● 01.01.15

● Links 1/1/2015: Kodak on Android, Tizen on All Samsung TVs

Posted in News Roundup at 9:09 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Librem 15 is a new Linux-powered laptop in the making, and the crowdfunding campaign that’s taking place on Indiegogo has just passed the halfway mark.

Applications

• Comix is an application that lets users read comic books that can even be archived. It’s been around for many years and it’s one of the best so far, despite its age and simplistic approach. The American culture always held comic books in high regard and this trend is now spreading across the world. It’s true that not everyone is really a fan of this kind of storytelling and that there is still a long way to go until more people from other continents appreciate them. In any case, if you want to read comic books on a Linux platform, it’s rather easy to do so, especially since there are quite a few options out there.

• Download managers are not something new for Linux users, but it’s true that apps with nice GUIs and lots of options are. uGet is definitely one of the most interesting download managers for the Linux platform and we’ll now take a closer look at it.

• LiVES is a simple-to-use video editor and VJ tool that allows users to combine real time and rendered effects, streams, and multiple video/audio files. The developers have released a new version of it with some minor changes and improvements.

• PhpMyAdmin is a tool built in PHP that handles the administration of MySQL databases. The developers have released a new version and is now available for download.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Steam for Linux has been available for a couple of years already and it seems like it’s definitely making an impact, if we look closely at the most played games on the digital distribution platform.

• Blitzkrieg 3, a new strategy game developed by Nival Interactive, will be getting a Linux release, at least this are the latest reports from the German media.

• Here is a look back at the most popular articles on GamingOnLinux for 2014, it was a seriously crazy year for us here, and for everyone in Linux gaming, so let’s see what happened! We had a few downers, but most of it was great stuff that I am proud to be a part of.

• Lisa is a quirky side-scrolling RPG set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It has a nice style to it, and very positive reviews on Steam.

• After a bit of a wait it’s finally possible for you to bring your penguins to space and colonize new worlds in the name of Torvalds. But how does Civilization: Beyond Earth fare, what are its strengths and weaknesses? Let’s find out.

• Civilization: Beyond Earth is the newest installation in the long standind series of Civilization games and, as you all are probably aware, instead of allowing you to become the most powerful nation on Earth it brings you onto an unexplored planet far away as humanity’s last resort to save itself from an overpopulated home.

• Roundabout, a weird arcade driving game developed and published on Steam by No Goblin, has also reached the Linux platform and is now available with 34% discount.

• The Way of Life, an adventure game developed in just 24 hours, has made its way on Steam for Linux. It’s not ready yet and is still under development, but the first three levels have been provided for free.

• OpenTTD is an open source simulation game based on the popular Microprose title Transport Tycoon written by Chris Sawyer. It’s been around for quite some time and it’s still played by many gamers, even today. A new major release is in the making and the first Beta has been released.

• The Itch.io games store has always been nice, but icing on the cake is that they are now creating an open source desktop client in Qt 5.

• It’s in the very early stages, but could be something to give it a boost over other smaller stores. Desura is also working to bring their re-open sourced client back to Linux, and GOG are bringing out a closed source client. Looks like desktop clients are becoming a big thing again.

• Finally, Desura has a new client available for Linux. Bad Juju Games haven’t officially announced it anywhere on Desura yet, but it is available to download.

• It has been open sourced again thanks to Bad Juju Games who moved it to the GPL3 license, and removed the need to sign a contributor agreement, but the Desura name and logo are still subject to certain terms (fair enough).

• TIMEframe was originally created for the Ludum Dare game jam competition by Random Seed games and an updated version has been in development.

• It looks like a pretty interesting concept, and they need help by getting votes on Steam Greenlight. Sadly, the original doesn’t have Linux support, so it’s great the updated version will.

• One of the great things about open source is that you’re free to modify and redistribute it in whichever way you like. This is real creative freedom that I support. All of my apps and games are open source. A while back, I helped fund the opening of some game music and art assets to the public. Being in the public domain (or having a Creative Commons license, as these art assets now do) allows for public remixing and free use of the content. Gotta love that.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• All leaders must rise to the challenge for December 2015, warns outgoing EU climate chief

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Well the first two laps of my first SoK is over and now I finally enter into the final lap. In the first month I had finished with the design of the site but it was just plain and simple HTML/CSS and as we all know that is not enough. So the next question that arises is – what do we need ? And the answer to that will be a framework.

• There were not many commits from my side to the Cantor project during the last month, but most of stuffs that are related to porting the Python 2 backend to Python 3 have been done.

• MUP is a markup previewer. It supports multiple markup formats. You can use it to read markup text, but it is also useful when writing markup text to check how your work looks, thanks to its refresh-as-you-save feature.

• Here in the Marble world, we are working hard on expanding the current functionality with new features. Today I would like to show you some stuff we’ve recently introduced as part of the Measure tool. The measure tool is basically a multifunctional georuler, that allows to perform a variety of measurements. For instance, now you can easily measure distances on trivial paths or areas of complicated polygon shapes.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Bastian Hougaard and Jakub Steiner put together a wonderful video for the campain. Thanks guys!

• I’ve funded the last 4 months of development to give you and idea of what you are funding and reduce your risk. I also wanted to prove to you that I’m capable of taking on this project. I hope you agree and are willing to keep me going.

Distributions

New Releases

• Deepin, a Linux distribution that provides a unique, fun, and interesting experience to its users has been upgraded to version 2014.2 and is now ready for download.

• OpenELEC is a bleeding-edge embedded operating system built specifically to run the Kodi media player hub. It has just been upgraded to use the latest version of Kodi and it packs a ton of improvements.

• I am proud to announce the release of ZevenOS 6.0 – Goodbye Edition. Goodbye Edition therefore because its released at the end of this year and will be the last ZevenOS Version for a long long time. This release is based upon Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and will be supported for 5.0 years.

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

Fedora

• On some levels this makes sense. Red Hat is the single largest entity in Fedora and many (if not most) of the movers and shakers in Fedora are Red Hat employees. A quick glance at the Fedora 21 System Wide Changes shows many more Red Hat employees than not. Is it any wonder that individual contributors can feel a bit like a sailboat in the way of an aircraft carrier?

• Today I’d like to take a look at where Ansible is, a year later, using last year’s report as a benchmark. I think it’s fair to say that we’ve done pretty well for our users in 2014.

Debian Family

• The next timed change of the freeze policy will apply per January 5th. After that date, we will only accept RC bugs fixes. Which means it is final chance for translation updates.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Ubuntu can be easily tweaked and it’s not all that difficult to make some visual changes to it. People think that Unity is not all that flexible, but that’s definitely not the case and users need just two apps to make all the changes they want.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Tizen

• The HOT News of the day is that Samsung have decided to start shipping Tizen on ALL of their upcoming Smart TVs starting 2015. According to industry sources, Samsung have taken this bold move following a meeting that took place on 29 December, and decided to only use Tizen across its complete upcoming TV line in an effort to boost its own Tizen TV ecosystem.

