● 09.16.14

● Links 16/9/2014: Firefox OS Smartphones in Bangladesh, “Treasure Map” of the Internet

Posted in News Roundup at 7:19 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• New videos of a “Windows 9″ variant have emerged, and to this hack’s eyes they look to have brought Windows up to speed with tricks that desktop Linux has been turning for at least half a decade.

• Choosing an operating system may seem simple but can result in restrictions on what applications you can run, and if not executed properly, can result in slow running services and websites which will not load.

Server

• Docker said it has secured $40 million from investors for its open-source platform designed for developers and system administrators to build, ship and run distributed applications. Bill Coughran from Sequoia Capital will represent the venture capital firm on Docker’s board of directors. Here are the details.

• Open-source Docker virtualization container technology gets a big vote of confidence from investors, with Docker Inc. receiving a new round of financing.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• With the drm-next merge window for Linux 3.18 closing, Intel’s open-source developers have submitted another round of changes for ultimately landing with the Linux 3.18 kernel.

• X.Org Server 1.17 is planned for release at the start of 2015 and thus puts the closing of the merge window in the middle of October. While some xorg-server 1.17 code has already landed, more is on the way.

• The list of applications that work ‘natively’ (ie with the GTK+ Wayland backend) is looking pretty good, too. The main straggler here is totem, where we are debugging some issues with the use of subsurfaces in clutter-gtk.

• The open-source driver stack tested was with the Linux 3.17 Git kernel while using the Oibaf PPA to upgrade to Mesa 10.4-devel for the latest RadeonSI and LLVM AMD GPU code. The closed-source driver was the fglrx 14.20.7 / OpenGL 4.4.12968 Catalyst release. When running the Catalyst binary blob we had to downgrade from Linux 3.17 to Linux 3.16 for kernel compatibility. All tests were done from the Intel Core i7 5960X system running Ubuntu 14.10.

• Valve’s Pierre-Loup A. Griffais has begun publicly listing known issues with AMD’s Catalyst Linux graphics support.

Applications

Proprietary

• Halcyon Software has announced the immediate availability of a new Linux on Power agent that runs on IBM Power Systems to ensure that the Linux operating system performs correctly. It also gives tighter control of ‘mission-critical’ applications running on Linux through automatic and continuous monitoring and management. Halcyon’s new monitoring technology meets the requirements of organisations deploying Linux on IBM Power Systems to give greater scalability, reducing ‘server sprawl’ and infrastructure costs, particularly for large data centres and managed services providers (MSPs) with cloud-based offerings.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• The Beta branch of the Steam distribution platform has been updated by Valve and the devs have explained that a few changes have been made.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• First up is the release of Qt 5.3.2 that brings various fixes and enhancements to the Qt 5.3platform. Qt 5.3.2 has the Qt Quick Compiler 1.1, introduces a tumbler control with Qt Quick Enterprise Controls 1.2, a Qt Purchasing 1.0.1 module for improving in-app purchasing, etc. Qt 5.3.2 details can be found via this Digia blog post.

• QtCompositor only support one output so in order to do this I did a little abstraction to enumarate outputs and played with QML to show them in the compositor window.

• We are happy to announce Qt Creator 3.2.1. This release contains a range of bugfixes, including fixes for:

• a freeze when using the current project or the all projects locator filters via keyboard shortcut a deployment error in the OS X packages which led to the Clang code model plugin not loading a crash when opening the context menu on C++ macro parameters For a full list of fixes, please see our change log.

• KDE developer Aaron Seigo is a very outspoken person and he is known for his strong opinions. He recently proposed for public debate a very heated and interesting subject about the role of the community managers for the open source project.

• He thinks that the community managers’ role, as they are working today on various projects, is actually a fraud and a farce. It’s unclear what determined him to make this statement, but he knew right from the start that it was going to rile up the community and various community managers.

• Digia has spun off a subsidiary called “The Qt Company” to unify Qt’s commercial and open source efforts, and debuted a low-cost plan for mobile developers.

• The Linux-oriented Qt cross-platform development framework has had a tumultuous career, having been passed around Scandinavia over the yearsfrom Trolltech to Nokia and then from Nokia to Digia. Yet, Qt keeps rolling along in both commercial and open source community versions, continually adding support for new platforms and technologies, and gaining extensive support from mobile developers.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam, and its developers have released a new version that brings a ton of improvements.

