● 03.29.15

● Links 29/3/2015: Red Hat’s Stock Soars, Kodi 14.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Applications

• After 15 years, application developers are still using ActiveState’s Komodo IDE.

• Tools to build websites and applications change over time, but one tool that has stood the test of time is ActiveState’s Komodo IDE (integrated developer environment). This week ActiveState released Komodo 9, continuing the legacy of the IDE that began its life 15 years ago.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• It was only in January that we saw signs of Shadow Warrior being ported to Linux, and it’s officially due next week! Get ready for some beautifully frantic and brutal action.

• Well there goes my Tuesday night. Outlast, one of the scariest games ever made is releasing for Linux on Tuesday the 31st of March!

• Spirits of Xanadu is a creepy mix of exploration and adventure that was just released, and I decided to take an early look to see if it’s worth your time.

• The game was released originally some years ago, and with the latest updates they added in Linux support.

• Guild Software announced that Vendetta Online, a 3D space combat MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game) for Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS, has been updated on March 27 to version 1.8.330.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The highly anticipated GNOME 3.16 desktop environment for Linux kernel-based operating systems has been announced on March 26, 2015, and has been declared by the GNOME development team as the best GNOME release yet. Of course, we wanted to give GNOME 3.16 desktop environment a try and see for ourselves the new features, apps, and improvements.

Distributions

• A large part of Google’s OS success hasn’t been because of its awesomeness. No. Frankly, we think nothing speaks louder than the almighty dollar in this world. But both are “free,” right? So this is tie? Not really. Although Android is technically free since Google doesn’t charge device makers for it, there are costs associated with getting devices “certified.” Oh, yeah, and then there’s Apple and Microsoft, both of which get healthy payouts from device makers through patent lawsuits. Microsoft reportedly makes far more from Android sales than Windows Phone sales. You just generally don’t see the price because it’s abstracted by carriers. Chrome OS, on the other hand, actually is pretty much free. A top-ofthe-line Chromebook is $280, while a top-of-the-line Android phone full retail is usually $600. We’re giving this one to Chrome OS because if it’s generally cheaper for the builder, it’s cheaper for you.

New Releases

• Kodi 14.2 was released today as the last planned point release in the 14.x series. Next stop is the Kodi 15 “Isengard” release!

• The Kodi development team, through Nathan Betzen, had the pleasure of announcing today, March 28, the immediate availability for download of the second and last maintenance release for Kodi 14 (codename Helix), before they continue with the development cycle for the upcoming release, Kodi 15, dubbed Isengard.

• This release has the same features as the basic version of 4MLinux, but it also includes 4MLinux Printing Suite (CUPS 2.0.2, SANE 1.0.24, Xpdf 3.0.4, Ghostscript 9.15) and 4MLinux QtPack (Qt 4.8.6 and 5.4.0, QupZilla Git-2014-02-18, SMplayer r6737).

Screenshots

Red Hat Family

• Software company Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) surged more than 11% on Thursday and hit a new 52-week high after reporting quarterly results that the market clearly liked.

• The overall health and vibrancy of the enterprise technology sector and the open source community in general appears to be reflected in the financial results of one of its leading lights, Red Hat Inc.

Debian Family

• The Debian Installer team had the pleasure of announcing on March 27 that the second Release Candidate (RC) version of the Debian 8.0 “Jessie” installer is now available for download and testing. The RC2 version of the installer brings a great number of improvements and fixes.

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

Flavours and Variants

• The Zentyal development team was proud to announce today, March 27, the immediate availability for download of their Zentyal Server 4.1 open-source operating system that is natively interoperable with Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Active Directory (AD) protocols.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi’s Redmi 1S did extremely well because of its low price point and powerful specs. Clearly, the company knows how to make a good, cheap phone.

• Google’s Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop update was first released more than two weeks ago. Since then, the update’s trickled out to some users but not all of them. With a Nexus 5 Android 5.1 Lollipop upgrade on the minds of many users, particularly those dealing with Android 5.0 problems, we want to take a look at what we expect from the Nexus 5 Android 5.1 release going forward.

• Google’s Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update was first released nearly three weeks ago. Since then, the update’s trickled out to some Nexus 7 users but not all of them. With a Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop upgrade on the minds of many users, particularly those dealing with Android 5.0 Lollipop problems, we want to take a look at what we expect from the Nexus 7 Android 5.1 release going forward.

• Plex, the popular media server application, has just received a major update on Android. Version 4.0 brings a revamped user interface with Material Design enhancements, support for Plex Home, and increased access to Android TV.

• Google finally unveiled the latest Android 5.1 build for its Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 smartphones yesterday, just a week after the mobile operating system for the Nexus 6 was updated. The new factory image for the 5.1 version of Android was given the build number LMY47I, and it is expected to roll out soon.

• While Android 5.0 Lollipop OTA release dates are still hard to come by for many flagship Android devices manufactured by third party OEMs, Motorola has been one of the swiftest to get its devices the latest Google OS possible.

• Roughly five months after the release of Android 5.0 Lollipop and the Nexus 9, and Google’s now released a few small updates as well as a bigger bug fixing Android 5.1 Lollipop update. We’ve seen countless Nexus devices all get updated to Android 5.1 Lollipop, but those with the latest Nexus 9 tablet are still stuck waiting, but it should be coming soon.

• Is it a “deal alert” if the cheapest option is still way more than most people want to pay? Probably not, but if you’re in the market for Pioneer’s first car stereo head units equipped with Android Auto, you can save some considerable cash anyway. The new models have been heavily discounted on Amazon almost immediately after being released, often by hundreds of dollars. For example, the top-of-the-line AVIC-08100NEX, with a wallet-pounding suggested retail price of $1400, is going for just $934 on Amazon.

• The Motorola Moto X has had two iterations with the first generation being released in 2013, and the next gen or second gen having been released last year in August/September. This has led to fans of the Moto X wondering when the generation or 2015 model is on the way. Fortunately, Motorola’s president has given us a hint of the Motorola Moto X 2015 version release date. There has also been recent news on the Android L Update for the first and second generation Moto X.

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• The 2015 Linux Plumbers Conference organizing committee is pleased to announce that the registration for this year’s conference is now open. The conference will be taking place in Seattle, Washington, USA, August 19th through August 21st. Information on how to register can be found on the ATTEND page. Registration prices and cutoff dates are also published in the ATTEND page. As usual, contact us if you have questions.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• Tucked away in the settings area of mobile Chrome, there’s an option to reduce how much data you use by having Google compress websites before loading them. The feature, known as Data Saver, made its way over to the desktop version of the browser sometime this week.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

BSD

• The HAMMER2 file-system has been slow to mature since being announced three years ago, but now at least there’s a man page for HAMMER2.

Project Releases

• What’s the point of releasing open-source code when nobody knows about it? In “Release Notes” I give a round-up of recent open-source activities.