Android

• After a lengthy corporate restructuring, the indomitable Kodak is applying its brand and expertise to a new market: smartphones. The imaging company announced its intention to launch a range of Android smartphones aimed at transitioning technophobes in partnership with mobile device manufacturer Bullitt Group.

• This last year has been a big one for Android. Displays have started moving beyond 1080p, devices keep getting bigger, and Android 5.0 brings the most fundamental change the platform has seen in a very long time. Some of the phones that were released in 2014 were huge successes, and other fell short of expectations, but which one was the best? That depends on how you frame the question, so let’s split it up a few different ways and find out.

• In most areas, Google is already beating Apple, or at least catching up to it. Yet Apple still has a stranglehold in specific areas, ones that aren’t easy to break, including the enterprise as well as the hearts of independent developers and startups.

• Earlier this week, we brought you the story of Jason Kallelis of Writing About Tech, a longtime Android fan who had grown so frustrated with Android’s user experience recently that he felt tempted to switch to the iPhone 6 Plus. Well, it’s just one day later and Kallelis has already decided to take the plunge and has bought himself Apple’s giant new phablet as an experiment to see if he likes it better.

• Android 5.0.2 has rolled out for Nexus 7 users, and the latest incremental update aims to fix a few lingering bugs that were still crawling around the Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system after launch.

• Google’s new Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system delivered tons of new features to Nexus smartphone and tablet users. However, it also delivered a number of Android 5.0 Lollipop issues to owners of the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, Nexus 10, and Nexus 7, Lollipop problems that Google’s been trying to iron out over the last month and a half.

• December was the fourth anniversary for Android 2.3 Gingerbread—an eternity for smartphones—yet the OS stubbornly refuses to die. The OS that originally shipped in 2010 is still clinging on to 9.1 percent of active devices, and in developing markets it still ships on new devices. Android 2.3 has even outlasted newer versions of Android, like 3.0 Honeycomb (0 percent) and 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (7.8 percent).

• Another reliable tipster confirmed that the HTC One M9 “Hima” will be released in March boasting the latest Android 5.0 Lollipop OS overlaced with the HTC Sense 7 user interface.

• The news of a OnePlus ROM was not new news, as it had been reported months ago that the company was working on its own version of close-to-stock android. More recently, the company announced a competition in their forum asking members to suggest a name for their ROM. Well, if you have been waiting to see what OnePlus could bring to the ROM table then it looks like the wait is over. OnePlus today have released the first version of their very own ROM. At the moment, the ROM name has still not been decided (or at least made known) and instead is simply going by ‘Android Lollipop Alpha’. As the name suggests, this ROM is based on Android 5.0 (Lollipop) and is now available to download and install. However, before you all click download, you do need to know that this is a very early build. Quite often builds are referred to as “early” or “alpha”, but this is seriously early and OnePlus has therefore released this as a ‘community preview’ version (similar to what we saw from Google with the L preview a few months ago). OnePlus make this point in their blog post stating “It’s so early, in fact, that this build contains no extras beyond the stock features of AOSP Lollipop”. So you’ve been warned. You should expect things not to work, bugs and other nasties associated with early and alpha ROM builds.

• Samsung Electronics Co. may be ringing in the New Year with a fresh new system update for its devices. The manufacturer reportedly plans to begin sending out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to its devices in January, according to a Reddit user claiming to be a Samsung employee.

• If the 40 free applications that Amazon gave away last week wasn’t enough to satiate your hunger for new apps, the company is back today with even more goodies for your Android device.

• Amazon is now offering 33 paid Android apps for free as part of its latest Free App of the Day Bundle. There are games and utilities packed inside of the bundle, including big names like Monopoly, République, Thomas Was Alone, Lyne, and Angry Birds Star Wars.

• Android is the most used mobile operating system in the history of the world. Google’s mobile OS shipped on 84% of all global smartphones in Q3 2014, a level that has grown consistently over the last several years. In contrast, Apple’s iOS has lost quarterly share in a growing market, showing up in 11.7% of all smartphone shipments in the third quarter.

• While Google has yet to release the Android Lollipop for the HTC One M7, users of the smartphone can try out the latest version by installing the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update on their phones thanks to LiqiudSmooth ROM.

• Instructables user depotdevoid took his old Droid Razr Maxx and decided to turn it into an always-on, internet-connected webcam he could monitor at any time. If you want to do the same, you’ll need a few things to make this project work. A copy of IP Webcam (Free, $4 Pro) from Google Play, and a soldering iron (if you don’t want to just use USB power—depotdevoid’s Maxx has a broken USB charging port) to add external power, and a mount for your phone are all it really takes. He uses his to watch his 3D printer when he’s not in his garage workshop, but you can use it to keep an eye on package deliveries, watch your pets during the day, or just see the view from your home window.

• An obscure court case in India appears to have dented hopes of the mobile industry weaning itself off Google dependency – and has raised questions about the goals of Cyanogen and its backer, a Silicon Valley VC firm with close ties to Google.

• In the cosy world of Menlo Park VC firms, Andreessen Horowitz (or “A16Z”) is as close to Google as anyone. Together, they teamed up to create the “Glass Collective”, while its head, Netscape founder Andreessen, appear to go to battle in Google’s wars against media companies, as Michael Wolff reminded us this week.

• Although it can be exciting living on the bleeding edge of tech, sometimes being first to a software update can prove to be more harmful than good. Just ask Nexus (or even iPhone) owners who’ve, over the years, learned the hard way that initial updates — especially when it comes to major Android versions — can often times be riddled with bugs and other general weirdness. It’s this very reason it appears there was such a long delay in the rollout of Android 5.0 Lollipop for the Nexus 5.

• What became of the crowdfunded projects we covered in 2014? Two earned more than $2 million each, about a third went unfunded, and half had shipping delays.

• Ten years ago if somebody were to tell you you’d soon be able to collect thousands and even millions of dollars for your product idea simply by posting a summary and some pictures on a web page, you might have been inclined to check their meds. Then Kickstarter launched in 2009, and small-scale investing changed forever.

• While it may seem to most consumers that all smartphones are pretty much the same — and for Apple users, they are — Android phone manufacturers brought a diverse array of hardware to the market in 2014. The theme of the year was standout features, including large (and even curved) displays, water-resistant designs and powerful cameras. Manufacturers competed fiercely to win the favor of consumers, and many handsets stood out for very specific reasons. Below is a rundown of the best Android devices of 2014 and their best features.

• Android 4.4 “KitKat” has been ported to Intel/AMD x86 processors for a while in stable form while kicking off the New Year is the second stable release of Android-x86 4.4

• Android-x86 4.4-r2 is the second stable update to KitKat for Intel/AMD processors. This update has various x86-specific improvements targeted for tablets and netbooks.