• GNOME Control Center, GNOME’s main interface for the configuration of various aspects of your desktop, has been updated to version 3.14 RC1, along with a lot of the packages from the GNOME stack.

• Last month at flock, we reported on GNOME and Fedora developer Matthias Clasen’s talk on the replacement for the X display server, Wayland. Now on his blog, Matthias has provided a brief update on the status of Wayland support in GNOME 3.14 (the version of GNOME that will ship with Fedora 21).

Distributions

New Releases

• No matter how good the code review process is, or how high the standards for acceptance, applications will always have bugs, says Joanna Rutkowska, founder and CEO of Invisible Things Lab. So will drivers. And filesystems.

• “Nobody, not even Google Security Team, can find and patch all those bugs in all the desktop apps we all use,” Rutkowska says in the Q&A interview, below.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat, Inc. RHT, +0.07% the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11, the final minor release of the mature Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.11 reiterates Red Hat’s commitment to a 10-year product lifecycle for all major Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases and offers a a secure, stable, and reliable platform for critical enterprise applications.

• RPM 4.12 has been released as the latest version of the RPM Package Manager. This most recent upgrade brings a fair amount of additions, bug-fixes, API changes, binding improvements,a new plug-in system, and more.

• A newly announced partnership with Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) gives American Underground startups a “foxhole” in Silicon Valley.

Fedora

• There is saying that used to be commonly attributed to when Debian Linux distributions would be released. That saying is – “it’s done, when it’s done.”

• The same is true for Fedora Linux which has had more than its fair share of scheduling delays in recent years for releases. Fedora 21 has now been delayed yet again, pushing the date out by a several weeks from the original schedule.

Debian Family

• The Debian installer could be a lot quicker. When we install more than 2000 packages in Skolelinux / Debian Edu using tasksel in the installer, unpacking the binary packages take forever. A part of the slow I/O issue was discussed in bug #613428 about too much file system sync-ing done by dpkg, which is the package responsible for unpacking the binary packages. Other parts (like code executed by postinst scripts) might also sync to disk during installation. All this sync-ing to disk do not really make sense to me. If the machine crash half-way through, I start over, I do not try to salvage the half installed system. So the failure sync-ing is supposed to protect against, hardware or system crash, is not really relevant while the installer is running.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• For now, if Ubuntu 14.10′s Unity default page look familiar, well it should. On the surface, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has done little with the Unity interface. While experienced Linux users tend not to like it, I still find it to be a great desktop for new users.

• Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Ubuntu Linux distribution is ramping up its OpenStack efforts thanks to a new server solution from AMD.

• The Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS have been updated in order to fix a few Django vulnerabilities that were identified.

Devices/Embedded

• Build GPIO projects around your Raspberry Pi Camera Module with ProtoCam, a new Kickstarter campaign from the Average Man, Richard Saville…

• Blogger and tinkerer, Richard Saville of AverageManVsRaspberryPi.com has just hit Kickstarter with ProtoCam, a prototyping board for the Raspberry Pi designed to offer a whole new way to prototype Camera Module projects.

• Roku just hit a milestone: over 10 million of its streaming players have been sold to this point, stretching from the company’s original set-top box — which debuted in 2008 — through today. It’s a big number, and it establishes Roku as one of the leading players in the living room, at least when it comes to streaming boxes. Game consoles obviously sell many more units than that, but Roku has carved out a nice audience by pricing its products aggressively and constantly expanding the ecosystem of apps that run on those boxes. And the products themselves keep getting better.

Phones

Android

• Google launched the first Android One phones in India starting at $103 from Micromax, Karbonn, and Spice, and backed by direct Android updates from Google.

Free Software/Open Source

• So if I compare it to Linux. Linux is in my computer, in my car, it’s in a million things outside of the server room. In the same way I think a large percentage of OpenDaylight will be used and leveraged that way. You will have a few people who grab the code, compile it themselves and deploy it in their environment, but mostly for a proof of concept (POC). If an end user hears about SDN and thinks it’s great, they might find themselves needing to POC 15 different solutions. Do I need an overlay? Well, you’ve got to look at three or four overlays out there because they all do things differently. And if you want to figure out how to use OpenFlow, well there are different flavors of OpenFlow, so you’re going to pull a couple of different ones.

• The rapidly increasing pace of adoption of Open Source software and methodologies led by advancements in analytics, cloud computing and the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) have propelled Open Source into a core strategic technology asset for enterprises across the globe. Wipro has set up an Open Source Practice under its Business Application Services division to address this rising demand. This practice will channelize the earmarked investments towards driving growth and building industry leadership in this area.