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

Open Hardware

• You can buy a dongle with a weird industrial connector that fits under the dash of any car on the road for $15. This is just a simple ODB-II transceiver meant for reading error codes and turning a Crown Vic into a police interceptor. There’s a lot more to the CAN Bus than OBD-II; robots and industrial control units, for instance, and Hackaday alum [Eric] has developed an open source tool for all things CAN.

Programming

• Over the time I started to get more and more requests to have python-gammu working with Python 3. Of course this request makes sense, but I somehow failed to find time for that.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

• What did concern the young student was the amount of misinformation available on the internet, most of which he believes is fear-based and inaccurate.

• “For someone that doesn’t have a science background they would have a hard time vaccinating because there’s a lot of scary information. It’s fear mongering, no other way to put it and I’ll believe in vaccination while the weight of evidence is in favour of it, or someone proves otherwise,” he said.

• Webb reported that tons of cocaine were being shipped into San Francisco by supporters of the CIA backed Contras, then distributed down to LA to a Nicaraguan, who then on sold it to street vendors. He also alleged this epidemic was having a disproportionate affect on African Americans.

• Gary Webb’s career was destroyed as a result of these investigations, and is now the subject of a new DVD called “Kill the Messenger’.

Security

• Worried that you might get compromised by hackers? The bad news is that the rest of the internet might know before you do

• Over the past several years mainstream news outlets have conveyed a litany of cyber doomsday scenarios…

• It turns out that American smartphone owners are not great at protecting their privacy. In a new report from security firm Lookout, 34 percent of American mobile users who claimed to be the most aware of privacy risks didn’t even set a pin or passcode on their phone. Another 35 percent downloaded apps from unofficial marketplaces, which is a great way to get malware on your phone. The results come from 1,012 U.S. respondents found through an online surve

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• U.S. and Israeli politicians often claim that Israel’s bombing of Iraq in 1981 significantly set back an already-existing Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The truth is almost exactly the opposite. Harvard Physics Professor Richard Wilson, who visited the ruins of Osirak in 1982 and followed the issue closely, has said the available evidence “suggests that the bombing did not delay the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program but started it.” This evidence includes the design of the Osirak reactor, which made it unsuitable for weapons production, and statements by Iraqi nuclear scientists that Saddam Hussein ordered them to begin a serious nuclear weapons program in response to the Israeli attack.

• When I lived in China, there was a story going around about a China Airlines flight in which both the pilot and the co-pilot had left the cockpit and then, on their return, found the door locked. They reportedly got a fire ax, and with the whole planeload of freaked out passengers watching in horror, started wailing in the metal door. The co-pilot then turned, and seeing the panic developing, calmly drew the curtain across the aisle, hiding their work from view. The axe’s bashing continued until they broke the latch and got back to the controls.

• The United States could supply Kiev with ‘not offensive’ weapons if the Minsk agreements on Ukrainian reconciliation fail, US Department of State spokesperson Jen Psaki said Wednesday.

• Latin America does not depend solely on exports from extra-regional powers for military equipment. On the contrary, the region boasts its own thriving domestic weapons industry. The crown jewel of Latin America’s defense industries is arguably Brazil’s, which has made a name for itself by domestically producing military equipment for export. Case in point is the Super Tucano, a light military aircraft that can be utilized for either training or combat operations, which is produced by the Brazilian aerospace conglomerate Empresa Brasileira de Aeronautica (EMBRAER) and enjoys significant prominence in the field. According to the latest headlines, the Portuguese-speaking nation is predicted to have a good year in weapon sales, bolstering Brazil and Latin America in terms of capital and relevancy in the global arms market.

• Almost all wars that are currently under way in the world are targeting Muslims. Just about every bomb, every drone, every prison, every cage, every orange jumpsuit are produced for Muslims. Look around carefully; all the world’s intelligence services target Muslims. Even more, Muslims are driven to war and destruction at the hands of other Muslims.

• The head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who presided over the agency’s drone campaign and directed the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is being removed from his post, officials said, a watershed moment as the CIA turns its focus to a new generation of extremist threats.

• For years, the Americans saw President Ali Abdullah Saleh a key ally in the fight against al-Qaeda. He allowed his air bases to be used by US drones to strike at the movement’s operatives, and gladly received Western aid in development cash and arms supplies.

• Yet according to claims in a United Nations report last month, one of the first things Mr Saleh did when his three-decade rule was threatened by the 2011 Arab Spring was strike a secret deal to give an entire southern province to al-Qaeda. The more he could portray Yemen as falling into militant hands, he calculated, the more the West want to keep him in office at all costs.

• General Dempsey and his colleagues may be right. Current levels of Pentagon spending may not be able to support current defense strategy. The answer to this problem is right before our eyes: cut the money and change the strategy. That would be acting in the name of a conception of national security that was truly strategic.

• The U.S. military insists its drones and other high-tech gadgets can kill “bad guys” with an unmatched precision. But these assassination weapons may just be the latest example of putting too much faith in the murderous technology of war, as Andrew Cockburn explains in a new book reviewed by Chuck Spinney.

• Bombs dropped by unmanned remote-controlled drones have become routine forms of warfare, allowing the US to pick off people it deems unworthy of life within a complex and secretive chain of command that has almost no public accountability. The ACLU just sued the Obama Administration to reveal the details of how and why people are targeted by drones. Particularly since some of those people are US citizens.

• I dread the morning news for it is as sure as the rising sun that the Muslim subject is everywhere: dead, maimed, bombed and bloody. Muslims are keeping the journalistic enterprise afloat by sheer madness of actions committed in the name of Islam. No news day is a good day but these are rare and far between for if it bleeds it leads and daily the Muslim wound is deepening and gushing profusely.

• The US military no longer does war. It does assassinations, usually of the wrong people. The main victims of the US assassination policy are women, children, village elders, weddings, funerals, and occasionally US soldiers mistaken for Taliban by US surveillance operating with the visual acuity of the definition of legal blindness.

• It seems like a no-brainer: If we could win a war by having an engineer in the United States simply push a button rather than by putting thousands of troops in harm’s way, we should embrace the new technology, right? But in Elaine Romero’s drama “Graveyard of Empires,” the answer is more complicated than a simple affirmative.

• Imagine a future in which a competitor assassinates you via a robotic spider. That’s one way to see new technology’s potential.

• Frightening but never fear-mongering, the information supplied by the authors of The Future of Violence posits a tomorrow full of techno-threats demanding discerning vigilance.

• Nowhere can I find any article in the corporate news media asking what role the US’s massively unpopular campaign of bombings and drone-fired missile attacks on alleged terrorists — attacks that have killed countless civilians, and that have also included wholly erroneous massacres of innocents such as wedding caravans — has played in the creation of a situation that is likely to become a bloody civil war. This in a country that already endured one such catastrophe lasting from roughly 1964 – 1994. We’re talking about a generation’s worth of bloodletting, both between tribes, and between a north dominated by the US-puppet Saudi monarchy, and a south supported by the Soviet Union and, for many years, its alley, Egypt. The idea that the US would casually take actions that could re-ignite such a horror in a place that had to be seen as a tinderbox is simply appalling.