• Nokia has confirmed the launch date of its first Nokia-branded Android tablet, the N1, which will first hit the Chinese market on Jan. 7, 2015.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

• The One Laptop Per Child project, still going strong in 2015, provides a new version of the nearly indestructable XO laptop which is specifically geared toward children in farming communities.

• The XO Tablet is an Android tablet designed for children 3-12 years old that brings OLPC’s expertise to both the educational . It features a 7-inch screen and over 150 applications.

Free Software/Open Source

• At the beginning of a new year, it’s traditional to look back over the last 12 months. But as far as this column is concerned, it’s easy to summarise what happened then: open source has won. Let’s take it from the top:

• Supercomputers. Linux is so dominant on the Top 500 Supercomputers lists it is almost embarrassing. The November 2014 figures show that 485 of the top 500 systems were running some form of Linux; Windows runs on just one. Things are even more impressive if you look at the numbers of cores involved. Here, Linux is to be found on 22,851,693 of them, while Windows is on just 30,720; what that means is that not only does Linux dominate, it is particularly strong on the bigger systems.

• Cloud computing. The Linux Foundation produced an interesting report last year, which looked at the use of Linux in the cloud by large companies. It found that 75% of them use Linux as their primary platform there, against just 23% that use Windows. It’s hard to translate that into market share, since the mix between cloud and non-cloud needs to be factored in; however, given the current popularity of cloud computing, it’s safe to say that the use of Linux is high and increasing. Indeed, the same survey found Linux deployments in the cloud have increased from 65% to 79%, while those for Windows have fallen from 45% to 36%. Of course, some may not regard the Linux Foundation as totaly disinterested here, but even allowing for that, and for statistical uncertainties, it’s pretty clear which direction things are moving in.

• Is open source collaboration the key to communication? No silver bullet exists that provides organizations with everything they desire in a single solution. With that said, commercial open source collaboration solutions help companies future proof their investment and give them what is needed to fit their unique requirements. So, if what you are seeking is better security and privacy, improved flexibility and greater control over your collaboration solution, then you should consider open source.

Events

• The rise of China is hardly a secret – by some metrics, the Chinese economy is already the largest in the world. But in recent months, it has become clear that Chinese technology companies are also about to have a major impact on the rest of the planet – and that includes the world of open source.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• I use the private mode of firefox quite often, for example when I want to test an application while being authenticated in one windown and not authenticated in another window.

SaaS/Big Data

• In just a few hours 2014 ends. This is a great opportunity to look back at what happened this year in the ownCloud world and in my personal life. This was an absolutely crazy 12-month so this blog post is now way longer that I planed. A huge thanks you to everyone in the ownCloud community. It´s a blast to work together with so many clever and friendly people from all over the world.

Project Releases

• New Year’s Eve Edition: GWorkspace 0.9.3 released!

• A new version of rfoaas is now on CRAN. The rfoaas package provides an interface for R to the most excellent FOAAS service–which provides a modern, scalable and RESTful web service for the frequent need to tell someone to eff off.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• A bit of news on the development of OpenTAC – the Open Hardware Test Automation Controller.

Programming

• I just watched a CCC talk in which the speaker claims Perl is horribly broken. Watching it was fairly annoying however, since I had to restrain myself from throwing things at the screen.

Standards/Consortia

• The ODF Plugfest that took place in London on 8 and 9 December showcased innovative ways to work with electronic documents. The most striking idea is the borrowing of techniques commonly used in software development, promising many news ways to create and collaborate on documents.

• At the two-day workshop in London, the Berlin-based ODF expert Svante Schubert proposed to borrow techniques commonly used in software development, to manage revisions from many different sources. He suggests to exchange only the changes made in a text, instead of the much more cumbersome sending back and forth of an entire document. “Using files for collaborating on documents is a relic from the era of floppy discs”, developer Schubert says. “It forces a recipient to read the entire document and try to understand what has been changed by others.”

Leftovers

• A travel agency in one of Japan’s most beautiful cities, Kyoto, has started organising bridal ceremonies for single women.

Security

• The Lizard Squad, a band of young hooligans that recently became Internet famous for launching crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the largest online gaming networks, is now advertising own Lizard-branded DDoS-for-hire service. Read on for a decidedly different take on this offering than what’s being portrayed in the mainstream media.

• It’s no secret that some in the computer security world like the idea of being able to “hack back” against online attacks. The simplest form of this idea is that if you’re a company under a denial-of-service attack, should you be able to “hack” a computer that is coordinating those attacks to stop them? More than two years ago, an LA Times article noted that some cybersecurity startups were marketing such services. Related to this, when the terrible CISPA legislation was being debated, one concern was that it would legalize such “hack backs” because, among other things, CISPA would grant immunity to companies “for decisions made based on cyber threat information.” Some interpreted that to mean that companies would have immunity if they decided to hack back against an attacker.

• More than 78 per cent of all PHP installations are running with at least one known security vulnerability, a researcher has found.

• Google developer advocate Anthony Ferrara reached this unpleasant conclusion by correlating statistics from web survey site W3Techs with lists of known vulnerabilities in various versions of PHP.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• US director Oliver Stone has called Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych a CIA “coup” and claimed that the West played a role in fostering anti-government protests in the country.

• The filmmaker, who is not new to conspiracy theories around world events, posted the bizarre theory on Facebook after a four-hour interview with Yanukovych, whom he called “legitimate president of Ukraine until he suddenly wasn’t on February 22 of this year”.

• Acclaimed film director Oliver Stone on Tuesday claimed that the overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych earlier this year was the result of an American plot.

• Stone, who is known for his left-wing politics, made the claim via a post on his Facebook page. In it, he revealed that he’d spoken to the ousted ruler for “4 hours in Moscow for new English language documentary produced by Ukrainians.” Stone did not provide many details on the documentary but said it “seems clear that the so-called ‘shooters’ who killed 14 police men, wounded some 85, and killed 45 protesting civilians, were outside third party agitators.”

• The armed coup in Kiev is painfully similar to CIA operations to oust unwanted foreign leaders in Iran, Chile and Venezuela, said US filmmaker Oliver Stone after interviewing Ukraine’s ousted president for a documentary.

• Hollywood film producer Oliver Stone has said he wants to make a four-hour documentary telling the “dirty story” of the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in what he believes was a “coup” organized with the help of the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.

• As Russian troops amass along the Ukraine border and take over military facilities in the Crimea region, the United States has distanced itself from any boots-on-the-ground intervention.

• The U.S. won’t send troops or weapons, but it will send hashtags.

• While Congress approved an aid package for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia this week, the State Department pushed a Twitter campaign under the hashtag #UnitedForUkraine, which calls on people to share their support for the country.

