● 09.28.14

● Links 28/9/2014: Moto X, End of OpenSUSE 11.4

Posted in News Roundup at 7:35 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• Back in August Rockchip published a DRM driver for their SoCs. While this driver has yet to be mainlined, Rockchip continues revising the open-source driver to address upstream developer feedback.

Benchmarks

• These quick weekend benchmarks were comparing EXA and GLAMOR on the Radeon HD 6870 graphics card. The Radeon HD 7000 series hardware and newer (with RadeonSI Gallium3D) only supports GLAMOR — 2D over OpenGL — for 2D acceleration. The Radeon HD 6000 series hardware and older meanwhile has the dedicated 2D code-paths to support EXA by default while GLAMOR can be enabled via the xorg.conf if you wish. Fedora 21 has the X.Org Server 1.16 release and with its post-alpha updates was the Linux 3.17 nodebug Rawhide kernel.

• For those anxious to see NVIDIA’s newest high-end Maxwell graphics card, the recently launched GeForce GTX 980, on Linux, here’s some preview results.

• My GeForce GTX 980 sample just arrived on Friday so I’ve been busy testing it over the weekend and plan to have the review out in the next few days. So far, the GeForce GTX 980 is running great on Linux.

Applications

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 3.14 is out, and all users now want to try it and see what’s new. The developers have provided us with a list of changes and improvements that have been implemented in this latest version.

Distributions

• The official support for openSUSE 11.4 officially ended back in November 2012, but the openSUSE ecosystem has things that sets it apart. One of those things is called Evergreen support. Basically, after a version of OpenSUSE reaches End of Life, the community can extend the life of the system by integrating patches and fixes long after the developers have finished with it.

New Releases

• The embedded operating system built specifically to run the famous XBMC media player solution, OpenELEC, has been upgraded to version 4.2.0 and the image is now ready for download.

Screenshots

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

• The OpenMandriva Association association has announced that OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, the first update for this beautiful KDE-based Linux distribution, has been released and is now available for download.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Schmidt was on Bloomberg TV Wednesday to talk about “How Google Works: The Rules for Success in the Internet Century,” a book he co-wrote with Jonathan Rosenberg. When mention was made of how customers are lining up for blocks to get Apple’s new iPhone models, Schmidt pointed out more than once that Samsung’s similar phones were available a year ago.

• A notable Mesa DRM library update was released today.

• Motorola as a company has gone through what can only be described as a roller coaster ride over the past several years. The company was once highly recognized solely for their popular Droid line (which is so well-remembered that many people synonymize the term “Droid” with “Android”, when they in fact do not mean the same thing), but soon became irrelevant as other manufacturers came along with more powerful products (which also had better availability). When Motorola was purchased by Google in 2011, it felt like forever before the name Motorola resurfaced again. When it finally did, we were greeted with the Moto X.

Free Software/Open Source

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• The famous office suite built by the Linux Foundation, LibreOffice, has just turned four years and the developers have been quick to celebrate this momentous occasion.

• I was invited to give a talk in Bern, Switzerland, for the LibreOffice Conference. The LibreOffice people are a nice crowd with diverse backgrounds. I talked to design people, coders doing rather low-level GL things, marketing folks, some being new to Free Software, and to some being old farts. It sounds like a lot of people and one is inclined to think of boat loads of people attending the conference when having the community statistics in mind. But it has been a very cosy event, with less than a hundred people. I found that surprising, but not necessarily in a bad way.

BSD

• The third BETA build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

Project Releases

Openness/Sharing

• They could have made millions.

• “Screw it,” says lead engineer Javed Gangjee, in his basement in London Ont., when asked about the commercial potential of his work.

• The engineer, a Western University grad, is part of an organization that’s giving a voice to people who were trapped in their own bodies.

• And it’s open-source. When he’s satisfied with the code, he’ll publish it online so anyone can use it. They just have to help people along the way in return.

Leftovers

• It’s not just people who have tuned out politics who feel perplexed.

Security

• So it probably shouldn’t surprise anybody that Mitnick, who post-prison reinvented himself as a skilled penetration tester, security consultant and social engineer, is now offering to sell zero-day exploits at the eye-popping opening price of $100,000 (£61,283).

• Not a humble price!