• Is there more to container-based open source virtualization than Docker? A startup named Flockport thinks so, and has launched a website for sharing and deploying virtual apps using Linux Containers (LXC), an alternative to Docker.

• Open Source Enterprise IT Tools are now available to make work more productive in your office, as reported by The Linux Insider.

• Below are discussions of some of these Open Source enterprise tools that stand out uniquely from their common counterparts. As reported in The Linux Insider, these new-generation online tools bring convenience to the productivity of works produced.

• Over the past few years, we’ve seen more drones being used in more ways than ever before. With uses in the military, real estate, retail and everything in between, there’s no shortage of applications for drones.

Events

• South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics said Monday it would hold a two-day conference on open-source software to allow developers to share ideas on the new industrial trend.

• The inaugural Samsung Open-Source Conference opens Tuesday morning in Seoul, with keynotes from well-known figures in the open source world and a hackathon focused on Tizen, the company’s in-house mobile operating system.

• The event kicks off with a speech from Jono Bacon, the former community manager for Ubuntu, who recently moved to the XPrize Foundation, and also includes talks from Linux kernel developer Tejun Heo and Carsten Heitzler, the principal creator of the Enlightenment desktop environment for Linux.

• From its beginning in 2010 as a joint project from NASA and Rackspace, OpenStack has grown to have a global community of nearly 20,000 people worldwide working to create a massively scalable cloud operating system.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) at MIT today announced the dates for the LibrePlanet free software conference, which will be held March 21-22, 2015, in Cambridge, MA. The call for sessions is now open, as is the call for exhibitors and volunteers.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Rust, the general purpose, safe, and concurrent programming language developed by Mozilla Research, is starting to assemble their vision of Rust 1.0.

• “This launch was made possible through the cooperation between Grameenphone, Telenor, Mozilla and Symphony,” says Rolv-Erik Spilling, SVP and Head of Telenor Digital. “For us, it’s important to provide the Bangladeshi market with an easy, affordable and locally relevant mobile internet experience, which the Firefox phone enables.”

SaaS/Big Data

• HP signs letter of intent to buy Eucalyptus, names CEO Marten Mickos head of its cloud unit. More open-source company acquisitions expected as HP builds out cloud offerings, analyst says.

• Late last week, news broke that Hewlett-Packard has agreed to buy cloud computing firm Eucalyptus, and HP intends to retain open source veteran Marten Mickos as a cloud computing lead. It’s all part of HP chief Meg Whitman’s pledge to pour $1 billion into HP’s Helion cloud business.

• MapR, a Google Capital-backed Hadoop distribution provider, announced its software now supports Apache Drill, an open source stream data processing software framework the company is deeply involved in developing.

• Open source Big Data vendor MapR expanded the functionality of its Hadoop distribution this week with the announcement of MapR 4.0.1, whose headlining feature is Apache Drill 0.5 integration.

• The addition of Drill to MapR’s Hadoop distribution introduces ANSI SQL functionality to the platform, which will make it easier for users familiar with SQL interfaces to work with Hadoop and NoSQL data. The upgrade also expands the range of data sources that MapR supports.

Healthcare

• Sensor-laden smartphones and wearable devices are set to generate vast amounts of activity and other health-related data in the coming years. Fitness bands such as the popular Fitbit and Nike Fuelband, smartwatches such as Samsung’s Gear series and Apple’s recently announced Watch, and their successors, will deliver step counts, heart rate readings and more.

Business

Semi-Open Source

• The open source community also plays an important role in terms of software patches for any bugs or security flaws that may come up in an application. “For example, when the Heartbleed bug was uncovered, the open source community addressed this problem more aggressively than any other company or group. This enabled Zimbra to issue a fix in less than three hours after it was discovered,” he states.

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The GNU Guix project is organizing a hackathon on September 27th and 28th, 2014. The hackathon will take place primarily on-line, on the #guix IRC channel on Freenode. We have started collecting a list of hacking ideas. Feel free to stop by and make more suggestions!

Project Releases

• After several months of development the latest version of the most popular open source CRM, vtiger CRM is released today.

Openness/Sharing

• I recently came across a fascinating book, The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman. It is an introduction to using software tools to better understand the way things interact in nature. Shiffman employs animations and visualizations to create this joyful understanding of simulation and the world around us. From a simple oscilating pendulum, to a group of many interacting particles, to the general patterns of a flock of birds.