• Once hailed by President Barack Obama as a model for fighting extremism, the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Yemen has all but collapsed as the country descends into chaos, according to U.S. and Yemeni officials.

• Yemen’s descent into chaos has undermined the US campaign against Al-Qaeda there, forcing Washington to abandon a strategy once touted as a model for counter-terrorism efforts.

• Fifty years after the U.S. ground invasion of Vietnam began, we look back at the 1968 My Lai massacre, when American troops killed hundreds of civilians. Journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story of the massacre and cover-up, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his work. But Hersh never actually went there — he interviewed soldiers stateside. Forty-seven years later, he recently traveled to My Lai for the first time, which he documents in a new article for The New Yorker, “The Scene of the Crime: A Reporter’s Journey to My Lai and the Secrets of the Past.” Hersh joins us to discuss how he exposed the massacre nearly five decades ago and what it was like to visit My Lai for the first time.

• Factual information is out of fashion. American society now devalues it.

• Britain became known as America’s poodle.

• Rosa Brooks’ article in Foreign Policy is called “There is no such thing as peacetime.” Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it’s not properly a war then the same action is murder.

• Rosa Brooks has apparently come to see the problem with that distinction. How can a secret presidential memo in a drawer somewhere, that she and her colleagues have empowered to determine whether of not an action is part of a war, actually decide on the legitimacy of sending hellfire missiles into houses and restaurants, the behavior of futuristic gangsters on steroids?

• President Barack Obama’s decision to maintain troop levels in Afghanistan through 2015 is partly to bolster counterterrorism efforts in that war-torn country, including the CIA’s ability to conduct drone strikes, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

• President Obama has again delayed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Obama had vowed to remove half of the 10,000 troops currently in Afghanistan in the coming months. But following a request from visiting Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Obama announced he will leave 9,800 soldiers at least through the end of 2015. Obama said the United States will still meet its goal to consolidate forces in Kabul and remove all but 1,000 forces by the end of his term in early 2017.

• Antiwar actions called Spring Rising, focusing on the 12th anniversary of the criminal U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and continued war in Afghanistan, were held in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities around the United States. Spring Rising was initiated by Cindy Sheehan, anti-war activist and mother of U.S. Army Specialist Casey Sheehan who was killed in Iraq.

• Although most news outlets sanitize it, the United States is, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1967, the greatest purveyor of violence on the planet. This is manifested by drone strikes, which in the last ten years have killed at least 5,000 people, only an estimated 150 of whom were the actual targets; the remainder were ‘collateral damage’; by the bombing of suspected ISIS sites in Iraq; bombing of Syria; financial and military support for the apartheid regime of Israel; continued war against Afghanistan, and several other examples. Nothing has changed in decades; the statement about violence was true when Dr. King said it, it had been true for years before and it remains true today.

• A number of recent studies have questioned the wisdom and effectiveness of drone strikes, yet the targeted bombings remain one of the central tools of the U.S. war on terrorism.

• The U.S. has recently shifted focus towards radical hotspots such as Yemen, but the vast majority of drone strikes have taken place in North Waziristan, a mountainous region on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

• A Stanford University study in 2012 undertook a thorough examination of the effect of drone strikes on the local population and found that, rather than reducing terrorist ranks by taking out top Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, drones tended to serve as a recruitment tool.

• In many cases, it turned neutral citizens into radicals.

• “Before the drone attacks, we didn’t know (anything) about America,” one Waziri told researchers. “Now everybody has come to understand and know about America. … Almost all people hate America.”

• The top risk from war is nuclear holocaust. That danger continues to grow with active U.S. assistance. The second worst thing a U.S. president can do about war is grab more war powers and pass them on to all future presidents. In that regard, President Obama has outdone President Bush. Lying to Congress is now totally routine: Congress and the United Nations can simply be ignored. Secrecy has mushroomed. President Obama picks out men, women, and children to murder from a list on Tuesdays. The public, the Congress, and the courts have no say and often no knowledge. President Obama has dramatically increased U.S. weapons sales abroad — the U.S. being far and away the top supplier of weapons to regions that the U.S. public thinks of as inherently violent.

• If Amnesty International is seen as one of the “most prestigious” international NGOs, it is also thought to harbor “a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel.” It is particularly interesting, then, that Amnesty this week released a report blaming Palestinians for a much-publicized incident that resulted in the deaths of Palestinian children and other civilians during last summer’s war between Hamas and Israel.

• As the United States begins bombing the Iraqi city of Tikrit and again delays a withdrawal from Afghanistan, a new report has found that the Iraq War has killed about one million people. The Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other groups examined the toll from the so-called war on terror in three countries — Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The investigators found “the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan. Not included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware. … And this is only a conservative estimate.” The true tally, they add, could be more than two million. We are joined by two guests who worked on the report: Hans von Sponeck, former U.N. assistant secretary-general and U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sanctions regime; and Dr. Robert Gould, president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

• Only days after President Obama announced that troops would remain in Afghanistan through 2015, a new study reveals the massive cost of war. Through its campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the US may be responsible for the deaths of millions.

• Arab coalition warplanes bombed rebel camps in Yemen today in a second straight day of strikes led by Saudi Arabia, which accused Iran of “aggression” across the region.

• It seems that a day rarely passes without news of a new atrocity committed by an increasingly notorious terrorist group. And, without fail, this news is accompanied by an increase in U.S. military interventions around the world.

• White House spokesman Josh Earnest told the press gaggle yesterday that the administration still considers Yemen a “template” for the success of its counterterrorism efforts.

• Yet chief among the factors must be the mental flashbacks to some ghastly horror, perhaps long ago, and the question arises as to how the individual veterans view their participation in the horror.

• This is, unfortunately, the very goal of much spin and propaganda. We rightly hold public parades to honour those who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq and to remember the dead and their families but ignore the plight of those who fled our enemies – on whose behalf our troops were supposedly there. Many of the children in detention whose plight was highlighted in the report of the Human Rights Commission, The Forgotten Children, were doubly victimised – once at the hands of our enemies the Taliban and again when they fled to us for safety.

• It should also be remembered that war has its victims on both sides. Whatever we think of the Taliban and their ethics, they suffer and bleed as we do. Afghan mothers will miss their sons and Afghan lovers be torn apart by lives tragically cut short in just the same way as American and Australian ones.

• On Friday, I concluded that modifying a civilian-looking vehicle into a military object to attack an adversary could indeed amount to perfidy during an international armed conflict. This question was triggered by Ryan Goodman and Sarah Knuckey’s post on the 2008 killing of Hezbollah’s Imad Mughniyah by the US and Israel where, among other things, they ask how using a car bomb differs from certain other means and methods of surprise attacks. I will briefly address them below.

• As the US grapples with whether it should pursue a larger role in the Syrian War – and just how much military aid to give Iraqi troops battling the Islamic State – it is also trying to figure out how to avoid one of the most basic and nettlesome blunders of all: inadvertently creating a Frankenstein’s monster in the form of corrupt local power brokers.