• As Wired reports, Mitnick last week unveiled a new branch of his security consultancy business called Mitnick’s Absolute Zero Day Exploit Exchange that will both develop zero-day exploits – i.e., tools that take advantage of as-yet unpatched software bugs – in-house, as well as buy them from developers.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• It is official: US President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama is at war again. After toppling Libyan ruler Muammar el-Qaddafi and bombing targets in Somalia and Yemen, Obama has initiated airstrikes in the Syria-Iraq belt, effectively declaring war on the Islamic State – a decision that will involve infringing on the sovereign, if disintegrating, state of Syria. In his zeal to intervene, Obama is again disregarding US and international law by seeking approval from neither the US Congress nor the United Nations Security Council.

• The aerial war waged by the United States and its Western and Arab allies against the cutthroats of the so-called “Islamic State” (formerly known as the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” – ISIS – or the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” – ISIL) is a mere tactic in a war without a strategy.

• So far this year foreign policy and defense issues have been pretty absent from the campaign trail. Will this week finally be the week when the 2014 candidates for Congress finally discover foreign policy?

• It is important to question not merely the legal bases of the administration’s claim, but also the wisdom of establishing a national security policy without congressional aid. It is important to note that several national security experts have made arguments that congressional vetting of proposed executive actions improves the quality of the product, legitimizes the policy and lends itself to lesser chance of backlash, either by the public, the federal judiciary or Congress. In short, getting Congress’s approval is often in the best interest of the president.

• Now it’s a new war or better yet the latest phase of an endless war against whatever new “enemy” is out there to be demonized and contrived as the latest threat to America and Americans.

• The men, David Phillip Ryan, 50, of Miami, and Carlos Quirola-Ordonez, 57, of New Jersey, are believed by the federal government to have attempted over a four-month period in 2012 to sell a cache of guns smuggled out of Iraq. The firearms, a mixture of exotic shotguns and handguns, was understood to be stolen from the family of Saddam Hussein following the U.S. invasion of Iraq and obtained by Ryan who enlisted Quirola-Ordonez and two others in an attempt to sell the guns for between $250,000 and $350,000. The plan came apart when the buyers turned out to be undercover federal agents working with Homeland Security Investigations and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms.

• Two Tornado aircraft which left an RAF base in Cyprus to fly the first combat missions over Iraq have returned without carrying out air strikes, the MOD says

• MPs have voted to back Britain joining US-led airstrikes on Islamic State in Iraq in a vote on Friday. Attacks could begin within days, as ministers admit that UK military intervention could last two or three years.

• In 2000, the United States had about 50 drones. There are some 7,500 today, armed and unarmed.

• An al Qaeda splinter group claimed to have fired a rocket that intended to hit the U.S. Embassy in Yemen on Saturday, wounding several guards in an attempt to retaliate against an air drone strike carried out by the United States in Yemen a day before.

• Intelligence officials in Pakistan say a US drone strike has killed four suspected militants in a northwestern tribal region along the Afghan border.

• The two officials and three local Taliban fighters say the strike Sunday killed two Arab militants and two of their local allies in a compound in the town of Wana in South Waziristan.

• You Mr. President accused Russia of aggression, arming the rebels in Ukraine, even though Russia has done its utmost to find a political solution and now, there is a ceasefire on the ground. Far more progress towards a political solution has been made in Ukraine, than in any other recent theatre of war.

• A United Nations Security Council resolution unanimously adopted this week, which aims to curb foreigners joining extremist militants in countries such as Syria and Iraq, is in line with existing South African legislation, according to the Department of International Relations.

• The most popular analogy used to describe Fidel Castro’s turning Cuba into communism’s only bastion in the Western Hemisphere in 1959 was “cancer.” And the fear, to carry the analogy further, was that it would metastasize elsewhere in Latin America.

• The CIA, therefore, decided that invasive surgery was needed and launched the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. Lacking air cover, all 1,400 anti-Castro paramilitaries were killed or captured as they waded ashore. That was taken to mean that the Castro regime posed a potential military as well as a political threat to the area. It was decided that the best way to excise the malignancy was to cut it out.

• Thanks to a dizzying barrage of lies, mainstream media fear-mongering and a couple of beheadings, the Obama Administration finally achieved its long sought after war in Syria. The tactic that proved most effective in mobilizing the American public back into a shivering, post-9/11 fetal position, was the same tactic used by elites in the UK to convince Scotland against voting for independence. That tactic, as I detailed in a recent post, is fear.

