrayed the Internet and the world. It has subverted the products, protocols, and standards that we use to protect ourselves. It has left us all vulnerable—to foreign governments, to cybercriminals, to hackers. And it has transformed the Internet into a medium that no one can trust.

• The world has changed dramatically since the NSA was founded 62 years ago. Back then, it was easy to spy on foreign governments while shielding our own from snoops. Today, the NSA’s intelligence mission has expanded from just government-on-government espionage to government-on-population surveillance. At the same time, the communications world has shifted from dedicated circuits that can be passively tapped to a single global Internet infrastructure that requires active attack to eavesdrop on. Everyone uses the same networks, and creating the capability to eavesdrop on foreign communications by engineering backdoors into US technology leaves domestic transmissions vulnerable to eavesdropping. The NSA’s aggressive data-gathering, with seemingly little regard for how that might compromise the security of everyday digital communications—and with only loose oversight (at best) by government watchdogs—has far exceeded what any modern and free society should reasonably expect. Breaking up the agency would do a lot to bring it under control.

• Haass and other experts will tell you the best way to protect the information you may have stored on a computer and/or mobile device is to use multiple passwords, and change them.

• Turkey has summoned the German ambassador to demand a “formal and satisfactory explanation” following reports that the country was spied on by Germany’s intelligence agency (BND).

• German media reported at the weekend that the BND had not only “accidentally” listened in on phone calls made by the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his predecessor Hillary Clinton in 2012 and 2013, but that it also – less accidentally – monitored the activities of Turkish politicians. According to news magazine Der Spiegel, the Nato member has been listed as a target for BND surveillance since 2009.

• The German intelligence service, the BND, treats its NATO partner Turkey just as America’s NSA treats Germany. Everyone mistrusts everyone else, but nobody’s prepared to admit it, says Marcel Fürstenau.

• Main opposition Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP) İzmir deputy Erdal Aksünger has submitted a parliamentary question concerning the allegations that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) spied on Turkey.

• Irish-born musician and enigmatic DJ Aphex Twin has released details of his first album in 13 years – that are only accessible through the Tor anonymous browser.

• Sneak loves to spend his lunch hour lurking on Twitter, scrolling through the tawdry thoughts of bored IT execs and publicity-hungry tech corporations.

• But sometimes, when the hum of the server room is getting too much, Sneak stumbles upon a wonderful gem of bile, hypocrisy, anger and opinion.

• Today’s nugget of controversy comes courtesy of Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted: “NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google.”

• [...]

• Given that Murdoch was all but forced to put the century-old News of the World out to pasture over phone hacking, to call out Google’s approach to privacy is so hypocritical that a new catalogue of pot and kettle-esque idioms needs to be written.

• Then again perhaps one could consider Murdoch to be an expert on such issues, given how far the News of the World went to destroy the concept of privacy for so many.

• Rupert Murdoch has incurred the wrath of the online community after publishing an ever-so-hypocritical tweet about privacy.

• The Citizen Lab “hackers” at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs have released a report which reveals the use of network injection by law enforcement as a method to undermine internet security – and it makes for frightening reading.

• But first I want to commend Tye for raising his concerns through the processes established for that purpose. Using those processes, he has been able to review his concerns with intelligence oversight bodies as well as with the public, all while continuing to protect classified information.

• The raging public debate over the surveillance state could actually benefit from the expertise of an unsuspecting source, a recent academic article suggests.

• Instead of relying on the myriad privacy and legal experts, congressmen, or former NSA directors chiming in on the NSA surveillance state, a new article in Science argues that we should really be asking more scientists what they think about domestic signals intelligence for American policymaking.

• If you watched the 2009 NOVA episode “The Spy Factory,” or the 2007 Frontline episode “Spying on the Homefront” you’ll see it all there — the phone surveillance, the internet monitoring, and even the whistleblowers from the NSA facilities who were listening to your phone calls. We knew American intelligence agencies were spying on Americans with impunity.

• U.S. intelligence officials are months or even years away from preventing classified information from being leaked in cases similar to fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden, The Daily Beast reported.

• The officials say that due to the vast number of computer systems and networks in the 70 U.S. agencies dealing with secret data, it will be a long process before they are able to keep an eye on the computers of federal employees with security clearance.

• The intelligence officials are almost a year away from being able to monitor public databases for clues that government workers have transgressed federal laws or run into financial hardship, the Beast said.

• Due to the delays in mounting a sweeping monitoring service to “watch the watchers,” the intelligence agencies are also struggling to keep an eye on its employees. The setbacks resulted in a “second Snowden,” who leaked secret files to The Intercept from the National Counterterrorism Center, the Beast said.