• There is no historical controversy as contentious or long-lasting as the North Korean and Chinese charges of U.S. use of biological weapons during the Korean War. For those who believe the charges to be false — and that includes much of American academia, but not all — they must assume the burden of explaining why the North Koreans or Chinese made up any bogus claims to attack the credibility of U.S. forces. Because they had no reason to do that.

• It is a historical fact that the United States carpet-bombed and napalmed North Korea, killing nearly 3 million civilians thereby.

• In other words, massive war crimes are already self-evident, and if there is any mystery, it is how historical amnesia and/or callous disregard for crimes such as those committed by the U.S. and its allies in Korea, or the millions killed by the U.S. in Southeast Asia, can go ignored today.

• Sergei Sokolov says he doesn’t believe Russian tycoon took his own life

• The 67-year-old was found hanging at ex-wife’s Berkshire home in 2013

• Berezovsky had evidence of plot to topple President Putin, it is alleged

• Sokolov claims Russian tycoon was killed by Western security services

• An outspoken critic of Putin, Berezovsky had sent him ‘repentance’ letter

• Call it the revenge of the nerds, Washington-style. The gun-toting F.B.I. agent and the swashbuckling C.I.A. undercover officer are being increasingly called upon to share their clout, their budgets and even their Hollywood glamour with the humble, deskbound intelligence analyst.

• FBI’s cooperation with the CIA and NSA is better than ever, but more is needed to make the Bureau a truly global intelligence and investigative agency, says a newly released US government report on agency’s post-9/11 transformation.

• The CIA has a history of contributing to coups in Ecuador. Back in 1963, the CIA led a coup which deposed President Carlos Julio Arosemena because he criticized the United States and supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba.

• I don’t believe Kurdistan is a pipedream, but a real-life dream that can come true, and bring freedom to 40 million Kurds—just as the implosion of the Soviet Union ushered in freedom for fifteen nations. The Middle East is now imploding, and the possibility of a free Kurdistan looms even greater—to the chagrin of our well-meaning author, Graham Fuller, and his beloved Turkish friends.

• The US Central Intelligence Agency will not release an updated assessment of the Malaysia MH17 flight crash because it would exonerate the Russian government from involvement, US journalist Robert Parry, known for helping expose the Iran-Contra affair, told Sputnik.

• Wow, they really think you’re stupid.

• I’m talking about all of those bought-and-paid-for radio talkers as well as the neocon nincompoops posing as conservative pundits.

• They’re trying to convince you that for some reason the Saudis – you know, those people who execute apostates and who funded the 9/11 attacks – are now our allies in the fight against the Houthis in Yemen.

• Do you even know who the Houthis are? Do you know where Yemen is?

• In Ireland there is a place called Morley’s Bridge and it is located on the border between County Cork and Kerry. At this remote spot there is a plaque in memory of a local man.

• CIA director John Brennan said on March 13 that the US did not want the Assad regime to collapse. Three days later, secretary of state John Kerry called for discussions with Mr Al Assad rather than, as in the past, his resignation. This was anathema until the fanatics of ISIS unleashed their terror on the region. Apart from setting most of the world against it and bringing succour to the regimes in Damascus and Baghdad that ISIS wanted to destroy, ISIS provided a haven for insane youth from much of the world. If ISIS falls, where will they go?

• “Before the attack I was accused of exaggerating the potential costs of the war when I warned that it could end up costing as much as $100 billion,” Paul writes. Despite that criticism, Paul may have even been lowballing the total cost. Last March, Reuters estimated that the war continues to cost in excess of $1.7 trillion. And that’s not including the War in Afghanistan.

• Eleven years after the UN mission began in Haiti, it brought dictatorship, a virulent cholera epidemic, tens of thousands of deaths, rapes of women, men and children and more jails than ever before in Haiti’s 200 year old history.

• Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that, and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

• And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

• Israel killed more Palestinian civilians in 2014 than in any other year since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip began in 1967, a UN report has said.

• The director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, a dark-suited, anonymous figure known as “Roger,” is leaving the post he has held since 2006.

• [...]

• He led the agency’s signature program, a relentless series of drone strikes against al-Qaida whose occasional imprecision and lack of legal transparency angered many civilians in the Muslim world. But Roger himself is, by all accounts, a practicing convert to Islam, a religion he embraced upon marrying his Muslim wife.

• The role of the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force in directing Iraqi forces against the Islamic State is complicating the US mission against terrorism and contributing to destabilization in Iraq, the director of the CIA said Sunday.

• But a journalist must be careful too, and I wondered if Kiriakou still felt a romantic attachment to the CIA. In a recent interview with Ken Klippenstein, he acknowledged that the war on terror is as much a war of revenge as it is a paramilitary police and espionage action designed to protect Americans from harm. He acknowledged that drone strikes have killed “dozens” of innocent people at wedding celebrations and “do more to help recruitment for groups like al-Qaeda or ISIS than anything they could do.” He even equated the Al Qaeda fighters he captured with the average American prisoner or soldier – functionally illiterate, lacking job skills, propagandized and manipulated. “So these were not hardened terrorists,” he told Klippenstein, “these were just confused young men.”

• The office of the attorney general in Ecuador is investigating if the death of former President Jaime Roldos was an assassination of Operation Condor.

• AS we wait for the publication of the Chilcott Inquiry into our involvement in the illegal invasion of Iraq it would appear that events in the United States have provided the evidence that George W Bush and Tony Blair made statements to justify the invasion knowing they were false.

• “If the opposition marches had been organized by the CIA, they wouldn’t have been such colossal failures,” Ecuador’s president said.

• Ecuadorean government officials charged the AFP with taking President Rafael Correa’s remarks out of context and publishing a story based on lies.

• Ecuador has denied that leftist president Rafael Correa had accused the United States of trying to destabilise his government by infiltrating it with spies, according to an official statement.

• Correa had said the US Central Intelligence Agency was trying to “wear down the government” and accused it of helping to organise opposition protests.

• The use of Agent Orange constitutes a war crime with devastating effects on the people in Vietnam not only during the war but even today. The U.S. military knew that its use of Agent Orange would be damaging, but, as an Air Force scientist wrote to Congress “because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.”

• Ecocide was committed when “the U.S. military sprayed 79 million liters of herbicides and defoliants over about one-seventh of the land area of southern Vietnam.” The 2008-2009 President’s Cancer Panel Report found that nearly five million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange, resulting in “400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half million children born with birth defects.”

• While the majority of the internet media presume that the US had already made its choice of oligarchs in Ukraine and has opted to support the head of state, Petro Poroshenko, the German online newspaper Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten believes that Washington might still change its mind and shift the balance of power in favor of Ihor Kolomoiskyi.

• We can take this terrible example as a metaphor for the whole “war on terror,” which has created a self-serving political culture that allows us to silently evade our national responsibility while loudly projecting collective blame onto abstract “others.” If we want a better, saner, more just future, then the “war on terror” must come to an end—and for that to happen, we must become more critical and discerning about the full spectrum of horrors that have occurred (and are still taking place) during this war. “It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces,” the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote. Only when we face up to our delusions and actions and stop torturing others into silence will we be able to keep ourselves out of the darkness.