• President Obama had great success using social media during his campaigning days, but does that same mindset work for foreign affairs?

• “I don’t know what effect this is supposed to have,” said former State Department diplomat James Lewis. “It’s a hashtag. What’s it going to do? For this situation, it’s not a useful tool.”

• To get the momentum going on the hashtag, top officials posted their own photos. Among the most notable was the State Department’s chief spokesperson Jen Psaki, who was once in the running for the Obama’s press secretary.

• The woman who was accidentally shot dead by her two-year-old son in an Idaho Walmart is described by those who knew her as a gun lover, a motivated academic and a successful nuclear research scientist.

• “She was a beautiful, young, loving mother who was taken much too soon,” Veronica Rutledge’s father-in-law, Terry Rutledge, told the Spokesman-Review. “She was out on what was supposed to be a fun-filled day with her son and nieces.”

• Rutledge was shot at about 10.20am on Tuesday, in the electronics department of the Hayden, Idaho, Walmart. Kootenai County sheriffs said her son, sitting in the front of a shopping cart, reached into Rutledge’s purse, found her weapon and shot his mother.

• “I mean, this is a pretty tragic incident right now that we’re dealing with,” Kootenai lieutenant Stu Miller told reporters on Tuesday. “When you have young children, small people, holiday season – it’s not a pleasant experience.”

• While shopping with her son and nieces in the store, Rutledge carried a loaded small-caliber handgun zippered in a pocket in her purse. The purse was a Christmas gift from her husband, Colt Rutledge, one designed specifically for concealed carry, the Washington Post reported.

• In his 2009 acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, President Barack Obama declared, “Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war.” By the time Obama accepted the award, one year into his presidency, he had ordered more drone strikes than George W. Bush had authorized during his two presidential terms.

• The Bush administration detained and tortured suspected terrorists. The Obama administration has chosen to illegally assassinate them, often with the use of drones. The continued indefinite detention of men at Guantánamo belies Obama’s pledge two days after his first inauguration to close the prison camp there. However, Obama has added only one detainee to the Guantánamo roster. “This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida [at Guantánamo] they are going to kill them,” according to John Bellinger, who formulated the Bush administration’s drone policy.

• Evidence in the public domain suggests that predator drone strikes are doing more harm than good.

• That is not surprising. The Senate Intelligence Committee report released recently similarly showed that post-9/11 torture did not work on al Qaeda detainees and facilitated international terrorist recruitment.

• Yet Congress has been derelict in failing to conduct comprehensive oversight hearings to appraise the predator drone program. They would probably provoke legislation to terminate the professedly targeted killings because they create more terrorists or terrorist sympathizers than they eliminate.

• The German public has reacted with surprise to headlines that the Bundeswehr passed on so-called “kill lists” of Afghan “terrorists” to the US. Admitting the truth can be painful at times, says Kersten Knipp.

• German weekly Der Spiegel published secret NATO documents revealing a list of around 750 suspected Taliban officials, some of whom were killed without charge or trial.

• Opposition parties demanded an explanation from Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday after a German newspaper published secret documents suggesting Germany had provided intelligence for targeted killings of Taliban members in Afghanistan.

• The U.S.-led NATO war on Afghanistan has lasted so long they’ve decided to rename it, declare the old war over, and announce a brand new war they’re just sure you’re going to love.

• The war thus far has lasted as long as U.S. participation in World War II plus U.S. participation in World War I, plus the Korean War, plus the Spanish American War, plus the full length of the U.S. war on the Philippines, combined with the whole duration of the Mexican American War.

• In the United States in 2014, you may be arrested for selling loose cigarettes, jumping turnstiles, dancing on the subways, and having small amounts of marijuana, but not for assassination, torture, anal rape, illegal surveillance, or invading, occupying and bombing sovereign countries.

• At the time, Weiss was one of at least 48,000 corporate soldiers working in Iraq for more than 170 private military companies (PMCs), with another 30,000 to 100,000 serving in Afghanistan at any given point during the war along with thousands more who performed menial tasks like cooking and cleaning for marginal pay.2 Though the Pentagon claims not to keep records on mercenary fatalities, over 1,000 mercenaries are estimated to have been killed in Iraq and another 2,500 in Afghanistan, including eight who worked for the CIA, with thousands more wounded.3 A 1989 UN treaty, which the U.S. did not sign, prohibits the recruitment, training, use and financing of mercenaries, or combatants motivated to take part in hostilities by private gain, with PMCs claiming exclusion on the grounds that they play a combat support role.4 This essay details the role of PMCs in America’s long Iraq War in light of a century-long history of U.S. use of mercenary and clandestine forces throughout the world. It shows the multiple ways of mercenary war as a means of concealing military intervention from public view. The Bush administration carried these practices to extreme levels, particularly in financing organizations which profit from war and hence are dedicated to its perpetuation.

• The corporate media chorus willfully ignores that U.S. actions, not Islam, fuel jihadism.

• At least 153 people have been killed in 25 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s restless tribal belt in 2014, according to figures from a Pakistan-based think tank.

• Peace activist Kathy Kelly is about to begin a three-month prison sentence for protesting the U.S. drone war at a military base in Missouri earlier this year. Kelly, along with another activist, was arrested after offering bread and an indictment against drone warfare. Kelly is the co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare.

• Muntasser survived an Israeli strike on Gaza this summer which killed his young brother and three cousins. Five months and a suicide attempt later the Palestinian boy remains haunted by the memory.

• Just a week into the deadly 50-day July-August war, two Israeli missiles slammed into a beach in Gaza City where Muntasser Bakr, 11, was playing football with relatives.

• Co-directors Seth Rogen (who also plays a leading role) and Evan Goldberg and screenwriter Dan Sterling have created a work that consists largely of a series of unconnected vulgar jokes and gags strung over a plot that glorifies state murder. One of the sharper characterizations of the film is to be found in the emails from Sony executives, who panned The Interview as “desperately unfunny and repetitive.” The studio officials termed the film “another misfire” by Rogen and [actor James] Franco, in which “Franco proves once again that irritation is his strong suit.”