• Wouldn’t that be a pretty turn of events. Obama started out trying to form a Sunni alliance to take down Shiite Assad and now the NYT suggests that he form a Shiite alliance to take down Sunni ISIS. But then again, the NYT is Obama’s mouthpiece.

• ISIS. ISIL. Alibaba. Ebola. Khorasan.

• I checked The Daily News archives for records of such words.

• ISIS? Our first reference to this was in June.

• Since 2003 more than 1 million people in Iraq have been killed in the conflict. Do you think that more surgical strikes will change anything, other than to anger the citizens that live there and live under the threat of being accidentally targeted? Is this how we are to win the peace? This will do nothing but send even more “freedom fighters” into the camps of the terrorists.

• It would be prudent to ask where did ISIS get all the weapons and training it currently seems to have and the answer is very alarming. We allowed half a billion dollars of weapons to get into the hands of anti-Gaddafi organizations. Their leadership includes former generals of the Iraq Army that we disbanded.

• Apparently, we arm and train “freedom fighters” when we don’t like the current ruler. Then we have to go fight those same organizations that we built a few years later. We are supplying the resistance forces in Syria and now we want to side with that same government to reduce the capabilities of the rebels?

• Here’s an idea: leave the internal affairs of other countries to the people that live there and lets mind our own business. Let’s get our economy back on track and get our Fourth Amendment robbing government restrained.

• It was only just six weeks ago that the president argued that arming the Syrian rebels was “fantasy.” Now, as he abruptly shifts his strategy – both in bombing Syria and aiding the opposition to President Bashar al Assad — he should first answer three important questions: Who will be on the receiving end of these weapons? And, just who are these “moderate” rebels? And, now that the U.S. is at war with the Islamic State, what is to guarantee the weapons will stay out of their hands?

• In the skies over Syria, U.S. and Arab combat aircraft have bombed Islamic State targets 20 times since Tuesday. But on the ground, commanders for rebel groups that are part of a CIA-run program say they’ve pleaded in vain for arms, ammunition and even field rations so they can fight the same extremists.

• Although they are among the few chosen to receive aid under the covert U.S. program, the commanders say the U.S. has done little to help them as they struggle to hold onto their main supply route from Turkey against a determined Islamic State offensive. ]

• The U.S. war establishment is using the ISIS propaganda scare to police the world and continuously subject resistant nations to their global NATO imperial plans through massive aerial bombardment violence that is already murdering people not taking part in hostilities.

• [...]

• The U.S. war criminals dropped as many bombs on Syria in one night on September 23 than the entire span of recent bombings/170 plus death dealing airstrikes on Iraq in the name of waging war against ISIL, which is really a campaign designed to further destroy the Iraqi nation to control its petroleum . In Syria, U.S. NATO imperialists bombed 50 targets in Raqqa, Deir al-Zor and Hasakah provinces and also conducted airstrikes in Alleppo.

• The United States and a couple of Arab allies yesterday bombed small oil refineries in eastern Syria controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, seeking to deprive the group of one of its top funding sources. The strikes came as President Barack Obama addressed the United Nations General Assembly, delivering a 39-minute speech that left no doubt he’s given up his aspiration of bringing an end to U.S. military entanglements in the Middle East — and now views himself, however reluctantly, as a wartime president.

• When President Barack Obama decided to drop bombs in Iraq this month, television news turned to a group of familiar faces to decipher the plan for viewers.

• Eager for scoops, both credulously relayed the stories; and eager to furnish serviceable information, the CIA gave them credence. Together they helped trigger one of the most disastrous interventions in recent history.

Transparency Reporting

• Assange repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the mass surveillance of tech giants Google and Facebook, assailing Schmidt and the omnipresent search engine he oversees as worse than the National Security Agency (NSA) in terms of privacy concerns and the sheer, unregulated power it wields via the mass personal data voluntarily handed over by users.