Transparency Reporting

• The Federal Chief Information Officers Council is taking home this year’s Rosemary Award for giving the “worst open government performance of 2014.”

• It is obvious, almost by definition, that excessive governmental secrecy and true democracy are incompatible. If the people of a country have no idea what their government is doing, they cannot possibly have the influence on decisions that the word “democracy” implies.

• McGovern was commenting on the Obama administration’s recent decision to cease accepting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which stands in stark contrast to the progressive platform Obama ran on as a candidate.

• In a bizarre, first-of-its-kind decision, a US court has dismissed a defamation lawsuit between a Greek shipping magnate and an advocacy group against a “Nuclear Iran.” The reason? Despite the fact that the case involves no government agencies, an unknown official convinced the judge that a trial could reveal critical state secrets.

Finance

• According to exlusive reporting by Reuters on Friday, big Wall Street banks are so upset with Elizabeth Warren’s call to “un-rig” the economy and proposals for stronger financial regulations that discussions are underway about withholding campaign contributions to Senate Democrats as a form of “symbolic” protest against the freshman senator from Massachusetts.

• Washington wants its allies to stay away from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• While NATO puppets in eastern and central Europe are involved in a propaganda war against Russia and its May 9 Victory Day event, three US ex-ambassadors to Ukraine – Steven Pifer, John Herbst, and William Taylor – have demanded that the leaders of the UK, Germany and France should participate in a WWII Victory in Europe ceremony in Kiev, “a city where neo-Nazis and skinhead mercenaries from around Europe enjoy political and military power,” the author stressed.

• Hillary Clinton has always had a tenuous relationship with the media. But that didn’t stop her from headlining a journalism awards ceremony Monday night.

• “Some of you may be a little surprised to see me here tonight,” Clinton acknowledged. “You know my relationship with the press has been at times, shall we say, complicated.

Censorship

• With the uproar over comic books, Congress began holding hearings. The hearings were biased. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, who harbored presidential aspirations, may have conspired to discredit moderate witnesses, including two female librarians bold enough to say they thought the comic books were basically harmless.

• Turkish journalist Aydogan Vatandas warned Friday night at the Turkish Cultural Center of Staten Island in Dongan Hills that freedom of the press in his country is under siege.

• He was the guest speaker during an event titled “Democracy and Freedom of the Press in Turkey,” which explored the nation’s long and difficult history with the media – a relationship that has often included extreme censorship.

• Omar recently wrote a short satire of the “check your privilege” fad. It was just a tongue in cheek article that described how a system of right-handed privilege was oppressing left-handed people everywhere through daily right-handed “micro-aggressions.”

• The article was humorous, harmless and conservative.

• In response, The Michigan Daily invoked a technicality to kick Mahmood out of his writing gig, claiming a conflict of interest. Much worse, a group of students vandalized his room, pelted the door with eggs and hot dogs, attached hateful messages calling Mahmood “scum” and told him to “shut up” and leave the school.

• Take your pick: press conferences without questions, intimidation, threats, slander, state harassment, privileged access, and even restrictions on newsprint purchases.

• These are some of the problems facing the media in Latin America, according to a group of academics, politicians, and journalists convened for the Freedom of the Press Colloquium, hosted in Montevideo, Uruguay, on Monday by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

• A Mexican broadcast news journalist, fired after helping to reveal a conflict of interest scandal that embarrassed the country’s president, said her former employer tried to suppress the report before she published it on her own website.

• When India banned a BBC documentary about rape, it was motivated by more than misplaced national pride. Like other examples of state censorship that bode ill for the supposedly secular democracy, this was a sop to hardline Hindu factions, says Zareer Masani

• India’s top court affirmed people’s right to free speech in cyberspace Tuesday by striking down a provision that had called for imprisoning people who send “offensive” messages by computer or cellphone.

• India’s supreme court has struck down a controversial law that made posting “offensive” comments on social media a crime punishable by jail.

• A professor at the University of South Dakota is refusing calls to cancel the screening of a controversial documentary that depicts brutality against Muslim women.

• The “Honor Diaries” is scheduled to be screened at the university’s annual women and gender conference on April 10. But another screening of the film that was supposed to take place Sunday didn’t happen for reasons unknown, and there is pressure from some staff and faculty members to cancel next month’s showing.

• Following the terrorist attacks in Paris in January, including the murder of several journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, we anticipated that the French government would overreact. Sure enough, recent reporting has revealed that France is censoring websites and pushing for broader surveillance powers.

Privacy

• The newest toy for children from Mattel is called Hello Barbie and it can converse with your child and record the answers in real time via wifi. It saves that information in the cloud.

• UN envoy to Libya, Bernardino Leon, proposed a unity government composed of a three-person presidential council but it also would incorporate the House of Representatives of the Tobruk-based internationally recognized government.

• In 1958, at the height of the Cold War and long before satellite photo reconnaissance was thought possible, President Dwight Eisenhower endorsed a project called Corona.

• A powerful bipartisan pair of senators is pressing the Obama administration over the development of spy tools that mimic cell towers in order to track people’s cellphones.

• The top two lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee are pressing the Justice Department with concerns the Central Intelligence Agency helped domestic law enforcement develop technology to scan U.S. cellphones.

• Getting one from Index On Censorship was different. This is a group people trust. They’re establishing norms for how we should all behave in the increasingly complicated and networked world of free expression. So I took them to task in a one-sided conversation for having such terrible security norms and endangering their users. They ignored me, which didn’t shock me. When you work in internet security you get used to the world ignoring you. But I figured, the least I owe Index On Censorship, and the many other NGO, newsrooms, small companies, freelancers, and people at home is some ideas on how to improve their security practices.

• A major security flaw in a network gateway popular among hoteliers can be exploited by hackers to launch attacks against guests by injecting malware into their downloads over unencrypted connections. Compromised gateways can also be used to infiltrate sensitive areas of a hotel’s network, such as its reservation systems, it’s claimed.

• An examination of the server that housed the personal email account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used exclusively when she was secretary of state showed that there are no copies of any emails she sent during her time in office, her lawyer told a congressional committee on Friday.

• After her representatives determined which emails were government-related and which were private, a setting on the account was changed to retain only emails sent in the previous 60 days, her lawyer, David Kendall, said. He said the setting was altered after she gave the records to the government.

• A law bill introduced in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday seeks to abolish the Patriot Act, ban Uncle Sam from forcing backdoors into technology, and safeguard whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

• Ever since Snowden leaked top-secret files detailing the NSA and GCHQ’s global surveillance of innocent people, there have been calls for reforms – which have sparked little more than tinkering at the edges of the laws enabling the blanket snooping.

• One would be installing so-called “backdoors” in encryption — an access point known only to law enforcement agencies. Security experts find this concept abhorrent, since cyber crooks or foreign intelligence agencies would likely exploit it.