• There is a long list of sites powered by Open edX, a platform hoping to be powerful and extensible enough that education experts can use it not only to run courses, but to try out new ideas for how to educate online.

• Open source programmers and maverick election officials want to improve the way we vote, register to vote, and count the votes. Wish them luck.

Open Access/Content

• For innovation to really explode, we may have to rethink traditional ways of protecting proprietary information. Is it time to leverage the latent opportunities hidden in open datasets?

Standards/Consortia

• Enter Matrix, a proposed open source standard that wants to make instant messaging, voice, and video chat as interoperable as email and as slick as Slack. Matrix is still new — it launched to the public two weeks ago, and not a single messaging service supports it yet — but it has a grand vision for the open future of messaging.

Leftovers

Science

• It must have been quite a sight: an angry mob of scientists confronting the prime minister on a rainy day in Canberra about his government’s treatment of science.

• Incensed at budget cuts and poor working conditions, the scientists forced the prime minister to admit that before the minerals run out, Australia must become “the clever country”.

Security

• Last year, Skycure hacked my iPhone in just a few minutes and I was immediately convinced that network attacks were a problem. Though this was an extreme example, we’ve long been warning our readers about the dangers of public Wi-Fi networks and the prevalence of attacks that can silently sip your personal data without your knowledge. But yesterday, Skycure’s CEO and co-founder Adi Sharabani showed me a new tool that makes those invisible attacks a little easier to see.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• The U.S. Constitution sharply disfavors war. It does so by entrusting exclusive authority for initiating war in Congress, the branch of government whose powers are diminished by military conflict.

• Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden made headlines after he compared President Obama’s plan to implement air strikes against ISIS militants in Syria to “casual sex” in an interview with U.S. News & World Report on Thursday.

• So the left view of Obama’s war plan is that airstrikes “are wonderful,” but that in order to really win there needs to be a ground invasion? Or is Shields’ point that a ground invasion is necessary and therefore untenable? It’s hard to tell. During an earlier discussion (NewsHour, 8/8/14), when he was asked if Obama had “a choice but to go back in militarily,” Shields replied, “I don’t think he did.”

• If Shields–and PBS, for that matter–believe in having a full debate about this war, they will need to find a more forceful critic of Obama’s latest war.

• The White House sells drones strikes as legal, ethical and targeted to protect our military and innocent civilians from harm. These are questionable claims, made more dubious by the administration’s selectively leaking details of the drone program to assuage the public when reports arise of flawed legal reasoning, mistaken strikes or vastly underestimated civilian deaths.

• CIA director John O. Brennan also told the American public that drones “can be a wise choice because they dramatically reduce the danger to U.S. personnel, even eliminating the danger altogether.” Director Brennan is wrong.

• I know because I am a veteran of the drone program. I served as an Air Force imagery analyst. What I know of drone warfare is that it has dangerous, sometimes devastating, consequences for too many service members participating in the program.

Transparency Reporting

• It would be too much to say that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange feels optimistic. He’s been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for more than two years now, with cameras and police—”a £3 million surveillance operation,” he calls it—just meters away.

Censorship

• The Australian Government has proposed a wide variety of measures to deal with online piracy, including website blocking. The local Pirate Party believes that censorship is not the answer, however, and signals a range of problems with the Government’s plans.

Privacy

• Joy Corrigan, 20, claims she tried to warn Apple in early July after fearing her account had been hacked when nude photos of her leaked online

• She says Apple told her she had been the victim of phishing and that she needed to change her password

• Naked photos of over 100 actresses, performers and even Olympic athletes were released by a user on anonymous web forum 4Chan on August 31

• Corrigan is launching a class-action lawsuit against the tech giant because of its ‘crappy security’ and she’s seeking other victims to join her

• A major undersea telecommunications cable that connects Australia and New Zealand to North America has been tapped to allow the United States National Security Agency and its espionage partners to comprehensively harvest Australian and New Zealand internet data.

• Documents published by The Intercept website by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden show that New Zealand’s electronic spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), worked in 2012 and 2013 to implement a mass metadata surveillance system based on covert access to the Southern Cross undersea cable network.

• PRESS ORGANISATION the UK Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) is demanding answers and information from UK spy agency GCHQ about its communications surveillance practices.