• Wong previously held positions such as director of legal products at Twitter and deputy general counsel at Google, the latter of which involved making calls on censoring certain content on YouTube and in searches. She earned herself the nickname “the Decider” while in the position.

• She joined the Obama administration in June of last year in what was, at the time, considered a positive move just after the NSA revelations had rocked the administration.

• A little more than a year after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the federal government was collecting and storing the telephone records of millions of Americans, Congress is poised to end the program and provide significant protection for a broad range of personal information sought by government investigators.

• Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has joined the likes of former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in a political game of phones, after her smartphone was compromised while on a two-week overseas trip.

• Australian intelligence authorities seized and replaced Bishop’s phone on her return from a two-week trip to Ukraine, the US, and Holland, in which she worked to broker a deal to get Australian police into the Ukrainian crash site of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 — shot down by a surface-to-air missile on July 17 by Russian-backed rebels.

• I’ll begin with a warning. Everything you’ve heard about the deep web is probably true. Yes, it’s a hub for illegal activity. Yes, cyber criminals run loose. And yes, users can find terrifying illegal behavior–including a bitcoin funded assassination market. In short, the Deep Web has a reputation for being virtual refuge for people who have something to hide. The most popular gateway into the Deep Web is Tor, a free network which allows users to anonymously browse the Web, and has been under NSA’s microscope since its inception in 2002. Countries like Russia and the US are trying to expose Tor users. Russia has issued a bounty, offering upwards of $100,000 for anyone who can successfully deanonymize Tor.

• Tumblr, it seems, is also ready to help corporations cash in on its users’ impeccably curated tastes. It just inked a deal with Ditto, a company that scans images on the web for branded products and sells the results to multinationals like Coca-Cola and Kraft, and part of the deal involves giving Ditto wholesale access to all of Tumblr’s (which is to say Tumblr users’) photos.

• In the latter category, and likely of interest to anyone seeking to know more about the larger bulk collection story, is this 2004 submission to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”). The brief sought—and evidently, for a time, won—FISC sign-off for the NSA to collect internet metadata in bulk, pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (“FISA”) pen register and trap and trace rules. That’s consequential, considering what had happened earlier. As is well known, that year Department of Justice officials, including then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey and then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (who had no role in editing this post) had protested the legality of highly secret surveillance program that President George W. Bush had authorized pursuant to his independent constitutional powers. The White House relented and agreed to changes—one being, apparently, a bid to bring the surveillance within the FISA framework.

• British spy agency GCHQ has since 2009 been port scanning every available IP address in 27 countries across the globe for vulnerable systems to exploit, according to a new report.

• The HACIENDA program was exposed in secret documents obtained by reporters writing for German publisher Heise.

• As Russia’s relations with the West sour over Ukraine, the Kremlin has agreed to broaden software deliveries to China, with increased supplies of Chinese servers, storage systems and other IT products set to come the other way, Russian Communications and Mass Media Minister Nikolai Nikiforov said Monday.

• The deal is likely aimed at helping Russia replace deliveries of U.S. information technology products in light of Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its role in the Ukraine crisis.

Civil Rights

• With images of heavily armed police confronting protesters in Ferguson, Mo., sparking a national debate about police militarization, a campaign finance research organization has released a study showing how much defense industry money House members got before a June 19 vote that rejected Rep. Alan Grayson’s amendment to block military equipment transfers to local law enforcement. The organization, MapLight, found that those who voted against it got 73 percent more in defense industry donations than those who voted in favor.

• Americans, at last, appear to have had enough. A Reason-Rupe poll released in December found that 58% of Americans believe police militarisation has gone “too far”. Whether their politicians heed them is another question. Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky and a likely contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2016, just wrote an editorial arguing that it is time to “demilitarise the police”, but he has yet to introduce any legislation to back those words up. In June Alan Grayson, a liberal Democrat from Florida, sponsored an amendment that would have forbidden the Defence Department from transferring to local police “aircraft (including unmanned aerial vehicles), armoured vehicles, grenade launchers, silencers, toxicological agents (including chemical agents, biological agents, and associated equipment), launch vehicles, guided missiles, ballistic missiles, rockets, torpedoes, bombs, mines, or nuclear weapons.” It failed: not a single House leader of either party voted for it. America’s defence industry donates millions of dollars to politicians, and spends even more on lobbyists. Those who opposed Mr Grayson’s bill received, on average, 73% more in defence-industry donations than those who voted for it.