• A technology coalition headed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google urged President Barack Obama and other government officials to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone call “metadata.” In a letter addressed to the President and other key figures, the coalition, made up of privacy advocates, technology firms, and trade companies, called the NSA program “untenable,” and urged the House to move forward with reforms.

• Under a programme called “Prism” they are keeping records of your phone’s geolocation, harvesting your metadata and tracking your browser history. They are filing and documenting your most intimate details, and as we know from whistleblower Edward Snowden, NSA workers routinely share your nude photos with their colleagues (in an office culture apparently closer to fraternity “bros” than intelligence specialists).

• The Commission has also conceded before the European Court of Justice that the Harbour framework can’t ensure the data privacy of European citizens.

• The European Commission Attorney Bernhard Schima has told the Court Of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) the US-EU Safe Harbor framework doesn’t work.

• “You might consider closing your Facebook account, if you have one,” European Commission attorney Bernhard Schima told attorney-general Yves Bot at the CJEU on Tuesday, suggesting that personal data transferred from Europe to the U.S. isn’t necessarily protected under the U.S.-EU pact, even though the Framework should ensure data privacy and security.

• Juliet Barbara, the senior communications manager for Wikimedia, agrees.

• “Mass surveillance is a threat to intellectual freedom and a spirit of inquiry, two of the driving forces behind Wikimedia,” she told Truthdig. “Wikipedia is written by people from around the world who often tackle difficult subjects. Very frequently they choose to remain anonymous, or pseudonymous. This allows them to freely create, contribute and discover without fear of reprisal. Surveillance might be used to reveal sensitive information, create a chilling effect to deter participation, or in extreme instances, identify individual users.”

• According to a filing published by the World Trade Organization Thursday, the United States is outraged by China’s proposed restrictions on US-made information technology in the banking sector – by all accounts a reaction to the disclosure of secret documents by former NSA contractor Edwards Snowden.

• Want to understand why far-reaching, poorly scrutinized spying programs are dangerous? Here’s why. The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald have obtained a document showing that New Zealand used the US National Security Agency’s XKeyscore surveillance system to spy on other countries’ candidates for the World Trade Organization’s director general role. The 2013 snooping campaign searched for keywords in communications that referenced New Zealand’s own candidate (Minister of Trade Tim Groser, above), the competition and the WTO itself. Any relevant results were passed on to a “trade team” within the country’s surveillance agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, which is rather alarming when the leadership run had nothing to do with national security.

• Texas is home to a massive physical NSA facility that relies on the independent Texas power grid to operate. That power is provided by the country’s largest public utility, and Texas can turn it off by passing HB3916. (learn more here) It has been referred to the House State Affairs Committee.

• A recent Pew Research Center report found that some Internet users have changed their use of social networking services, apps, email, and even search engines as a result of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the government’s pervasive online surveillance. So how does your smartphone — the device that many of us find indispensable in our day-to-day lives — have the potential to expose your personal data and your online activity to government snooping? How does your mobile device protect your anonymity, and how does it leave your communications vulnerable to interception by the NSA and other intelligence agencies?

• The new law would give French spy agencies the power to hack into computers and spy on anyone linked to a “terrorist” inquiry – without having to obtain a judicial warrant first.

• “High-level” discussions on surveillance overhaul aren’t taking place, Rep. Adam Schiff said.

• Of late, American and British hackers have maximized crime by encroaching to hack database of the largest SIM card selling company. They have collected million tons of data from these SIM cards and they distorted the facts. It is a well fabricated crime and it is also heinous. On the other hand, NSA and GCHQ agencies have upgraded an encrypted key to break the privacy of people. They collected the configuration of privacy codes used by Gemalto to upgrade the chips of mobile phones. So it is now easier for NSA to steal valuable information from people.

• “NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned of how U.S. intelligence works with a number of E.U. countries that filter out traffic belonging to their own citizens. However, because of the number of collaborating countries, the U.S. is ultimately able to obtain data on all E.U. citizens. … Parliament members are in broad agreement that it is unacceptable for foreign intelligence services to conduct legally baseless large-scale interception, storage and monitoring of the communications data of Austrian and European citizens. To prevent this from continuing, all legal and diplomatic measures will be taken.”

• The United Nations human rights council said it will establish a special rapporteur position to cover privacy-related issues, a move that comes in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance programs by U.S. and U.K. agencies. The resolution, which was passed by the Geneva-based council on Thursday, was championed by Germany and Brazil, two of the countries that were allegedly most aggressively monitored by foreign espionage services.

• The United Nations has agreed to set up a privacy watchdog in response to the growing concerns of the effects of digital technology on human rights.

• In a debate yesterday, the Human Rights Council adopted four resolutions to create the mandate for a special reporter for the next three year, as well as calling on all members of the UN to support the initiative and comply with requests for information and visits.

• Exact details about how this works in practice are thin on the ground, but we’re assuming Cisco briefs its customers about its delivery plans beforehand. At least you’d hope.

• It’s also not clear if other tech firms are following Cisco’s lead on this, but we have a sneaky suspicion Royal Mail might be, given how haphazard their deliveries seem to be these days.

• It is often argued that data retention is necessary to combat terrorism. However, data retention cannot prevent any terrorist attacks. At best it may, as its proponents claim, assist the police to find the culprits and their accomplices after an attack has already taken place.

• Australia has passed a controversial security law that will require its internet and mobile phone providers to store customer data for two years.

• Crikey has been covering data retention for several years, and we’ve written tens of thousands of words in that time explaining what it is, why it’s important and the threat it poses to Australians. We know that a lot of people, especially in the media, have only started to focus on the issue in recent days, so we’ve further expanded this Q&A we prepared last year to take into account recent developments and give you a one-stop document for what will be Australia’s biggest ever mass surveillance regime.

• Israel spied on the recent US-Iran nuclear talks, alleges America. And the US knows enough about it to say it publicly because the NSA is spying on Israel, along with everyone else.

• On some level, the reports that Israel spied on Iran-U.S. nuclear talks don’t come as a shock. Just last year, German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported that Israel had eavesdropped on Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace talks. Jonathan Pollard, who was arrested in November 1985 after passing secret documents to Israel while working as a civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, has become a cause celebre among some Israelis.

• Former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall gained notoriety for his vocal opposition to National Security Agency surveillance programs in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures of June 2013.

• Over the last month, privacy advocates have slammed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, arguing that it’s surveillance legislation hidden in a security bill’s clothing. But those protests didn’t stop a Senate committee from passing the bill by a vote of 14-1. And now they haven’t stopped the House’s intelligence committee from following in the Senate’s surveillance-friendly footsteps.

• The House and Senate Intelligence Committee just passed a cybersecurity bill that critics argue isn’t likely to improve cybersecurity. In fact, because it undermines the privacy of electronic communications by encouraging companies to broadly share private data with the government and each other, it may actually damage cybersecurity.

• Canada’s electronic surveillance agency has secretly developed an arsenal of cyberweapons capable of stealing data and destroying adversaries’ infrastructure, according to newly revealed classified documents.

• Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, has also covertly hacked into computers across the world to gather intelligence, breaking into networks in Europe, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, the documents show.