• The BiJ has filed a case with the European Court of Human Rights, in which it asks for more information about the GCHQ and whether it is using its surveillance tools to monitor journalists. It said that this is a human rights issue, hence where it has filed the case.

• “We understand why the government feels the need to have the power of interception,” said the bureau’s Christopher Hird. “But our concern is that the existing regulatory regime to control the interception of communications data – such as phone calls and emails – by organisations such as GCHQ does not provide sufficient safeguards to ensure the protection of journalists’ sources, and as a result is a restriction on the operation of a free press.”

• They are the new form of terror. The hackers attacking and stealing sensitive information from the government departments is one of the perils of being tech savvy.

• Former National Security Agency systems analyst turned leaker Edward Snowden said that the NSA is collecting mass surveillance data on New Zealanders through its XKeyscore programme and has set up a facility in the South Pacific nation’s largest city to tap into vast amounts of data.

• Snowden talked via video link from Russia to hundreds of people at Auckland’s Town Hall.

• Shortly before he spoke, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key issued a statement saying New Zealand’s spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, has never undertaken mass surveillance of its own people. Key said he declassified previously secret documents that proved his point.

• Thanks to facial recognition technology, big brother is watching us even more closely these days. There’s a Google Glass face pinning app, surveillance cameras across the globe that are facial recognition driven, and that super creepy Facebook tagging code where somehow the site knows whose face is whose.

• Whether it comes in the form of gossip, internet postings or government surveillance, privacy infringement is everywhere. Privacy no longer exists in today’s world, the word itself is so laughable it’s reduced to its most archaic meaning: “The state or condition of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people.” In a world filled with known national intelligence agencies such as the NSA, CIA and others, that are surely unannounced to the public, every camera, microphone and/or computer is beginning to feel increasingly more Orwellian. Social media’s game changer, known as Facebook, has recently attracted a lot of attention due to its mobile messaging application.

• On Monday, the FT began publishing a three-day series about the growing international backlash against US technology companies.

• The first part focused on how Silicon Valley has embarked on a charm offensive in the wake of growing concerns about their role in US government surveillance and how they use their customers’ data. Part two highlighted the situation in Germany, which is leading the European regulatory push-back against big US tech groups.

• The following editorial appears on Bloomberg View:

• Yahoo Inc., as it turns out, has cared about privacy since 2007. It just couldn’t tell anyone.

• The company posted a note last week saying it was “pleased to announce” that it had gotten thousands of pages of court documents released that detail its battle to prevent the National Security Agency from collecting data about some of its users.

• In recent years, especially after the Snowden revelations, a legal debate on metadata has been sparked in the United States.1 In essence, what legal scholars and US government officials have been arguing is, first, whether communications metadata deserves the same protection as the content of communications, and second, whether the collection of metadata alone constitutes an interference with the right to privacy or whether the analysis of metadata would be necessary to trigger the privacy question.

• No watching for the watched. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Monday denied a request to broadcast Nov. 4 oral arguments in a case challenging the scope of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

• The truth is proving to be otherwise. China in particular now claims a free hand to do what the United States has been doing. Its targets are both government bodies and economic entities. Washington has protested loudly about intrusions into the systems of some American corporations. The Department of Justice has gone so far as to indict and place on its “most wanted list” five Chinese accused of doing the dirty deeds. The initial NSA defense was that “the department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.” That proved to be a lie. The NSA has caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and — most recently — China’s leading telecommunication’s company.

• The government’s surveillance review court has renewed the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program for another 90 days, even as new reports show that U.S. and British intelligence may have illegally tapped into Deutsche Telekom.

• German parliamentary investigators plan to question executives of telecommunications operators about reports that U.S. and U.K. intelligence gained direct access to networks of companies including Deutsche Telekom AG.

• Documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have revealed that a global internet mapping program dubbed Treasure Map has been spying on German telcos’ networks, despite US government assurances that the program was not for surveillance purposes, according to a report by Der Spiegel.

• After German officials proposed to lock down its internet due to security breaches, it looks as though newly discovered NSA activity could get the agency into trouble once again. Evidence has surfaced saying the NSA network infiltration in Germany reaches much further than the political leaders and other important individuals we reported on previously. It seems US agents tapped into the networks of both local internet provider Netcologne and German tech giant Deutsche Telekom.

• Richard L. Fricker, a courageous journalist and frequent writer at Consortiumnews, died on Sept. 12 from heart failure. Among Fricker’s important work was his investigation of the U.S. government’s PROMIS software which preceded the NSA’s Orwellian PRISM, as Fricker noted last July.