• You don’t arrest reporters just to stifle journalism — you do it to make a statement

• The difference between what happened in Boston in the wake of the Boston Marathon explosion and what is happening now in Ferguson, Missouri, is not in the government’s response but in the community’s response.

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• This is what happens when you fail to take alarm at the first experiment on your liberties.

• A Missouri chapter of the Ku Klux Klan is planning a fundraiser this weekend for the Ferguson police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen.

• olice and protesters clashed again Sunday, hours before midnight curfew went into effect.

• Armed riot police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a large group of protestors who marched toward a police command center in the parking lot of a shopping mall. Protesters threw back gas canisters and rocks at the police. Police responded to reports of multiple shootings, looting, and throwing of Molotov cocktails.

• An autopsy report conducted at the request of Michael Brown’s family shows that he was shot six times — four in the right arm and twice in the head — with all shots coming from the front of his body. The autopsy was the second of three that will be conducted on Brown’s body. Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered a federal medical examiner to do an independent examination. State officials performed the first autopsy. This second autopsy, performed on Sunday, was conducted by Dr. Michael Baden, a former chief medical examine for New York City, at the request of Brown’s family.

• The fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager and the ensuing protests in Ferguson, Missouri has rocked America. Even the mainstream media with its aversion to the truth, has been forced to address the militarization of the police in America — albeit years too late.

• But if you believe (or know) that the cop stopping you is violating your rights or is acting like a bully, I guarantee that the situation will not become easier if you show your anger and resentment. Worse, initiating a physical confrontation is a sure recipe for getting hurt. Police are legally permitted to use deadly force when they assess a serious threat to their or someone else’s life. Save your anger for later, and channel it appropriately. Do what the officer tells you to and it will end safely for both of you. We have a justice system in which you are presumed innocent; if a cop can do his or her job unmolested, that system can run its course. Later, you can ask for a supervisor, lodge a complaint or contact civil rights organizations if you believe your rights were violated. Feel free to sue the police! Just don’t challenge a cop during a stop.

• Ansgar Graw and Frank Hermann were cuffed and jailed for three hours the day after arriving in the beleaguered suburb of St. Louis. Graw and Hermann were there to cover the town of Ferguson, whose African-American population has clashed fiercely with local police since the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a white police officer on August 9.

• Color me unamazed. Politicians who are in favor of the government’s 1033 program — which distributes excess military gear and weapons to police departments engaged in our country’s two favorite “wars” (v. Terror, v. Drugs) — received a lot more money from defense contractors than those who oppose it.

• On June 19, the House voted on an amendment to a Department of Defense appropriations bill authored by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). In short, the amendment would have prevented the military from distributing to local police forces some of heavy weapons and vehicles that the country has seen deployed in response to unrest in Ferguson, Mo.

• The killing of Michael Brown at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer is a reminder that, if you are a black man in America, you continue to be the nation’s number-one threat. There has been a long and protracted war against black men dating back to the antebellum period, where fear of plantation rebellions drove the country to enact heinous and draconian slave-revolt laws.

• We’ve been writing about the militarization of police, and why it’s problematic, for years — but the events of the last week in Ferguson, Missouri, have really shone a (rather bright) light on what happens when you militarize the police. Annie Lowrey, over at New York Magazine, highlights what may be most disturbing about all of it: all of this has happened while violence has been on a rapid decline, and, no it’s not because your local suburban police force now has a SWAT team and decommissioned military equipment from the Defense Department…

• The story of Michael Brown’s death has in no small part been a story of police overreaction. The local force evidently killed an unarmed teenager, and then suited up as if going to war to police the generally peaceful protests that followed. And it’s revealed an irony: Over the past generation or so, we’ve militarized our police to protect a public that has broadly become less and less violent.

• It all starts back in 1990, a time when the country found itself with less demand for military equipment abroad and new use for it back home. Within our shores, the drug wars were escalating; gang violence was surging; and sociologists were warning of sociopathic child “superpredators.” At the same time, the military was starting to shrink as the Cold War ended. Put two and two together and you get the 1033 program, which transferred assets from the military to the police. (Here’s a capsule history.)

• The protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri are providing proof the U.S. government sanctions racial injustice in this country while denouncing it abroad. The federal government spends trillions of dollars so we can be the world’s peacekeepers. We start wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of freedom. We help rebel groups oust dictators and oppressors like Muammar Gaddafi and the Taliban. We send drones and warplanes to bomb rebels from Islamic rebels in Iraq and Syria who are killing Christians. And we put sanctions on Iran for putting protesters in jail.