• While the NSA headlines most of Ed Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance, the latest leaked documents reveal the Canadians are a dab hand at cyber-stuff, both defensive and offensive.

• Top-secret files, published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The Intercept, show that Canuck intelligence has developed its own technology to keep government servers secure. The EONBLUE system uses a mix of malware signatures and heuristics to identify network threats and maintain communications security.

• [...]

• Using its own infrastructure, the CSE claims it has the ability to process 125GB of internet communications metadata per hour for intelligence, and store 300TB at a time. In 2009 it collected an average of 112,794 blobs of interesting network traffic every day, in association with “allied sources.”

• A group of British and Israeli academics are set to participate in a £1.2 million cyber security research venture as part of the government’s “long-term economic plan,” the Cabinet Office announced on Tuesday.

• The bilateral project will consist of three cross-border partnerships linking Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv with the University of Bristol and University College London, and Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology with the University of Kent.

• In a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing this morning on the FBI budget for the upcoming fiscal year, FBI Director James Comey was again critical of new encryption features from Apple and Google that he claims would make it impossible for law enforcement to access the contents of mobile device communications.

• An in-house review of the FBI has found the agency failing to go far enough in its expansion of physical and cyber surveillance programs, urging the bureau to recruit deeper networks of informants and bring its technological abilities up to pace with other intelligence agencies.

• Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s office says she has again been invited to make a state visit to Washington, two years after she declined a similar invitation to protest an American spy program.

• Rousseff had originally been scheduled to make a state visit, which involves a black-tie dinner at the White House and is considered the strongest expression of friendly ties between allies, in October 2013.

• Google and the White House manage to hook up more than the majority of married couples, having met up once a week for the past five years.

• When Hillary Clinton learned that a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives had subpoenaed her emails as secretary of state and she promptly destroyed half of them—about 33,000—how did she know she could get away with it? Destruction of evidence, particularly government records, constitutes the crime of obstruction of justice.

• Citizenfour is a portrait of a one person who has chosen to resist the strong arm of the state

• Being in the latter part of my life, I surmise that the consequences of my views will be minimally felt if at all. I worry, however, for the future of my two sons, both in their late 20s, as technology employed by the NSA and other government agencies tightens the grip on their every thought and action. As we know from history, increasing monitoring of its citizens (under the banner of security) is virtually always prelude to the establishment of a totalitarian state.

• There are two governments — a double government — operating today in the realm of national security. There’s the one the voting public thinks they control when they go to the polls — what Glennon refers to as the “Madisonian institutions.” Congress, the courts and the presidency.

• And there’s the “Trumanite network,” the labyrinthine national security apparatus that encompasses the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities that Pres. Harry Truman created when he signed the National Security Act of 1947.

• New Zealand’s ambassador to Brazil, Caroline Bilkey, has been called upon to explain leaked documents showing New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) spied on rival candidates for the top job at the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

• Brazil has demanded an explanation from New Zealand after reports New Zealand’s foreign intelligence agency the GCSB spied on its campaign to get Brazilian diplomat Roberto Azevedo elected as Secretary General of the World Trade Organisation in 2013 – successfully.

• Brazil media have reported that New Zealand’s ambassador in Sao Paulo, Caroline Bilkey, was summoned by the Secretary General of Brazil’s foreign ministry (MRE), Sergio Danese, to explain.

• On Tuesday, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key wrapped up a three-day visit to South Korea during which he signed a free trade agreement. As might be expected, the South Korean media covered the visit, focusing mainly on the removal of tariffs and New Zealand’s cooperation in denuclearizing North Korea.

• An expert on computer security, Schneier has written over a dozen books in the last 20 years on the subject, some highly technical, but this one is a call to action addressed to a mainstream audience. The impetus for writing such a book, it seems, were the 2013 revelations of the NSA mass surveillance. Schneier worked with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, helping in the analysis of some of the more technical documents that were leaked by Edward Snowden.

• Today the bigger threat is from lots of “Little Brothers,” a multitude of corporations, companies, and online mechanisms that want to track your every move.

• On Friday, Access and a coalition of civil society organizations, including the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and New America’s Open Technology Institute, called on the Home Office of the United Kingdom to address questions about the lack of human rights protections found in its surveillance authorities.

• When it comes to the NSA’s mass surveillance programs, however, the FISA court is not acting like a court at all. Originally created to provide a check on the executive branch, the court today behaves more like an adjunct to the intelligence establishment, giving its blanket blessing to mammoth covert programs. The court’s changed role undermines its constitutional underpinnings and raises questions about its ability to exercise meaningful oversight.

• You don’t need to be the NSA to tap calls on Cisco’s SPA 300 and 500 IP phones: An authentication flaw allows potential attackers to do that by default.

• An unpatched vulnerability in the firmware of the SPA 300 and 500 series IP phones, typically used by small businesses, could allow eavesdropping on calls.

• Edward Snowden’s laptop and hard drive were destroyed by Guardian editors under pressure from the UK government’s secret services GCHQ

• US spies operate in Switzerland without much fear of being unmasked, because Swiss intelligence, though knowledgeable and very professional, poses no threat to them, former NSA contributor Edward Snowden told Swiss TV.

• Wizner said the growth of technology has outpaced the creation of laws to regulate how the government protects the privacy of citizens. He said people don’t realize how much data they create each day when they send text messages, make phone calls, read news online or shop online.

• Washington’s threat to stop sharing intelligence with Berlin if it offers asylum to Snowden is either US bullying, or a convenient excuse on Berlin’s part to shift the blame for not allowing him to go onto the US, believes former MI5 agent Annie Machon.

• If you attended the WHD.global 2015 keynote with former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden on Wednesday morning, it is very likely that you were being watched.

• “Unfortunately in many ways I am the X,” Snowden told the packed conference room at WHD.global. “I expect and accept that at this point I’m going to be scrutinized by every government and every bad actor in the world.”

• The second in line to the throne was flown by helicopter to the headquarters of Britain’s elite spy agency for a secret visit amid fears members of the royal family could have their emails and social media hacked by spies.

• “There are more devices and more types of devices, so this just gives you more ways for people to track you or hurt you,” Corman, a long-time security expert and cofounder of I Am The Cavalry, says. “What we’ve done is blindly assume that [adding software and connectivity] is always good. And we’re making really horrible, horrible choices.”

• HP (NYSE:HPQ) is close to selling a 51% stake in its H3C Technologies Chinese networking hardware unit to state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup, the WSJ reports. Echoing an October report about HP’s sale efforts, the paper states H3C is “worth roughly $5 billion in total.”

• The United States’ limits itself in one very narrow context. After acknowledging that the United States engages in economic espionage, DNI Clapper said in 2013: “What we do not do . . . is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.” This very carefully worded statement is the only admitted U.S. limit on economic espionage. Note what it permits. It permits economic espionage of foreign governments and institutions. It even permits theft of trade secrets from foreign firms. It just doesn’t allow such theft “on behalf of” U.S. firms, and it doesn’t permit the government to give the stolen information to U.S. firms.