• Representations of North Korea as a buffoon, a menace, or both on the American big screen are at least as old and arguably as tired as the George W. Bush-era phrase, “the axis of evil.” Along with the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,” hackneyed Hollywood constructions of the “ronery” or diabolical Dr. Evil-like North Korean leader bent on world domination, the sinister race-bending North Korean spy, the robotic North Korean commando, and other post-Cold War Red/Yellow Peril bogeymen have functioned as go-to enemies for the commercial film industry’s geopolitical and racist fantasies. Explaining why the North Korean leader was the default choice for the villain in his 2014 regime-change comedy, The Interview, Seth Rogen has stated, “It’s not that controversial to label [North Korea] as bad. It’s as bad as it could be.”1 Indeed, one-dimensional caricatures of North Korea flourish in the Western media in no small part because “[w]acky dictators sell.”2 Yet when it comes to Hollywood’s North Korean regime-change narratives, the line between fact and fiction, not to mention the distinction between freedom of expression and government propaganda, is revealingly thin. Whether in Hollywood or Washington, the only permissible narrative for North Korea is what Donald Macintyre, former Seoul bureau chief for Time magazine, has called “the demonization script.”3 Not only have the dream machines of the entertainment industry long played an instrumental role within American theaters of war, but also, U.S. officials and political commentators often marshal the language of entertainment—for example, the description of U.S.-South Korea combined military exercises as “war games” and the Obama administration’s references to the Pentagon’s “playbook” with regard to North Korea—when describing U.S. military maneuvers on and around the Korean peninsula.

• The suicide bomber had been recruited as a CIA informant and taken to Afghanistan to infiltrate the upper ranks of al-Qaeda. For months, he provided the Agency with independently verifiable intelligence on the terrorist network, and he promised to lead the CIA to the group’s most senior members. Instead, the asset was an al-Qaeda double agent…”

• According to a secret study released by the WikiLeaks group on Dec. 18, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) considers the killing of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) second-in-command Raúl Reyes by Colombian forces in Ecuadorian territory on Mar. 1, 2008 an example of ways that assassinations of rebel leaders “can play a useful role.” In addition to the Reyes case, the paper reviews the use of “high-value targeting (HVT)”—the killing or capture of top leaders—in fighting rebels in Afghanistan, Algeria, Colombia, Iraq, Israel, Peru, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka. HTV can have “negative effects,” the study concludes, but the practice can “contribute to successful counterinsurgency outcomes” if used strategically. The July 9, 2009 study, marked “secret” and “NOFORN” (“no foreign nationals”), is entitled “Making High-Value Targeting Operations an Effective Counterinsurgency Tool”; it apparently forms part of a “Best Practices in Counterinsurgency” series.

• Reyes, the FARC’s chief spokesperson and negotiator, was killed when the Colombian military launched a nighttime air raid and then an incursion against a rebel encampment in Ecuador’s northeastern Sucumbíos province about three kilometers from the Colombian border. Some 19 FARC members were killed in the operation, as were four Mexican students who had been visiting the encampment while in Ecuador to attend a leftist conference. Although the Colombian government and the media treated the attack as a simple raid against a group of rebels, the CIA study refers to it as part of a number of “successful HVT strikes against top insurgent leaders in early 2008, in conjunction with earlier strikes against second and third-tier leaders and finance and logistics specialists.” Reyes’ death “is likely to have seriously damaged FARC discipline and morale, even among its leadership, according to a CIA field commentary.” As an example of the operation’s success, the CIA noted that “[p]ublic support for the Colombian government solidified in the wake of the killing…with President Alvaro Uribe’s approval rating increasing from the mid-70% range to as high as 84%.”

Finance

• Social justice activists determined to feed the homeless have faced eviction for the second time following their attempts to open a soup kitchen in Westminster, in the heart of London. They were forcibly ousted by police Tuesday night.

• Following their eviction from a listed Victorian building near Trafalgar Square they had been occupying in the run-up to Christmas, the group decided to set up a soup kitchen outside.

• Since December 25, they had been distributing food, coffee and tea outside the vacant offices to people sleeping rough on the streets of London.

• But these old works do invite us to live questions that they lived, which many of us had complacently forgotten, and which Pikettymania was an effort to remember. These are the inescapable questions of a world where the economy, including global ecology, does not take care of itself, and where it may come into conflict with democracy. They are questions for a world where we need to get clearer on what we mean by democracy, and what we lose when we neglect or betray it.

• France’s star economist Thomas Piketty, who shot to fame and topped best-seller lists in 2014 with his controversial book on wealth and inequality, has declined the country’s highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, local media said on Thursday.

• “I refuse this nomination because I don’t think it’s up to a government to say who is honorable,” Piketty told AFP news agency. “They would do better to focus on reviving growth in France and Europe.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A Twitter advertising technique is perturbing people. Promoted brands like MasterCard and IFC are appearing in the list of accounts some users follow, even if they don’t actually follow them.

• Sources familiar with the company’s advertising strategy tell me this has been occurring since early 2013, but the public has only just now cottoned onto it thanks to actor William Shatner (of Star Trek fame). Shatner brought attention to it after he saw that “MasterCard” appeared in his following list despite the fact that he didn’t follow it. He did a little investigation and discovered that the same promoted account appeared on Dwayne Johnson’s follower list, looking a little out of place given “The Rock” only followed one other account.

• The rapid expansion of America’s right-wing media began in the 1980s as the Reagan administration coordinated foreign policy initiatives with conservative media executives, including Rupert Murdoch, and then cleared away regulatory hurdles, reports Robert Parry.

Censorship

• The block here is clearly not directed at Techdirt, but rather at Google’s Feedproxy service — which was formerly Feedburner, a company Google bought years ago. Many, many, many sites that have RSS feeds use Google’s service as it makes it much easier to manage your RSS feed and to do some basic analytics on it.

• In this case, it appears that Air Canada has (for reasons unknown) wasted good money on a company called “Datavalet” which offers “Guest Access Management” for companies who offer WiFi access to customers. Datavalet proudly highlights Air Canada and famed Canadian donut chain Tim Hortons among its customers.

• Some users were also able to access Gmail via cell phone clients on Google’s Android, the top mobile operating system in China.

Privacy

• Apps often need permission to access other stuff on your phone to work. What is less obvious is the breadth of information collected, and why it gets scooped up. Vocativ put together a list of common permissions from popular Android apps, calling it a “barometer of what app makers think they can get away with.”

• I remember being excited senior year of high school when thinking about our future class reunion. My excitement stemmed from a movie I had watched. In the movie, the star was the ugly duckling growing up. When he arrived at his class reunion, he was a rich hunk with a gorgeous bride. I couldn’t wait to be “that guy”. I also couldn’t wait for all of the “popular kids” to show up at this future class reunion fat and strung out. It was going to be GREAT.

• As it turns out, I was entirely wrong. NOBODY showed up at our class reunion. Because we never had one. And I blame Facebook. The social media giant has helped us all become closer apart.

• A new round of NSA documents snatched by master blabbermouth Edward Snowden appeared online late on Sunday, revealing spooks’ internet security pet hates.

• The latest dump of PDFs published by Der Spiegel appeared to show what the Five Eyes surveillance buddies – the USA, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – see as obstacles posed by internet security protocols.

• Although it’s now well known that US spy agency NSA and its British cousin GCHQ were able to monitor, collect, and analyse our digital communications, a new report reveals which encrypted programmes gave the spy agencies a headache.