• A newly released document from Edward Snowden’s archive indicates that the NSA has made its way into at least one South African data centre

• Julian Assange is currently answering questions in a live chat over at Gawker, promoting his new book, When Google Met Wikileaks. One of the most interesting exchanges for readers of Paleofuture actually comes from a question by Matthew Phelan who writes the Gawker subdomain Black Bag.

• Latest Snowden documents: NSA Treasure Map program includes U.S. Net traffic

• Back in August 2013, Reuters revealed that the DEA was receiving information from the NSA about suspects who had no connection to terrorism. Worse still, the NSA then gave tips to the DEA on how to hide that fact from the entire justice system, including judges and defense attorneys.

• The Tenth Amendment Center has joined a trans-partisan coalition of surveillance whistleblowers, civil liberties advocates, and organizations representing millions of Americans calling for a rejection of the latest version of the USA Freedom Act in the US Senate.

• A coalition including civil liberties groups and government whistleblowers has come out against a Senate bill responding to the government surveillance and data collection revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

• Liberal groups, transparency advocates and the whistleblower behind the Pentagon Papers are coming out strongly against a Senate bill to reform the National Security Agency (NSA), arguing the reforms it contains are inadequate.

• Activists and whistleblowers told members of Congress in a letter on Monday that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) USA Freedom Act “contains ambiguities that are ripe for abuse” and “fails to protect against future privacy invasions of innocent people.”

• Civil rights group says database risks turning millions of citizens with no criminal record into suspects

• According to National Journal, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved a request from the Justice Department to renew the NSA’s Section 215 telephony metadata program, part of the Patriot Act, on Friday. The program allows the NSA to spy on American citizens by collecting phone records.

• Ms Harré says that the Prime Minister’s conflicting disclosures are the most frightening of the lot in that he has admitted that the tools for mass surveillance have been installed.

• The much-anticipated Snowden documents are finally out there, with the fugitive whistle-blower explaining their contents by videolink at a ‘Moment of Truth’ event in Auckland last night. Andrea Vance examines what the fugitive whistle-blower revealed about New Zealand’s spying.

• There are plenty of solid, legitimate reasons to want to surf the web anonymously. Maybe you’d like an additional level of protection against snoopy advertisers. Or, perhaps, you’d prefer to make it harder for the NSA and other government agencies to look at your private info and Internet activity out of principle. So little is private online these days that it makes sense to want to cover your tracks, simply to maintain full control over your own data.

• Nelson’s candidates on the Left say last night’s “Moment of Truth” raised important questions but its National MP says he was underwhelmed.

• Labour list MP and Nelson candidate Maryan Street said the Kim Dotcom event in Auckland produced “questions that need answering, at the very least”.

• Labour leader David Cunliffe says he will immediately set up a full-scale review of the country’s intelligence and security services if he is Prime Minister next week.

• Renegade US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden claims the National Security Agency, the American spy outfit he once worked for, has a facility in Auckland and another further north.

• Snowden case reveals a program with few checks and little accountability

• The US National Security Agency and British intelligence services are able to secretly access data from telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom and several other German operators, according to Der Spiegel weekly.

• Der Spiegel reports that Attorney General Harald Range gave the German Parliament’s NSA investigation committee the bad news last week.

• Security experts from the Criminal Police (BKA) and secret services are trying to find out whether the intelligence officer at the Federal Secret Service (BND), named as Markus R., sent any more classified material to the US spy agency than they already know about.

• Attorney-General Brandis needs to forget categorising personal data by how it is collected, and focus on whether its use to solve crime justifies invading our privacy.

• Leaked NSA documents appeared to show that at around the time Key was making his public assurances around the planned legislation, the GCSB was implementing the first phase of a mass surveillance program code-named “Speargun,” Greenwald said.x

• Auckland Town Hall was packed to overflowing on September 15, with almost 2000 people gathered to hear surprise guest, US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, speak over the Internet.

• Snowden address the crowd about evidence the New Zealand government has, despite its repeated denials, been collaborating with US authorities to carry out wholesale surveillance and data collection on NZ citizens.

• Prime Minister John Key says Edward Snowden’s claim that the United States has spy facilities in New Zealand is about as likely as Martians roaming the country.

• And as for whether the GCSB has access to a mass data collection programme called XKeyscore, he’s refusing to say.