• The story of the CIA’s complicity in the cocaine trade is finally coming to the big screen next month, through the tragic story of Gary Webb, as told in “Kill the Messenger.” Old timers will remember that Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, broke the story in a huge series called “Dark Alliance” in 1996, detailing how CIA contract employees used multi-kilo sales to a notorious LA crack dealer named Rick Ross (from whom that Rick Ross took his name) to finance the agency’s counter insurgency in Nicaragua. As Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept reports, Webb’s worst enemy was not in Langley, but in DC, New York, L.A., and Miami, where mainstream newspapers put squads of reporters on the task of picking his stories apart. The CIA, naturally, observed all this with glee. Webb committed suicide a decade ago, having seen his once promising career reduced to ruins (he was working for a tiny alt-weekly in the end). His work abides though (you can read it all here.) And he was mostly right. (Edward Ericson Jr.)

• Sometimes, they kill the messenger, and the message takes flight, only to return later, with its truth self-evident to a new generation. And then, the messenger is resurrected.

• Webb committed suicide after his reports linking the Reagan-era CIA to the cocaine epidemic in the United States was discredited by major outlets in the mainstream media, though Webb was largely accurate. (There’s also a righteous profile of Webb and the whole story in this 1988 Esquire piece.)

• Instead of a superhero or super soldier, Renner is playing real life journalist Gary Webb – a man who uncovered the CIA’s role in cocaine entering the US.

• Possibly the most insightful statement ever made by a journalist was from Gary Webb, who killed himself in 2004, years after the CIA and media rivals destroyed his career and credibility.

• Eighteen years after it was published, “Dark Alliance,” the San Jose Mercury News’s bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.

• The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation’s most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb’s reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

• So how far have we come in the last 30 years? As Pearson points out, the federal government is currently testing bots to interview people for national security purposes. But, there’s still some way to go, since even this year’s “most intelligent” chatbot isn’t as smart as its developers hyped it to be.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Renowned US environmentalist Bill McKibben will be one of the recipients of this year’s Right Livelihood Awards, known as the ‘Alternative Nobel’, it has been announced.

Finance

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Evidence for Mr. Wong’s close ties to the U.S. that the paper cited included what the report described as frequent meetings with U.S. consulate personnel in Hong Kong and covert donations from Americans to Mr. Wong. As evidence, the paper cited photographs leaked by “netizens.” The story also said Mr. Wong’s family visited Macau in 2011 at the invitation of the American Chamber of Commerce, where they stayed at the “U.S.-owned” Venetian Macao, which is owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp.

Censorship

• A group of about 15 students gathering Wednesday night in Greenlaw Hall to discuss the history of banned books agreed that banning literature keeps people from considering important ideas.

• The report in question cites the Texas Department of Criminal Justice as the main example, where 11,851 titles have been banned from their prisons. “Of the 11,851 total blocked titles, 7,061 were blocked for ‘deviant sexual behaviour’ and 543 for sexually explicit images,” says the report. “Anthologies on Greco-Roman art, the pre-Raphaelites, impressionism, Mexican muralists, pop surrealism, graffiti art, art deco, art nouveau and the National Museum of Women in the Arts are banned for the same reason, as are numerous textbooks on pencil drawing, watercolour, oil painting, photography, graphic design, architecture and anatomy for artists,” the report went on to say. Works from Gustav Flaubert, Langston Hughes, Flannery O’Connor, George Orwell, Ovid, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Shakespeare and Alice Walker were all found on the banned book list. The report also touched on American schools, where people like Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Walker are examples of writers banned based on “objections centering around moral and religious reasons.”

• So let’s be clear. People have every right to object to art they find objectionable but no right whatsoever to have that work censored. Free expression, including work that others may find shocking or offensive, is a right that must be defended vigorously. As an organisation, while we condemn in no uncertain terms all those who advocate censorship, we would – as a free expression organisation – defend their right to express those views. What we do not and will never condone is the use of intimidation, force or violence to stifle the free expression of others.

• I still think that my argument was right. Pornography, libel, sedition, hate speech and lies are a fair price for freedom of speech. They would be powerless in a justly ordered, well-educated society. If pornography incites your lust, commend the pornographer for success and condemn yourself for succumbing. If you believe the propagandist, he or she has done his job: It is your critical faculties that are at fault. If the advertiser exaggerates, caveat emptor.

• Free-speech organisations find US government is ‘failing to protect the rights of its most vulnerable citizens’ as popular books – including Shakespeare – are banned from institutions

• Students at six Denver-area highs schools walked out their classrooms en masse, protesting a plan by the conservative-majority Jefferson County school board to push for curriculum changes to Advanced Placement history courses to promote patriotism and deference to authority. The proposed changes would include the removal of topics that could ‘encourage’ civil disobedience from textbooks and materials.