• It’s not easy to truly be anonymous online. Sure, there are plenty of chat apps and secret-sharing sites that claim to offer you privacy, but it’s tricky to know whether US intelligence agencies have a backdoor in them or not.

• The best way to stay anonymous online has been to use Tor, a special kind of web browser developed to help US government employees hide their tracks online.

• If you want a truly anonymous life, then maybe it’s time you learned about Tor, CSpace and ZRTP.

• These three technologies could help people hide their activities from the National Security Agency, according to NSA documents newly obtained from the archive of former contractor Edward Snowden by the German magazine Der Spiegel.

• But perhaps more significantly, the revelations culled from the trove of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show the forms of encryption the NSA struggled to break (at least at the time of the documents in 2012). That list includes PGP, Tor, CSpace, OTR and ZRTP.

• [...]

• Another alarming statistic from the article is the number of https connections, the type of secure connections used by sites like Facebook, that the agency intercepts. One document showed that by late 2012, the NSA was cracking 10 million such connections a day.

• After a banner year for shedding light on the NSA’s secret surveillance programs in 2013, the pace of disclosures in 2014 — both from whistleblowers and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits — slowed significantly.

• Google delivered a boob of a Christmas present to WikiLeaks by informing the organisation that it turned over an email account to the National Security Agency [NSA] following a request over two years ago.

• A Twitter post by WikiLeaks stated that Google contacted the group on Christmas Eve to inform them the Gmail mailboxes and account metadata of an employee were handed over to law enforcement authorities after a US federal warrant had been issued, Ars Technica reports.

• Roughly a year and a half since the first Snowden disclosures, there’s already been a judicial order to shut down the National Security Agency’s bulk metadata collection program.

• The lawsuit filed by Larry Klayman, a veteran conservative activist, would essentially put a stop to unchecked NSA surveillance. And at the start of 2015, he remains the only plaintiff whose case has won when fighting for privacy against the newly understood government monitoring. However, it’s currently a victory in name only—the judicial order in Klayman was stayed pending the government’s appeal.

• The agency has identified one anonymity method that’s impossible to crack. By combining several services including Tor, VPNs, CSpace and ZRTP, Internet users would give the NSA a “catastrophic” headache, as their communications would be virtually impossible to intercept.

• This cocktail leads to a “near-total loss/lack of insight to target communications, presence,” as the NSA explains.

• The National Security Agency’s Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP’s VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

• Patrick writes, “The NSA dumped its IOB reports on Christmas Eve, except that it was short 15 files, I pointed that out, next dump was silent but an additional 12 files, I pointed out the three missing files, and as of today, the three extra files were added, but the extra 3 files have a different naming convention.”

• The “Christmas Eve” NSA file dump that you will see reported at: NSA Waited Until Christmas Eve To Release Details Of Its Illegal Surveillance On Americans, What you need to know about the NSA document dump, and, U.S. Spy Agency Reports Improper Surveillance of Americans, repeated by various other sources, which never mentioned the dump being incomplete, is now complete.

• I reported in Merry Christmas From the NSA! Missing Files about 15 missing files, which by my report of: NSA IOB Report Dump – Still Missing Files had become 3 missing files and when I checked today, the NSA file dump is complete, all being silent corrections to the file dump.

• Every quarter, the National Security Agency generates a report on its own lawbreaking and policy violations. The reports are classified and sent to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board. It’s unclear what happens once they get there.

• Here’s a perfect New Year’s resolution: Let’s abolish the National Security Agency and prosecute its agents for spying on us. It’s perfect because it’s the right thing to do — and because it’s a promise that’s probably impossible to keep.

• On Christmas Eve, the NSA, complying with a Freedom of Information Act request from the American Civil Liberties Union, released documents showing that intelligence agents used the incredible resources of the NSA to spy on their wives, husbands, and girlfriends.

• Three out of three? That could be the score for the U.S. National Security Agency’s cryptographic “most wanted” list of 2012.

• In January 2012, it saw Internet traffic anonymizing tool Tor (The Onion Router), Linux distribution Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) and disk encryption system TrueCrypt as the biggest threats to its ability to intercept Internet traffic and interpret other information it acquires.

• Since then, flaws have been found in Tor and the FBI has unmasked Tor users and a vulnerability was found in Tails allowing attackers to determine users’ IP addresses.

• And while a source-code audit gave TrueCrypt a relatively clean bill of health in April, TrueCrypt’s anonymous developers inexplicably abandoned the software a few weeks later, warning it was insecure.

• Some of the new leaks imply that the NSA is able to compromise core cryptographic Internet protocols like TLS and IPSEC. This is scary news indeed: if the underlying mathematics of crypto are compromised, then in some important sense, all bets are off. But as Green shows, the NSA does not appear to be attacking the math: instead, it has infiltrated and subverted big companies in order to steal their cryptographic certificates, which means that the companies can’t be trusted, but the math can be (probably).

• The story of John Ashcroft and James Comey’s hospital-bed heroics has by now been told many times. On March 10, 2004, President Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and chief of staff, Andrew Card, went to the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital to try to persuade the ill attorney general, Ashcroft, to sign off on continuing massive collection of Americans’ Internet “metadata,” a program started in October 2001. Comey, then the deputy attorney general, had refused to reauthorize the program; its most recent authorization was scheduled to expire the next day. Comey got to his boss first, and Ashcroft refused to sign. Though pushed hard by Gonzales and Card, and also by Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, Comey and several of his Department of Justice colleagues stood their ground and declined to ratify this domestic metadata collection based on the president’s bare say-so.

• Austrian journalist Erich Möchel delivered a presentation in Hamburg at the annual meeting of the Chaos Computer Club on Monday December 29, detailing the various locations where the US NSA has been actively collecting and processing electronic intelligence in Vienna.

• The Edward Snowden leaks and the revelation of wholesale NSA surveillance of the entire planet hit a lot of people hard, but particularly in Germany, where the public knows all too well the dangers of a surveillance state. The backlash was huge, and the German government promised major changes to their relationship with the US spies.

• In a crescendo of anger over American espionage, Germany expelled the CIA’s top operative, launched an investigation of the vast U.S. surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden and extracted an apology from President Barack Obama for the years that U.S. spies had reportedly spent monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

• Laura Poitras’ new documentary about mega-leaker Edward Snowden, “Citizenfour,” makes no pretense at being evenhanded. It’s a polemic against the National Security Agency’s effort to spy on people in the United States and around the world – innocent, guilty, or simply suspect – all in the name of national security.

• When Horace Edwards saw a recent showing of the documentary “Citizenfour,” which chronicles former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leak of classified documents, he was aghast.

• Civil rights and federal attorneys sparred at a hearing over a case involving domestic dragnet surveillance by the federal government. The plaintiffs argued the searches are illegal, while the government said opponents don’t have enough evidence to know.

