● 06.20.15

● Links 20/6/2015: Mageia 5, Saudi Leaks

Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Every once in a while, I find myself in a situation where I’m being asked by someone who wants to migrate from a Microsoft Windows operating system if Linux is indeed a new home for Windows refugees.

• Robolinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian featuring various flavors that let users run any Windows application, has been upgraded to version 7.9.2 and is now available for download.

Desktop

• When I was in film school, I had been told by my professors that I needed a certain set of tools in order to get through my classes, but none of them told me how I was supposed to afford those tools. I figured that film was, after all, an infamously expensive medium, so that was just part of the curse. Sure we don’t use celluloid any more, but if you want to make moving pictures, you have to buy fancy computers, and then you have to buy fancy software (often as expensive as the hardware you just bought).

• [...]

• And then on my way to work one day, I was riding the N line, reading a trade magazine, and I flipped to an article about how someone at Pixar or ILM was really enamoured by all of the Unix software that was being used there, and how you could render things without actually opening the application that had created the thing itself. It sounded amazing. You mean I can render stuff out and not have my computer crash because the image was too large to fit into RAM?

Kernel Space

• There’s a Linux clothes detergent out there, and it’s a real one, from a company that has a trademark on it and that’s selling it today. Welcome to the bizarre world of trademark rules.

Graphics Stack

• The Linux Foundation has announced fourteen scholarships to those who don’t have the ability to attend Linux Foundation courses, the Linux Foundation will fund fourteen individuals to take the training courses.

Applications

• It’s been a while since we made a new build of Krita… So, here’s Krita 2.9.5.1! In all the hectics surrounding the Kickstarter campaign, we worked our tails off to add new features, improvements and fixes, and that caused considerable churn in the code.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• NightSky is described as an ambient action-puzzle and it’s developed and published by a small studio called Nicalis. The developer have just released the native Linux version along with their latest patch.

• Just four more days are left until the Steam Summer Sale ends, and Linux users had plenty of opportunities to get a ton of games. It looks like the eighth day is also a good day for Linux gaming.

• Today Crytek released version 3.8.1 of CryEngine, which brings support for a new OpenGL renderer so developers can publish CryEngine games on Linux and Android; it also adds Oculus Rift support.

• Crytek has just patched CRYENGINE, and the famous engine finally supports the Linux platform. The changes have been made for the CRYENGINE Steam subscribers, but it’s likely that they will land for other users as well.

• Shadow Warrior 2 was quite a surprise to be confirmed for Linux, especially after we only gained the first instalment recently. Thanks to E3, some gameplay videos have surfaced that makes it looks crazy good.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A few libraries have been split off from Calligra into own repos (more on that in another post), and one is around report generation. This week Calliga Plan, the project management application, could be made working with it again, here a preview (reports not yet added to build in the “frameworks” branch, still waiting for API of the now external library to become stable).

• Implemented effects:

• Window show/hide animation

• Dim inactive windows (though it dims too many windows)

• Shadows

• As I have mentioned in earlier blog entries, Kolab Enteprise has gained data loss prevention (DLP) functionality this year that goes above and beyond what one tends to find in other groupware products. Kolab’s DLP is not just a back-up system that copies mails and other objects to disk for later restore, it actually creates a history of every groupware object in real-time that can later be examined and restored from. This will eventually lead to some very interesting business intelligent features.

Distributions

New Releases

• It’s been quite a while since we got a substantial update for the Solus project, but the developers have kindly obliged, and they have shared the progress they made with the community.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• FOSS Force has learned that Mageia will soon officially announce the release of the stable version of Mageia 5, most likely later today. According to a source within the organization, the ISO images were pushed to the distro’s main mirror at about 7 P.M. EST yesterday. According to our source, the developers are now just waiting for the images to be available on all mirrors before making the official announcement.

• After more than one year of development, the Mageia community is very proud to finally deliver this long-awaited release, Mageia 5. This release announcement is a big sigh of relief, an “At last!” that comes straight from the heart of the weary – tired as one can be after long days of hard but rewarding work.

• And still, we chose to take our time to fix major issues and have a high quality release, without rushing it. Maybe our best release so far, taking into account the impressive work that was done on the installer, both to add new features and to get rid of old bugs.

• After more than a year of hard work, the Mageia development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final version of the highly anticipated Mageia 5 Linux operating system.