• Ezell Ford, a 25-year-old unarmed, mentally-challenged African-American man, was shot and killed by police last week in South L.A. The circumstances surrounding Ford’s death vary depending on who’s talking. The LAPD say the fatal shooting occurred only after a struggle in which Ford tried to grab an officer’s gun, while Ford’s family say there was no struggle.

• The Uyghur American Association urges the Chinese government to provide transparency over the use of drones in security operations in Yarkent County, fearing that deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles and militarization of the region will escalate further tensions and result in violence against Uyghur civilians.

• Three days after an eruption of violence in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang this summer left nearly 100 people dead, the region’s “antiterrorist command” asked the country’s biggest space and defense contractor for help. It wanted technical experts to operate drones that the authorities in Xinjiang had ordered last year in anticipation of growing unrest. The target was “terrorists,” according to the online edition of People’s Daily, a Communist Party media outlet.

• Back in 2004, public relations specialists outnumbered journalists about 3 to 1 in the United States. Today, as steady jobs in journalism disappear, it’s roughly 5 to 1. One reason more Americans are taking home a PR paycheck? It certainly pays a lot better than working in journalism.

• Such investigative journalists are the vanguard of the so-called Fourth Estate, bearing the formidable task of watchdogging the other three estates – the Executive, Judiciary and Legislative – to ensure that they remain ‘checks and balances’ to each other in their assigned constitutional tasks of maintaining the Democratic Republic’s integrity and vibrancy. While such journalists are often associated with a ‘paper of record’, their work is so crucial that sometimes some separation even from their publisher is necessary, since publications are owned, and owners have political agendas, and those agendas may conflict with the findings of deep journalism. Recall, for instance, the New York Time’s decision to hold back, on the brink of the November 2004 presidential election, an explosive investigatory report on the Bush administration’s use of the NSA for warrantless domestic wiretapping (shocking revelations that beat Snowden’s by years) – a delay with serious repercussions for the Times’ reputation.

• Prior to Glenn Greenwald’s in-depth journalistic interpretation and analysis of Edward Snowden’s raw NSA revelations last year, undoubtedly the most significant investigative journalism in US history came with the publication and analysis of the Pentagon Papers, released to the press by ex-Rand analyst Daniel Ellsberg back in 1971. Of the three branches of government, the Executive is the one that requires the most watchdogging because it is the branch wherein a single individual – the president – has a disproportionate and unilateral power at his disposal, compared to the Judiciary and Legislative, where decisions must come as the result of conference and consensus. The president can potentially become another form of king, if not checked. What the Pentagon Papers uncovered was the history of America’s secret presidential war-mongering in Viet Nam, beginning with the Eisenhower administration down through Nixon’s utterly corrupt regime – a history of unilateral and illegal foreign policy decision-making that by-passed Congress and the people they represent.

• This is not merely academic or specious. It seems that very few people recall now that when the chips were down for Nixon, he was actively considering a military coup to stay in office. As legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in a long-form piece for the Atlantic in 1983,

• The notion that Nixon could at any time resort to extraordinary steps to preserve his presidency was far more widespread in the government than the public perceived in the early days of Watergate or perceives today.

• It’s not a secret that the Obama administration has cracked down on whistle-blowers harder than any previous administration. Now a New York Times reporter and former Pulitzer Prize-winner has some harsh words for the president.

• The Obama administration has fought a years-long court battle to force longtime New York Times national security correspondent James Risen to reveal the source for a story in his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Risen may soon serve jail time for refusing to out his source. The fight has drawn attention to Obama’s less-than-stellar track record on press freedom—in a recent interview, Risen called the president “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” But lost in the ruckus are the details of what Risen revealed. Here’s what has the government so upset.

• In State of War, Risen revealed a secret CIA operation, code-named Merlin, that was intended to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. The plan—originally approved by president Bill Clinton, but later embraced by George W. Bush—was to pass flawed plans for a trigger system for a nuclear weapon to Iran in the hopes of derailing the country’s nuclear program. “It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world,” Risen wrote in State of War, “providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from the rogue countries like Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

• Over a year ago, NBC reported that General Cartwright had received a target letter informing him he was under investigation as the source for one of David Sanger’s stories on US-Israeli efforts to stall Iran’s enrichment program with the StuxNet cyberattack.

• Last year, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also showed how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow.