• The hearing, requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for a partial summary judgment, concerns the class action lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, which was filed six years ago. It claims the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired AT&T customers’ e-mail and other data using surveillance devices attached to the company’s network.

• Civil rights and federal attorneys sparred at a hearing over a case involving domestic dragnet surveillance by the federal government. The plaintiffs argued the searches are illegal, while the government said opponents don’t have enough evidence to know.

• The hearing, requested by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for a partial summary judgment, concerns the class action lawsuit, Jewel v. NSA, which was filed six years ago. It claims the National Security Agency (NSA) acquired AT&T customers’ e-mail and other data using surveillance devices attached to the company’s network.

• When Christmas approaches, the spies of the Five Eyes intelligence services can look forward to a break from the arduous daily work of spying. In addition to their usual job — attempting to crack encryption all around the world — they play a game called the “Kryptos Kristmas Kwiz,” which involves solving challenging numerical and alphabetical puzzles. The proud winners of the competition are awarded “Kryptos” mugs.

Civil Rights

• In 1971, I entered the full text of the top-secret Pentagon Papers – a history of how the US became mired in the swamp of the Vietnam War – into the Congressional Record, even as the Federal Bureau of Investigation was hunting for Daniel Ellsburg (who gave the papers to the New York Times) and President Richard Nixon and his Justice Department were filing injunctions against newspapers to prevent their publication. Subsequent case law affirmed that members of Congress may reveal any government “secret” to the public without fear of prosecution because of the “Speech and Debate” clause of the constitution, from which members derive their duty to inform the people about the actions of their government.

• After video of a man wrestling a woman and throwing her against a car came to light Tuesday, the San Jose Police Department issued a warrant – for the woman’s arrest.

• Of course the man “being assaulted” was none other than an off-duty San Jose Cop in plainclothes. The officer reportedly approached the woman – without identifying himself as a police officer – after a fender bender between their cars.

• Steve Rogers, who is Captain America (Chris Evans), awakens from decades of suspended animation, to find himself in the present day when the global war on terrorism is being waged. He works for SHIELD, a powerful paramilitary spy agency that now has military drones called “hellicarriers,” which allow for assassination. As Rogers says, “I thought the punishment usually came after the crime.” Part of the reason why the agency has turned to assassination is because the agency was infiltrated, and Captain America spends the movie dealing with this.

• It seemed an unlikely excuse from a man suspected of breaking into cars at an auto yard. But police say it appears a Norwalk man was being truthful when he insisted he was just checking the vehicles to make sure they were locked.

• Employees at Coating’s Auto Body caught 20-year-old Alexander Louis Friday and held him for police.

• This is a message to Allen Clifton, co-founder of Forward Progressives, and anyone else who labels the police accountability movement dangerous and hateful. Us “anti-government activists” as you called us, protesters, cop watchers, cop blockers, members of the civil rights movement; we are not hate groups as you recently proclaimed, despite being thoroughly told you are wrong in the comment section of your own article. You join the ranks of other “journalists” like Bill O’Reilly who recently attacked Cop Block and others who film the police.

• From 1967 to 1971, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a secret government operation called Phoenix. (4) At the time, the program was classified and, due to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, it received wide public scrutiny. In fact, many war protesters called it an illegal assassination program. (5)

• The Phoenix Program’s official stated purpose was to gather intelligence on the communist Viet Cong and share that information with South Vietnamese military and government leaders. The program has been heralded a success due to its ability to “gain detailed knowledge about the Viet Cong and to disrupt that organization”. (5) So what does “disrupt” mean, exactly?

• To many detractors, it means exactly what it sounds like: assassination. In fact, the program is known to have resulted in about 20,000 deaths. (4)

• One of those is a South Vietnamese interpreter by the name of Thai Khac Chuyen. (6) Chuyen was accused of being a double agent and killed by six Special Forces soldiers in 1969, but those soldiers were never held accountable for their actions because U.S. political leaders didn’t want key witnesses to testify. Therefore, a trial for the soldiers could not be staged. This event led to Daniel Ellsberg copying key documents and releasing them to the press.

• Rightly or wrongly, the U.S. developed a reputation for murder on the battlefield, an irony not lost on political conservatives who have criticized journalists for losing the Vietnam War merely by reporting on ugly incidents like Chuyen’s assassination, and his treatment prior, and the My Lai Massacre. (7)

• The scope of CIA torture revealed in this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report has come as a shock to many, but America’s involvement with torture predates the terrorist attacks on 9/11. This week Brazil published its very own torture report as part of an investigation into the crimes perpetrated during the country’s 21 year-long U.S. backed military dictatorship. It confirms what historians have been writing about for years: that torture and other human rights abuses were systemic within the regime, and that the military received extensive training by the U.S. and the U.K. on torture and other repressive techniques.

• Last month’s revelations about CIA torture have hurt U.S. credibility worldwide. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA Interrogation concluded the program “created tensions with U.S. partners and allies…complicating bilateral intelligence relationships.” It said the program caused “immeasurable damage to the United States’ public standing, as well as to the United States’ longstanding global leadership on human rights in general….”

• Sen. Mark Udall has called for the full release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture. However, as a still-sitting member of Congress, he has a constitutional protection to read most of the still-secret report on the Senate floor — and a group of intelligence veterans urges him to do just that.

• As the public grapples with the gruesome realities put forth in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s damning report on the CIA’s torture program, the agency has dug in to defend itself. The CIA claims the torture tactics it used in the years following 9/11 were legal and saved American lives. And despite what the Senate study alleges, the agency insists it never lied about the torture program.

• Calls for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) to reveal the entire, unredacted CIA torture report have increased, with a group of former intelligence analysts issuing a memo that urges the outgoing legislator to read the report on the Senate floor.

• Not long ago, in a bid to find out how effective the CIA really was at counterterrorism, U.S. President Barack Obama released a rabbit into a forest and challenged the agency to find it. The CIA spent months planting informers in the forest, interviewing forest creatures, and examining all the forest intelligence. Nothing. Finally the agency went into the forest and dragged out a soaking wet, badly beaten brown bear screaming: “Okay, okay! I’m a rabbit, I’m a rabbit!”

• [...]

• For years, the British government denied that its territory had been used for so-called “rendition” flights, in which terror suspects were illegally transported across the globe by the CIA to countries where they could be tortured. It also denied that British intelligence agencies had any involvement or knowledge of the CIA’s brutal program. The denials were supported by an ISC investigation in 2007 that gave the intelligence agencies and government a clean bill of health. The ISC reiterated its findings in 2010. – See more at: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Dec-30/282569-britains-murky-role-in-cia-torture.ashx#sthash.I6TN3xGP.dpuf

• New York Review contributor Mark Danner has been writing about the use of torture by the US government since the first years after September 11. Following the release this month of the Senate’s report on the CIA torture program, Hugh Eakin spoke to Danner about some of the most startling findings of the investigation and what it reveals about the continued political debate surrounding the program.