• ‘The latest revelations about the GCSB pose a stark question: is the GCSB’s “trade team” spying on governments with whom New Zealand is negotiating international deals, especially th e Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA)?’, asked University of Auckland law professor Jane Kelsey.

• The United States’ mass surveillance of internet and phone use flies in the face of global public opinion, says Amnesty International as it published a major poll to launch its worldwide #UnfollowMecampaign.

• The poll, which questioned 15,000 people from 13 countries across every continent, including New Zealand, found that 71% of respondents were strongly opposed to the United States monitoring their internet use.

• On 24 March, the Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) heard argument on a case that could significantly impact, if not invalidate altogether, the Safe Harbor framework that facilitates the flow of personal data from the European Union (EU) to the US.

Civil Rights

• About 85 percent of the 779 men ever held at Guantánamo are no longer there. Most left during the Bush administration. While the number of transfers has been much smaller under the Obama administration, the pace accelerated in the latter part of 2014.

• Fidgeting, whistling, sweaty palms. Add one point each. Arrogance, a cold penetrating stare, and rigid posture, two points.

• These are just a few of the suspicious signs that the Transportation Security Administration directs its officers to look out for — and score — in airport travelers, according to a confidential TSA document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

• Enshrined in both national constitutions and international treaties, these democratic precepts ensure that individual citizens can express their views and campaign for causes without fear of persecution or discrimination. Yet, when they were first codified during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ modernising revolutions which overthrew aristocratic and priestly despotism in western Europe and North America, these fundamental freedoms were initially restricted to a minority of the population: white male property-owners.

• [...]

• The recent revelations by Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers about the American empire’s megalomaniac scheme to spy upon every inhabitant of the planet have discredited ‘the West’s’ self-identification as the global champion of human rights.

• According to media reports Petraeus plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material for which he may face up to a year in prison. His paltry sentence is a far cry from the many years of prison time that many whistleblowers face when they disclose protected information in an attempt to further the public interest. Petraeus claimed no such motive. He seems only to have wanted to help his mistress and biographer, and Panetta and Vickers shared it with a producer from Hollywood – the common thread between the three stories is that these men both leaked information for purely personal gain and each received little more than a slap on the wrist.

• Following the late January guilty verdicts in the espionage trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, more proof emerged — if any more were needed — that many elite mainstream journalists abhor whistleblowers and think they should go to prison when they divulge classified information.

• Thousands of people in Canada have access to top secret government documents, but if any of them are considering following in the footsteps of Edward Snowden and leaking records to journalists, they will find comparatively few reporters in this country who are capable of protecting them.

• Snowden, an NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower, leaked a massive trove of documents that revealed potentially illegal surveillance programs throughout the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Intelligence agencies in these countries not only monitor the communications of terrorists and foreign states, they also collect private and potentially compromising information from journalists and the public at large.

• However, since the Snowden leaks were made public, only a handful of reporters in Canada have taken steps to secure themselves and their sources. Many investigative reporters and even some national security reporters in Canada are not equipped with email encryption.

• The fatal shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, not only sparked a nationwide social movement challenging police brutality, but it also amplified media scrutiny of the US legal system. One example is the recent Guardian investigation of a detention facility in Chicago’s Homan Square, where police take people for harsh, off-the-book interrogations without reading them their rights and denying access to attorneys. The facility is deemed “the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site” since suspects are effectively “disappeared.” While this is the first time Homan Square has been discussed in the mainstream press, it hardly represents anything new or unique in Chicago, or in the United States as a whole. If anything, Homan Square reflects a norm rather than a deviation from US legal and national security policy.

• Last week New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed into a law a bill (passed unanimously by both houses) that made his state the first to require local approval before any local law-enforcement agency can accept military equipment from the U.S. government. It won’t be the last.

• Even stronger bills banning the practice, under the so-called “1033 Program” of local law-enforcement agencies dealing directly with the Department of Defense for free military equipment, are pending in Montana, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

• The Church Committee’s investigation revealed more about the secret, sometimes illegal, work of the nation’s top intelligence agencies than any comparable effort before or since. And it led to reforms meant to rein in the agencies and protect civil liberties, though many of those reforms were weakened in the years following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

• In June 2005, a federal judge ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.” Five months later, the CIA destroyed hundreds of hours of interrogation videos of suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were being held overseas in a network of secret CIA prisons. By the time President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of those prisons and the prisoners were transferred to Guantanamo, the tapes were long gone.

• “If we really care about national security and being a model for the world of justice,” Goodman says of the George W. Bush administration’s actions after 9/11, we have “to move from assessment to an accounting and to accountability.” She also elicits responses from her fellow forum participants Porter Goss, former CIA director, and John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, about the U.S.-led Iraq War, and its use of torture.

• On March 5, the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) urged a French Appeals Court to fully investigate claims by three French nationals that they were sexually and physically tortured during their detention at the Guantánamo Bay prison in 2002. But a lack of cooperation from U.S. authorities has stymied the French investigation.

• As the Obama administration and Cuban negotiators examine the 54-year-old unilateral embargo (or “blockade” as the Cubans refer to it), one obstacle—particularly painful for Cubans and extremely important to American interests—must be addressed: Cuba’s continued presence on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.

• Fifty years ago tonight, following the end of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old Detroit homemaker and mother of five, was shot and killed by a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen. She was the only white woman to lose her life working for the civil rights movement. Her murder helped accelerate passage of the historic Voting Rights Act.

• In the March 2015 edition of Harper’s, a U.S. magazine, Adam Hochschild reviews a book by Karen M. Pate in which she presents her research into the CIA’s secret infiltration of the National Student Association during the 1960s and ’70s.

• Hochschild, a staff writer with Ramparts at the time, became somewhat involved and confirms in his review Pate’s allegations of CIA’s involvement in the National Student Association.

• President Barack Obama will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the White House on April 14, the administration announced Monday.

• Al-Abadi has expressed frustration in what he called “slowness” of the U.S.-led international coalition in providing military support against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

• A surveillance mission was exposed last week when a Predator drone crashed in northwest Syria while spying on the home turf of President Bashar al-Assad. U.S. officials believe the drone was shot down, but they haven’t ruled out mechanical failure. Regardless, the wreckage offered the first hard evidence of a U.S. confrontation with Assad’s forces.

• The impact of Cold War anticommunism on our national life has been so profound that we no longer recognize how much we’ve lost.

• The leaders will celebrate the relationship between the nations developed during the 70 years since the end of World War II, according to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said.

• The U.S. is ready to provide Lebanese security services with equipment and training to help them fight terrorism, Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk said after holding talks with CIA director John O. Brennan.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• CIA Director John Brennan declined Sunday to confirm or deny reports that the United States disrupted North Korea’s Internet system in December in retaliation for Pyongyang’s hack on Sony Entertainment.

• North Korea’s Internet connections suffered outages for a few days in late December after U.S. President Barack Obama blamed the communist nation for the massive hack on Sony and promised a “proportional response.”

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