• In a strongly worded commentary Birmingham Southern College President and former Marine Corps commandant, retired Gen. Charles C. Krulak, said the CIA must not be allowed to “circle the wagons” to prevent the full disclosure by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of a report detailing the agency’s torture program during the early years of the War on Terror.

• Records published under Britain’s Freedom of Information (FOI) Act have compounded concerns that the UK government lobbied US officials to keep Britain’s role in CIA torture and rendition out of a soon-to-be published Senate report.

• Newly-released data reveals Britain’s ambassador to the US, Peter Westmacott, engaged in at least 21 separate meetings with members of the US Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) prior to its publication of this report, heightening existing allegations that the British government may be seeking to sanitize the document.

• CIA spying on the Senate is the constitutional equivalent of the Watergate break-in. In both cases, the executive branch attacked the very foundations of our system of checks and balances.

• President Barack Obama is not Richard Nixon. Obama hasn’t been implicated personally in organizing this constitutional assault. But he is wrong to support the limited response of his CIA director, John Brennan, who is trying to defer serious action by simply creating an “accountability panel” to consider “potential disciplinary measures” or “systemic issues.”

• After more than a decade of denial and concealment on the part of our government, President Barack Obama’s recent acknowledgment that “we tortured some folks” felt like a milestone. Even in its spare, reductive phrasing, the president’s statement opened up the possibility, finally, of national reflection, contrition and accountability.

• Let’s turn our backs on torture

• Editor: Torture is the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk. President Obama used plain English to describe what the CIA did during the Bush administration. The New York Times just decided to stop sugar-coating it. It no longer uses “enhanced interrogation methods”, and now uses the word “torture” I urge The Record to tell it like it is. This helps us, as citizens, face clearly what was done in our name.

• In other words, the justification for creating a database where CIA and FBI could directly access much of NSA’s data was a mirage, one created by CIA’s own torture.

• All that’s separate from the question of whether CIA and FBI should have access directly to NSA’s data. Perhaps it makes us more responsive. Perhaps it perpetuates this process of chasing ghosts. That’s a debate we should have based on actual results, not the tortured false confessions of a decade past.

• I just came across these videos while reading about the ongoing litigation in the UK against the Metropolitan police department, related to its red-squad undercover infiltration of left-wing movements in London and beyond. They look really interesting and well worth watching (full disclosure, though: I can’t vouch for them, because I haven’t yet watched them).

• Before David Barron was confirmed this year to a lifetime seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, his critics objected that the cover he gave President Obama to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens ought to disqualify him from the bench. “I rise today to oppose the nomination of anyone who would argue that the president has the power to kill an American citizen not involved in combat and without a trial,” Senator Rand Paul declared in remarks opposing the nomination. “I rise to say that there is no legal precedent for killing citizens not involved in combat and that any nominee who rubber stamps and grants such power to a president is not worthy of being one step away from the Supreme Court.”

• A 91-year-old man honored by Israel for saving a Jewish life during the Nazi Holocaust has returned his medal in protest of the Gaza assault. Henk Zanoli was given Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations award for his actions under Nazi occupation in Amsterdam. In 1943, Zanoli smuggled out a Jewish boy and helped hide him in his home for two years, despite Nazi suspicion he and his family backed the resistance.

• The Israeli government is blocking Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from entering the Gaza Strip, preventing researchers from investigating the assault. The Israeli journalist Amira Hass reports the groups have been told they must register as a humanitarian aid organization, only to later be informed they do not qualify. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have previously issued reports that raised allegations of potential war crimes by Israel, as well as on a smaller scale by Hamas.

• Among the many, many issues raised by the fatal police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old black kid in Ferguson, Missouri this week was police transparency. The Ferguson police initially refused to release the name of the officer who shot the victim, Michael Brown, leading to a national outcry.

• It is one of the peculiarities of police departments that officers are afforded great privacy protections when they are involved in such an incident. Officer safety is cited, which is well and good, but police departments often feel no similar compunction to protect the identity of civilian suspects.

• It’s easy to feel cynical about law and order in America. Just peruse the tales of paramilitary police forces exerting their will on minorities in places like Ferguson, Missouri while rich bankers routinely escape from punishment for their white-collar crimes. Now the US Sentencing Commission is considering curbing the jail terms dished out for financial crimes like fraud, figuring that since the Feds have finally started to scale back mandatory minimums for drug offenses, we might as well take it even easier on corporate execs.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The defunct News-Service.com, once one of the leading Usenet providers with many prominent resellers, has scored a court victory against Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN. The appeals court overturned a previous verdict and ruled that the Usenet provider doesn’t have to monitor and filter pirated content.

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