• US spies from the National Security Agency (NSA) are here – working with our spies.

• “I can’t rule out that they have a second here or a liaison person here from time to time,” says Mr Key.

• That’s not quite the bombshell dropped by whistle blower Edward Snowden last night.

• Over the past couple of days, a lot has been said about the GCSB – what it does, and the balancing act of national security and personal privacy.

• Last year, before the GCSB bill was passed, Campbell Live tried really hard to have precisely those discussions.

• The Snowden files will show New Zealand spied on its Pacific neighbours and other Western democracies, journalist Glenn Greenwald says.

• Fugitive whistle-blower Edward Snowden has claimed that Kiwis have been subject to mass surveillance through the contentious spyware XKeyscore. He has also said that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has two facilities in New Zealand – a claim that is denied by Prime Minister John Key.

• Israeli politicians and a former military intelligence commander have hit back at reservists who criticized Israel for spying on ordinary Palestinians.

• Last week, 43 Israeli military intelligence reservists signed a letter refusing to serve in the occupied Palestinian territories over fears snoops were planning to blackmail individuals into becoming informants. The letter alleged that Israel Defence Force Unit 8200 – Israel’s equivalent of the NSA – undertook “all encompassing” surveillance of Palestinians’ medical conditions, finances, sexual orientation and infidelity in order to gain information that might be used to blackmail individuals into becoming informants against their own people.

• Just two weeks after the first disclosures about the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance programme, US President Barack Obama flew to Berlin, where he gave a speech on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate. The choice of venue was ironic in light of the scandal: it was on this side of the Berlin Wall where the Stasi, communist east Germany’s secret police, spied on its citizens for decades.

• Governments and companies are engaged in a battle to determine who can do what on the internet, and the outcome will reverberate around the world. Google’s troubles in Europe over privacy, antitrust and the “right to be forgotten” are one example of this struggle. Multinational companies’ tussles with the US National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ over access to user data are another.

• The number of requests made to Google for data on users has increased by 150 per cent over the last five years.

• In the search giant’s latest transparency report, demands by governments for user information have increased by 15 per cent over the last year.

• Journalists and dissidents are under the microscope of intelligence agencies, Wikileaks revealed in its fourth SpyFiles series. A German software company that produces computer intrusion systems has supplied many secret agencies worldwide.

• The weaponized surveillance malware, popular among intelligence agencies for spying on “journalists, activists and political dissidents,” is produced by FinFisher, a German company. Until late 2013, FinFisher used to be part of the UK-based Gamma Group International, revealed WikiLeaks in the latest published batch of secret documents.

• The National Security Agency (NSA) is looking to map every single internet connected device in the world, including smartphones, tablets and computers, according to a Sunday report by The Intercept.

• Apple is not in the business of storing – or supplying – data about its customers, boss Tim Cook has said.

• The assurance comes just two weeks after Apple’s iCloud found itself at the centre of a celebrity nude picture controversy – although Apple itself has confirmed that only passwords and not its systems were compromised.

• Switzerland would shield NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden from extradition to the U.S. should he agree to assist the country with an investigation into American spying, it has been revealed.

Civil Rights

• Officials said Hunt had “lunged” at officers with the sword before they shot him. But the attorney for Hunt’s family, Randall K. Edwards, said the autopsy results found that “none of these shots were from Darrien’s front.”

• As you may recall, over the past few months, there’s been a rather big story brewing, concerning how the CIA spied on Senate staffers. Specifically, after having explicitly promised not to do so, the CIA snooped on a private network of Senate staffers who were putting together the giant $40 million report on the CIA’s torture program. The CIA tried to spin the story, claiming that they only spied on that network after realizing that those staffers had a document that the CIA thought it had not handed over to the staffers (they had), believing that perhaps there had been a security breach. However, when read carefully, the CIA’s spin actually confirmed the original story: the CIA, against basically all of its mandates and the basic concept of the Constitutional separation of powers, had spied on the Senate. While both the Senate and the CIA asked the DOJ to investigate, eventually the DOJ said the matter was closed and there would be no prosecutions.

• In lawsuits challenging NSA mass surveillance, torture and drone strikes on Americans in recent years, the US government has turned what was once a narrow legal privilege into an immunity trump card – a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card for “matters of national security”. And now, despite publicly promising to restrict its use, attorney general Eric Holder is trying to expand the power even further.