• It is the call for a review of the Advanced Placement curriculum for U.S. history classes to ensure that teaching materials present positive aspects of U.S. history and its heritage. According to the wording of the proposal, teaching materials should “promote citizenship, patriotism … (and) respect for authority” and not “encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”

• “I understand that they want to take out our very important history of slavery and dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it portrays the U.S. in a negative light,” said Casey McAndrew, a high school senior.

• This week, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott used recent terrorist threats as the backdrop of a dire warning to Australians that “for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others.”

• The Australian government is primed to give the nation’s spy agency unfettered access to citizens’ computer networks and potentially put journalists in jail thanks to drafted national security reform laws passed by the country’s Senate Thursday, The Sydney Morning News reported.

• The Australian Senate passed an anti-terrorism bill called the “National Security Legislation Amendment Bill” that would give the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) more power to monitor Web traffic. If finalized, the law permits ASIO agents to search and monitor an unlimited number of computers on a particular network based on a single warrant request. Journalists, bloggers and government whistleblowers could also spend up to 10 years in prison for revealing details of intelligence operations, as part of the law. The bill is set to be voted on and approved by Australian’s House of Representatives next week.

• Free speech advocates from across Australia’s political spectrum have raised concerns about new counter-terrorism legislation passed by the Australian senate this week.

• Australia is in the process of passing new intelligence gatherings laws that, on the face, appear troublingly wide-ranging, even by American privacy standards.

• Bitcoin and Dogecoin were among the list of at least 20 words banned by the popular /r/technology subreddit. The scandal shook the Reddit sphere last week. Monday, Reddit punished the censorship by obscuring the community. They officially pulled the subreddit from the list of “default subreddits” awarded to popular sub-communities.

Privacy

• Plans by Apple and Google to increase the security on their smart devices have made FBI Director James Comey “very concerned,” he told reporters on Thursday at FBI headquarters in Washington.

• A few months ago, the Chinese government was said to have prohibited all state officials and agencies from using Apple devices and the now the Chinese government has banned Samsung devices too. However, in Apple products’ issue, China later said that the issue has been greatly exaggerated.

• Ultimately, a decision on whether to allow Supo to continue in its current capacity or to establish a new security intelligence service will be taken by policy-makers. The issue is expected to be on the agenda in the government negotiations to be held after the upcoming parliamentary elections to ensure that a vision for the organisation of security and intelligence services is inscribed into the next government programme.

• The White House is preparing a directive that would require federal agencies to publicly disclose for the first time where they fly drones in the United States and what they do with the torrents of data collected from aerial surveillance.

• One of the bothersome aspects of the war escalation in Iraq and Syria has been the commitment of President Barack Obama’s administration to using language to conceal their war plans.

• The White House has insisted this is not a war. The attacks on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) are a part of a “counterterrorism strategy.” The US has not launched a war because it has previously been dropping Hellfire missiles on suspected terrorists in various countries. Those strikes, though they have killed hundreds of civilians and were questionable in their legality and success in bringing about “security,” were part of a “strategy.”

• ‘Covert Operations’ exhibition brings FOIA requests and dogged investigative fieldwork into museum setting

• When the soul-crushingly simple, single-serving messaging app Yo hit the App Store earlier this year, people couldn’t say enough about the app that said barely anything at all. But given our pseudo-surveillance state and similar apps’ privacy concerns, we wondered — could the government be spying on (or even just talking about) Yo?

• Walker died on August 30.

• “The United States of Barack Obama will have great affinity with Marina Silva’s Brazil,” predicts one of Marina Silva’s campaign coordinators, Mauricio Rands.

• Rands, a former federal deputy for the PT [Labor Party] who changed parties and went to the PSB [Brazilian Socialist Party], is one of Marina’s government plan advisers, along with sociologist Neca Setúbal, a Banco Itaú heiress.

• According to Rands, a focus of her program will be to take a new approach to relations with the United States, which are now being affected by the espionage scandal exposed by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden.