Red Hat Family

• Red Hat Inc. today released their quarterly earnings report saying revenue increased 14% and profits rose 28%. All Things Linux has an article out highlighting some distributions without systemd and Jack Germain reviews Arch-based Antergos Linux. Phoronix reported today on the disappearing Assembly code in Linux and Mark Gibbs looked at some commandline monitoring tools.

• At the recent OpenStack Summit, I took the opportunity to talk to a number of different players in the OpenStack ecosystem. It was particularly interesting to spend time talking with Alessandro Perilli, former Gartner analyst and now with Red Hat. I’ve not had much chance to engage with Red Hat over the years and have found their approach somewhat confusing. Perilli reached out to take me through where Red Hat stands today, and what its vision for the future is.

Fedora

• The Fedora Project keeps three versions of the OS active at any given time — the current release, the release before that, and a new one in development. With last month’s release of Fedora 22 and Fedora 23 development underway, it’s time to bid a fond farewell to Fedora 20.

• Fedora used to be a major contender in the operating system war, but the number of users for this Linux distribution has declined significantly in the past few years. One of the reasons might just be the fact that Fedora is still trapped in the past, and it’s in no way, shape, or form a user-friendly Linux OS.

Debian Family

• The Debian project has undergone some major changes in the past couple of years, and it looks like more are on their way. Developers have announced that Libav will no longer ship as default on Debian, and it will be replaced by FFmpeg.

• Controversy has stirred in the Linux community since a bug report about Google’s Chromium browser was logged on Tuesday at Debian. Yoshino Yoshihito said in the report ‘After upgrading chromium to 43, I noticed that when it is running and immediately after the machine is on-line it silently starts downloading “Chrome Hotword Shared Module” extension, which contains a binary without source code,’

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Canonical has revealed some information in a security notice about a devscripts vulnerability in Ubuntu 14.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems that has been found and corrected.

• Sebastien Bacher has sent in his usual interesting report on what’s new for the upcoming Desktop edition of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, Wily Werewolf a.k.a. Ubuntu 15.10.

• Michael Zanetti has had the great pleasure of informing us earlier about the latest features that have been implemented in the Ubuntu’s Unity 8 user interface for Desktop and Ubuntu Touch.

• The BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition is now available for purchase, just in time for Father’s Day.

• Previously, the BQ Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition was only available for pre-order. Starting June 18, the official Ubuntu Twitter account announced the availability of the latest smartphone running on Ubuntu OS.

Devices/Embedded

Phones

Android

• Gosh all my Christmasses and Birthdays are arriving on one week. First Elop is fired. Then Trump joins the Clown Circus to give the funniest election season ever. Then Nokia confirms it returns to smartphones next year. Now comes the rumor of ‘Venice’ the Blackberry Slider, apparently scheduled for November release. Wow this is awesome news (what is next for this astonishing week, will Kimi win in Austria?)

• So Blackberry Venice. Its a rumor but Ubergizmo reports today that the device was shown as prototype to carriers and has a launch date of November. Want the specs? Drool over this: 5.4 inch touch-screen with Quad HD resolution. Very nice. Camera? 18mp on back, 5mp for selfies? This too is best-ever for the BeeBee. What about that keyboard. Yes, finally yes, a SLIDER QWERTY. This is the phone I have to have and will go buy immediately it is out. Cool beans, thank you gods of mobile, thank you all at Waterloo, I take back every nasty thing I’ve written about you in recent years. This is a killer smartphone for Christmas 2015. I miss the keyboard of my old BB Bold, this is a must-have smartphone for anyone who longs for a physical keyboard in a modern phone with also large screen (and good camera).

• Bethesda announced and released Fallout Shelter during its first-ever E3 press conference, and so far, it’s been absolutely killing the App Store top-grossing games chart. Unfortunately, Android owners have been sitting idly by while iOS owners have been merrily playing the role of a Vault Overseer. But Bethesda has revealed it is working on an Android version of the game.

• Zettaly’s portable, $200 “Avy” wireless speaker runs Android 4.4 and features a 7-inch touchscreen, 10W speakers, a web cam, and up to 40GB of storage.

• Zettaly, which makes PowerX battery packs, went to Kickstarter in January to launch its Avy multimedia system, then pulled the plug on the crowdfunding campaign once it had received over $30,000 of its $50,000 in pledges. On the Kickstarter comments page, the company said it had canceled the project due to a realization it couldn’t fulfill $50K worth of orders on time.