• In Monday’s New York Times, Matt Apuzzo wrote about a fascinating – if bizarre and publicly mysterious – court case between two private parties in which the US justice department has invoked the so-called state secrets privilege. A Greek shipping magnate has accused an advocacy group pushing for sanctions on Iran of lying about him, but the government argues that the case must be dismissed with hardly an explanation, citing only a “concerned federal agency”.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cindy Cohn is on fire: “Let’s be clear: Under international human rights law, secret “law” doesn’t even qualify as ‘law’ at all.”

• The US Government and agencies like the DEA, NSA, TSA and FBI conduct mass-scale domestic surveillance on the basis of laws whose interpretations are held to be state secrets and matters of national security. From No-Fly lists to the FISA court, the US has adopted the principle that you are not allowed to know the law, but if you break it, you will be punished under it.

• With the growth of internet-based cloud services, storage, social media and mobile devices, our activities increasingly leave digital shadows in our wake – social media activity, website visits, mobile phone records – that are hard to escape from.

• There have never been so many opportunities for governments around the world to snoop on citizens as there are today. Yahoo recently released a cache of documents revealing how in 2007 it refused a demand from the US National Security Agency for a bulk release of email metadata. Yahoo fought the demand in the courts, but caved in the following year after it was threatened with fines of US$250,000 a day for refusing to comply.

• What a strange and harrowing road we’ve walked since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties. We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade a freedom-loving people to march in lockstep with a police state.

• What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse. Since then, we have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance. The bogeyman’s names and faces change over time—Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and now ISIS—but the end result remains the same: our unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security.

• The same Pentagon program that provides surplus military equipment to local police departments has also provided heavy armor and weapons to school districts, and a group of civil rights groups are calling for an end to it.

• A 17-year-old boy is in a critical condition after being Tasered by a police officer during a traffic stop.

• The FBI is investigating after a police officer used a stun gun to subdue Bryce Masters in suburban Kansas City, Missouri, on Sunday afternoon after stopping a car he was driving because it had a warrant attached to it.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Commission’s proposed rule for “fast lanes” on the Internet that would cost extra has generated millions of comments since July

• Last week, we showed how the Verizon court decision made it clear that without Title II reclassification, the internet would be open to discrimination, paid prioritization and exclusive deals. This week, we’re looking at how FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s claims back that up, despite his attempts to argue otherwise.

• Comments from the public continued to flood the Federal Communications Commission on Monday, up until the midnight deadline for input on proposed new regulations on Internet service providers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• “It’s a serious threat to British democracy from Brussels.” “Faceless EU bureaucrats threaten to impose laws without the consent of the British people.” Both these statements could succinctly, and accurately, describe the proposed transatlantic trade and investment partnership – TTIP – between the European Union and the United States. But David Cameron is not scuttling to Brussels to display his bulldog spirit as he vetoes an attack on our country’s sovereignty. Nor will you catch Ukip issuing chilling warnings about EU rule. On the contrary, the Ukip MEP Roger Helmer says: “We have no alternative but to support the deal.”

• And don’t expect any front-page splashes from the Daily Mail – keen as it is to berate the EU over everything from regulations on the shape of bananas to imperial measurements – about the TTIP threat. In fact, there has been all too little media scrutiny of this menace, with the notable exception of my crusading colleague George Monbiot.

Copyrights

• Open Rights Group has responded to a consultation into changes to the law that could lead to people found guilty of online copyright infringement facing up to ten years in prison.

• Edward Snowden and Kim Dotcom have joined hands and waded into New Zealand politics ahead of the nation’s forthcoming election, by alleging prime minister John Key has told fibs about his government’s involvement with the NSA’s nasties.

• Kim Dotcom rolled out Julian Assange and Edward Snowden at his Moment of Truth event today, but despite promises to reveal “concrete evidence” in respect of his own case, a big reveal simply did not take place. An email reportedly set to be unveiled was dismissed as a fake by Warner Bros.

• After being challenged by Grande Communications, piracy monitoring outfit Rightscorp has withdrawn its request to identify the hundreds or thousands of customers who it earlier accused of piracy. The ISP is not letting Rightscorp walk away that easily though, and has asked the court for sanctions.

• Internet entrepreneur holds panel with Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange to expand on revelations that New Zealand government sought to implement top-secret mass surveillance program.

• At a recent political rally in Wellington, indicted Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom jokingly asked members of New Zealand’s spy agency to raise their hands.

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