• Not a day goes by without news reports on how large corporate entities and the government are collecting ever-increasing amounts of personal information about us. While consumers voluntarily give away personal information to various websites in exchange for their services, more worrisome is the collection of personal information without our knowledge or consent. When our government is doing the collecting, those concerns intensify. We ought to pause and ask what the appropriate place for the government is in this brave new “big data” world.

• Carlyle Group used ‘smart chips’ implanted in name badges to track limited partners at its annual meeting earlier this month, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

• When Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, a war-weary American public finally had its eyes opened to the profound expansions of executive power that occurred after 9/11. But in the week since President Barack Obama announced a new open-ended campaign to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the jihadi group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), one can’t help worrying that the lessons of the past decade will fade from our collective memory.

• Considered a mistake and now shrouded in secrecy, the document detailed a 175,000 euro contract from the interior ministry, responsible for the domestic security services, for the purchase of forensic equipment from a company named as Onerecovery, which are allegedly used for tracing data and smartphone analysis, much in the same way that the American NSA got into hot water for spying on people.

• Former US spy agency contractor, Edward Snowden, has been declared one of the winners of a Swedish human rights award-also known as the “alternative Nobel”- for exposing top secret state surveillance programs.

• The Right of Privacy has become deeply embedded in our culture and is part of our everyday conversations as a result of NSA’s eavesdropping, drones flying overhead taking pictures, and the data mining of everything we do on the Internet. Let us not forget the surreptitious pens filming us in public, Google glasses capturing our every move, or celebrities claiming violation of their Right of Publicity (an offshoot of the Right of Privacy). Today, the Right of Privacy and Right of Publicity are governed by statutes in most jurisdictions and those that do not have specific statutes use the common law.

• Edward Snowden, who remains the most wanted man in the United States and of almost every global hegemon in the world, was honored with an ‘alternative Nobel’. He, together with Alans Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian received the 2014 Right Livelihood Honorary Award. This recognized his contribution of information on surveillance programs made by the American government.

• For an illuminating glimpse of government power in action, it’s hard to beat the fines the US Justice Department threatened to level against Yahoo if it didn’t comply with a secret and sweeping surveillance request in 2008.

• The National Security Agency has hired its first “chief risk officer” in an attempt to quell public fear that it operates outside the rule of law.

• The National Security Agency (NSA), which develops surveillance tools that are both dazzling and terrifying, has been making money on the side by licensing its technology to private businesses for more than two decades.

• Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s assertion that Canadian security agencies don’t collect “metadata” has some cybersecurity experts scratching their heads.

• That’s because the Communications Security Establishment of Canada (CSEC) is not only legally mandated to collect metadata — data that details the circumstances around electronic communications — but has repeatedly confirmed that they do.

• “Unfortunately we live in a ‘black hole’ around CSEC’s activities,” Ron Diebert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said in an email.

• Knowing all this does not give me confidence in my government, but it does tend to vindicate Snowden’s actions. Maybe he did betray the government’s trust, but the government has been betraying the people’s trust to a far greater degree.

• German opposition members have appealed to the country’s highest court to allow former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to testify at a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin.

• Opposition lawmakers have asked Germany’s highest court to rule on whether former NSA contractor Edward Snowden can come to Berlin to testify about the agency’s activities.

• A recent report in the Globe and Mail reveals that Canada’s signals intelligence agency has developed and field-tested software that can secretly hijack a computer and then use it as a springboard to hack into other computers.

• High schools in the district of Huntsville, Alabama, have been monitoring their students’ activities on social media for the past 18 months after receiving a tip from the National Security Agency (NSA) about violent threats being made on Facebook.

• He said, “Every time you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you’re being a rat. You’re being a narc.”

• The public square that the internet and social media offers Russian activists may soon be compromised. The Moscow Times reported Friday that the Kremlin’s telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor, this week notified Google, Facebook, and Twitter that they would need to register as “organizers of information distribution” under the country’s so-called blogger law.

• Surprised? Probably not. According to recent documents from Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency is spending $79.7 million on a research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets”. This project involves building a quantum computer that would be able to break most types of encryption. At the moment, the agency is nowhere near completion of the project, so no need to worry yet. However, the NSA is already pretty good at breaking encryption and bribes companies to promote flawed encryption, so with this much power and money, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched that the NSA will successfully build this computer.

• Combine government bad behaviour and an employee with a conscience and you get a whistleblower. Add a journalist into the mix and you have a recipe for government accountability.