• Norman Pollack: The antecedent question, not did the CIA deceive these administrations about the efficacy of EITs, but, as the Senate Report claims, were the administrations even aware of the programs? The Senate Report is seeking to give Obama deniability—i.e., that he was kept in the dark—lest he be held accountable for war crimes. I am in no position to judge whether EITs yielded relevant information. But on solidification of security, no; if anything, torture has turned much of the world against America, and has created the basis for the rise of militant groups and the desire for retribution.

• But CIA torture being a “stain” on an otherwise flawless record doesn’t suffice either. In fact, in some way, this logic is the heart of the problem, since it blocks any attempt at honest reading of whatever “values” Washington stands for, and tries to achieve, using “soft diplomacy” of “rectal feeding.”

• What is equally worrying to what the report has contained is the existing mindset in the US, among the ruling class and the media.

• This reality can be best summarised in the words of a Fox News show co-host, Andrea Tantaros: “The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome,” she exclaimed.

• “The reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we’re not awesome.”

• With such overriding thoughtless mindset, there is little evidence to show that such “awesomeness” will cease any time soon, even if at the expense of many innocent people. – December 27, 2014.

• The recent CIA torture report revealed the agency’s inhumane practices of interrogation during the War on Terror. However, some people claim the information gathered through torture proved valuable and saved lives – but is that so? Is information gathered this way even reliable? Will the CIA stop its practices now the truth is out? And what about the inmates of Guantanamo Bay? What has been done to them? To find answers to these questions and many more, we speak to former FBI criminal profiler Jim Clemente on Sophie&Co today.

• When the US Senate report on the CIA’s torture campaign was released recently, the State Department sent out a warning to US missions abroad to beware of a possible backlash. In the event, beyond indignant newspaper editorials, the international reaction has been somewhat muted.

• The Senate Intelligence Committee’s scathing torture report not only described the brutality of the CIA’s interrogation methods, but also demonstrated their ineffectiveness. Led by ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, former Bush administration officials have rushed to the airwaves to defend the CIA.

• “I would do it again in a minute,” Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press, claiming that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) produced “actionable intelligence that kept us safe from attacks”.

• Nearly four decades later, Perico Rodriguez recalls his torture. He fought to breathe. Prison guards had blindfolded him and chained him to a bunk-bed. They tied his hands behind his back and shoved his face into a bucket of water.

• The technique was known as El Submarino, a cousin of waterboarding used during Argentina’s “Dirty War”. His lungs, he said, never recovered.

• Ministers faced fresh accusations of a cover-up last night after refusing to reveal crucial details of British meetings with US politicians investigating CIA torture.

• Home Secretary Theresa May was one of several British politicians and envoys who paid 24 visits to senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee as it investigated barbaric techniques used on terror suspects.

• The disclosure has fuelled claims that the Government desperately lobbied to keep allegations of Britain’s complicity in torture out of the committee’s damning report

• Mr. Olszewski states that millions of Americans who died protecting our freedom would have no problem with a little physical and psychological torture.

• I would like to know who or how many of these Americans who died elected him to act as their spokesman regarding their mindsets about torture.

• For your edification, Mr. Olszewski, these fun and games the CIA played resulted in a detainee meeting his death by drowning from hypothermia while being waterboarded. A second detainee died from hypothermia while being handcuffed to his cell wall without any clothing in freezing temperatures.

• We hanged German leaders who were responsible for torturing people, after they were found guilty of these crimes at the Nuremberg trials.

• ‘American people have a right – indeed, a responsibility – to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values,” says John McCain. But he seems to be alone among pro-torture, CIA-supporting politicians.

• Indeed, McCain’s views on the subject seem highly unpopular in the Republican Party. Reactions pretty much sum up to various forms of denial, fear mongering and finger-pointing. ‘This release could endanger the lives of Americans overseas, jeopardize U.S. relations with foreign partners, potentially incite violence, create political problems for our allies, and be used as a recruitment tool for our enemies,’ say Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Jim Risch. One might argue that most of the world suspected the CIA of torture anyways, not to mention a level of anti-American notions in certain parts of the world that have been stable for a long time, but who cares, let’s panic.

• CIA Torture Program Whistleblower John Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison while those he exposed still remain free.

• Former attorney general Dominic Grieve has said “egregious” behaviour like the CIA torture techniques would not occur in Britain because of the European Convention on Human Rights.

• His intervention comes amid a bitter dispute within the Conservative party over the leadership’s plan to stop British laws being overruled by European judges.

• Mr Grieve has criticised his party’s proposals for a new Bill of Rights which proponents said would give UK courts and Parliament the final say over Europe.

• When Ilana Greenstein blew the whistle on mismanagement at the CIA, she tried to follow all the proper procedures.

• First, she told her supervisors that she believed the agency had bungled its spying operations in Baghdad. Then, she wrote a letter to the director of the agency.

• A former CIA case officer has gone public with claims of retaliation against her from the bureau after she tried to report her concerns over the misconduct of colleagues in the intelligence service.

• “I don’t believe in breaking the law, I don’t believe in leaks, I don’t believe in divulging classified information,” stated Ilana Greenstein in a video interview released by McClatchy DC, a Washington-based journalistic bureau on Tuesday. “What I believe in is a good internal system, where people who have concerns can voice those concerns without recrimination.”

• Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, accused the CIA of having operated this torture-based conditioning program to fabricated the evidence that provided the rationale for going to war against Iraq [2].

• Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan is seeking clarification from the US government on whether evidence was uncovered in a recent US Senate intelligence committee report of Shannon Airport being used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition.

• The Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade has confirmed he is seeking clarification from the US Government whether any evidence of Shannon Airport being used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition was uncovered in a recent U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report.

• Minister Charlie Flanagan had been asked by Dublin South West Sinn Féin TD Seán Crowe whether he was aware of the report and revelations about CIA torture of detainees.

• Simon Carswell’s article on Shannon Airport and renditions (“Bush assured Irish State Shannon not used for rendition flights”, December 22nd) provides an important insight into the concerns that two former Irish ministers had in relation to the CIA’s torture and renditions programme.

• Dermot Ahern was minister for foreign affairs and Michael McDowell was minister for justice when a report by Dick Marty for the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe identified Ireland and Shannon as a stopover point for rendition flights. Nonetheless the government failed to take decisive action, apart, it would seem, from asking the US government if it was taking prisoners through Shannon. The US government’s response to such questions can hardly have been a surprise to the ministers.

• We practiced tortures that we have prosecuted after real war and condemned when used by other countries that could as legitimately claim “national security” as we did. So, it’s not a question of Congress not clearly prohibiting torture, it’s we as a nation allowing our representatives to turn a blind eye to it.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.

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