• In the technological age, the link between journalist and insider source is very often digital communication. Knowing this, governments all over the world are working hard to track the communications of leakers and the journalists who can make those leaks public.

• There are reports that American Muslims are sometimes coerced into becoming informants for the security agencies.

• A third civil liberties organization is asking a federal appeals court for time to defend the only federal court ruling challenging the legality of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of information on U.S. telephone calls.

• The Center for National Security Studies, a D.C.-based group which advocates for individual liberties and government transparency, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Friday to allow the group time to argue that U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the counterterrorism program appeared to be illegal was correct, albeit on different grounds than Leon identified.

• In the last few days three stories have broken that make the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel appear more insidious and threatening than ever.

• Private information stored online by British computer users could be scrutinised by American law enforcement agencies under a wide-ranging new right-to-snoop being pursued by the US government.

• Federal authorities in the US are using the courts to try to force American-owned technology companies to disclose emails and other data held in the “Cloud” – the vast network of servers where data is stored for customers.

• The claim would require companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Google to open up all their electronic records to agencies – such as the CIA, the NSA and the FBI – even if it is stored in Europe rather than on US soil.

Civil Rights

• Imagine the United States without independent reporters. Where would the news come from? Press releases and corporate statements? Government-run media? And more importantly, what would we have missed over the last century? Watergate, COINTELPRO, the CIA’s manipulation of politics in Vietnam—none of these things would be common knowledge without courageous reporters, who were willing to publish stories on scandals that rocked the entire country.

• President Obama made some commendable speeches at the United Nations last week, but his self-serving remarks to a panel on open government won’t win any plaudits from supporters of an independent news media. They were an astonishing example of saying one thing while doing just the opposite.

• However, we’ve had profound disagreements with the Attorney General on national security issues. During his tenure, DOJ approved the drone killing of an American far away from any battlefield, approved the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, failed to prosecute any of the Bush administration torturers, and presided over more leak prosecutions than all previous Justice Departments combined. We acknowledge, nonetheless, that he fought, albeit unsuccessfully, to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal criminal courts rather than in flawed military commissions.

• Holder’s work on civil liberties has been far less inspiring.

• Thursday President Obama announced Eric Holder will be leaving as Attorney General of the United States as soon as his yet to be named replacement is confirmed.

• Holder is the fist African-American and the 4th-longest serving U.S. Attorney General. He has served in Department of Justice under six Presidents of both parties. But his last five and half years as A.G. were the most eventful, as he confronted issues that were both controversial and historic.

• On Thursday night’s broadcast, however, he suggested that otherwise nonjudgmental liberals, multi-culturalists, and others who express outrage when Jonah Hill, Donald Sterling, Rush Limbaugh, or Mel Gibson say stupid or offensive things, or when a baker refuses to make gay wedding cakes, remain silent “while gross atrocities are ignored across the world.” He also called attention to the fact that a group of Yale students recently tried to prevent Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali from speaking on campus.

• Large-scale violations of electronic privacy, many of which were exposed by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, also occurred on Holder’s watch. Holder didn’t initiate the bulk collection of phone or e-mail records; nor did he run the N.S.A. But Holder, as the Administration’s top lawyer for half a dozen years, nonetheless bears responsibility for these gross and repeated violations of Constitutional principles. It is ultimately the Justice Department’s duty to stand up for the Constitution when other parts of government want to abandon it, and this Holder failed to do. (During the Bush Administration, Justice Department lawyers, like Jack Goldsmith and then Acting Attorney General James Comey, fought the White House’s excessive surveillance of American citizens at a key moment.) We don’t know what he knew, but Holder’s Justice Department does not seem to have put a real brake on the program.

• This month, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery hosted a “terror training” for law enforcement led by someone we consider a notorious Islamophobe, John Guandolo. As Muslim leaders of Arizona, we are deeply disappointed that Mr. Montgomery ignored our repeated calls to invite reputable trainers to address this important topic and chose individuals who advocate extreme anti-Muslim views.

• The Nazis and the Japanese resurrected the institution of slavery, and the Nazis even industrialized slavery and genocide in the Holocaust. Allied victory in World War II destroyed slavery based on anti-Semitism. Harry Truman followed up FDR’s work by laying the foundation for confronting the Stalinist brand of slavery, and Ronald Reagan played the major role in bringing down the Soviet Union some 40 years later without a shot being fired.

• Mliswa had been challenged over allegations he took US embassy staffer, Eric Little, on a tour of Hurungwe West in June to meet local government officials.

• While Agee was in West Germany, he campaigned traitorously against the CIA. He revealed the identities of several CIA officers, and put their lives in danger. For the domestic purpose of making it difficult for Agee to continue his anti-CIA campaign, the State Department revoked his passport.

• Roger Stone’s new book Nixon’s Secrets: The Rise, Fall, and Untold Truth About The President, Watergate, and The Pardon is a Washington thriller that hinges on a shocking revelation: that the CIA once planned to assassinate President Richard Nixon.

• One panelist, John Newman, who gave a presentation on CIA pseudonyms used by agents connected with the Kennedys, said the Warren Report “was not just wrong. The longer we have to study the case, the wronger its conclusions become.”

• In 1996 — as major U.S. news outlets disparaged the Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine story and destroyed the career of investigative reporter Gary Webb for reviving it — the CIA marveled at the success of its public-relations team guiding the mainstream media’s hostility toward both the story and Webb, according to a newly released internal report.

• Entitled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the six-page report describes the CIA’s damage control after Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series was published in the San Jose Mercury-News in August 1996. Webb had resurrected disclosures from the 1980s about the CIA-backed Contras collaborating with cocaine traffickers as the Reagan administration worked to conceal the crimes.

• Although the CIA’s inspector general later corroborated the truth about the Contra-cocaine connection and the Reagan administration’s cover-up, the mainstream media’s counterattack in defense of the CIA in late summer and fall of 1996 proved so effective that the subsequent CIA confession made little dent in the conventional wisdom regarding either the Contra-cocaine scandal or Gary Webb.

• The preceding paragraphs will come as no surprise to anyone who has researched or read about the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program. But if I held a security clearance, I could lose my career or face prosecution for publishing them.

• The release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program appears to have slipped further, judging by filings Thursday afternoon in a pair of related court cases.

• The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on “enhanced interrogation” techniques has been delayed again, this time until late October, according to an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

• The Department of Justice was due to release a summary of the report that details the committee’s investigation of a CIA interrogations program under former President George W. Bush in late September. The report was requested via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

• Feinstein intervened, requesting a one-month extension, so that the Intelligence Committee she leads, and the White House, could reduce heavy redactions made to the summary by the CIA, the aide said.

• This is Feinstein’s second request for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to delay the summary’s release under the FOIA request.

• The non-denial denial is an art that takes many forms in official Washington.

• The basic idea is that when you or your organization are accused of doing something that you did in fact do, you respond with what sounds like a denial, but really isn’t.

• You issue a very narrowly-crafted denial involving a lot of hairsplitting, while avoiding the central claim. Or you dismiss the accusation as unworthy of response. Or you deny something else: You raise a straw man accusation and deny that; or – possibly best yet — you take advantage of a poorly worded question.

• Gen. Augusto Pinochet and his minions overthrew Allende’s democratic election in 1973 with the full connivance of President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

• Less than two weeks later, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the two political leaders in San Francisco, where most of the Jonestown victims came from, most likely to undertake an independent investigation of the covert CIA involvement in Jonestown were also murdered.

• If you don’t know Ray McGovern yet, you probably should.

• You see, Ray just beat down, in court, Hillary Clinton, the State Department, and a small part of Post-Constitutional America.

• Now this CISPA bill, which is yet again pushed by congressional support of the executive, deals with pre-emptively “defending” against cyber terrorism. What this bill actually does is allow, under law, for private corporations and businesses to give detailed information about our lives such as our search, text, email, online store accounts, word and endless other technological privacies, including complete “cloud” access of each U.S. citizen to the federal government.

• On Oct. 2, 2013, Gov. Brown signed the Donnelly-introduced Assembly Bill 351 into law. Coined The California Liberty Preservation Act, the law opposes the indefinite military detention of persons without charge or trial and prohibits state cooperation with federal officials in enacting the provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Agreement.

• The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California lauded the bill as signaling that NDAA was “contrary to the common values of all Americans.”

Internet/Net Neutrality

• A senior Chinese internet regulator has been sacked and expelled him from the ruling Communist Party for accepting huge bribes.

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