Free Software/Open Source

• Open source software and code is becoming more and more commonplace. From consumer-level programs like LibreOffice and GIMP all the way up to enterprise-grade server and content management solutions, an increasing number of people in Britain are living and working with open source products on a daily basis.

• Code Climate is pulling a gutsy move today. The startup is open-sourcing key parts of its proprietary software for performing tests on source code to determine its quality.

• SourceForge is in trouble.

• The download-hosting site retreated after public outcry, removing the junkware it inserted into downloads of the popular GIMP image editing tool without the developers’ permission. But SourceForge has still lost the trust of the open-source community after the junkware-wrapping scandal—and now more open-source projects are leaving SourceForge for greener pastures like GitHub and FossHub.

Licensing

• As you all know Blue Jimp has joined Atlassian. With this new partnership, we are making changes, due to expected growth – thanks to more eyes than ever on the Jitsi Community.

Openness/Sharing

Programming

• The Kernel Address Sanitizer is Google’s AddressSanitizer (ASan) fast memory error detector modified for the Linux kernel. ASan finds use-after-frees, heap/stack/global buffer overflow bugs, and other memory issues within C and C++ code-bases. Clang has already supported ASan but now it has support for the Linux kernel ASan.

Leftovers

• A man is in hospital recovering after clinging onto a flight from South Africa for 11 hours while another has died after he landed in south west London

Science

• The United States and Russia are competing for a strategic role in Brazil’s plan to launch commercial satellites from its base near the equator, opening up a new theatre in their rivalry for allies and influence.

Security

• Puppet Labs said Friday (June 19) that NSA is releasing to the open source community a set of tools based on Puppet Labs’ technologies called Systems Integrity Management Platform, or SIMP. The framework is intended to automatically enforce compliance with various profiles called the Security Content Automation Program.

• All signs point to China being responsible for one of the worst hacks in U.S. history, exposing sensitive records of millions of federal employees.

• But the U.S. is an awkward position in deciding how to respond to the humiliating blow. That’s partially because in the two years since Edward Snowden’s leaks about U.S. surveillance, the Obama administration has repeatedly argued that hacking into computer networks to spy on foreigners is completely acceptable behavior.

• By exposing the names and addresses of foreign relatives, the cybertheft of private information on U.S. security clearance holders by hackers linked to China will complicate the deployment and promotion of American intelligence professionals with special language skills and diverse backgrounds, current and former U.S. officials say.

• When a retired 51-year-old military man disclosed in a U.S. security clearance application that he had a 20-year affair with his former college roommate’s wife, it was supposed to remain a secret between him and the government.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• Hezbollah’s television station, al-Manar, is reporting that their forces launched two separate attacks on ISIS forces along the Lebanon-Syria border, killing nine fighters including two who they identified as ISIS commanders.

• “Al Qaida and the U.S. are on the same side in Yemen, just as they are in Syria.”

Transparency Reporting

• Disclosing a trade secret on public interest grounds would not be an offence under new laws backed by a committee of MEPs.

• On Monday, Saudi Arabia celebrated the beheading of its 100th prisoner this year. The story was nowhere to be seen on Arab media despite the story’s circulation on wire services. Even international media was relatively mute about this milestone compared to what it might have been if it had concerned a different country. How does a story like this go unnoticed?

• Today’s release of the WikiLeaks “Saudi Cables” from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs show how it’s done.

• WikiLeaks has revealed secret Saudi Arabian influence in Arabic media and Islamic religious groups in Australia as well as covert monitoring of Saudi students studying at Australian universities.

• More than 61,000 leaked Saudi diplomatic documents have been released by WikiLeaks in what the international transparency group says will be the first instalment of the publication of more than half a million secret papers in batches over coming weeks.

• “The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement released on Saturday.

• Julian Assange, founder and editor of WikiLeaks, has now been a refugee in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for three years. The key issue in his extraordinary incarceration is justice. He has been charged with no crime. The first Swedish prosecutor dismissed the misconduct allegations regarding two women in Stockholm in 2010. The second Swedish prosecutor’s actions were and are demonstrably political. Until recently, she refused to come to London to interview Assange. Finally, when the British government almost pleaded with her to come, she agreed. She has now cancelled her trip. It is a farce, but one with grim consequences for Assange should he dare step outside the Ecuadorean embassy.

• Julian Assange has accused Swedish prosecutors of being “reckless” by cancelling plans to interview him in the Ecuadorian embassy in London this week.

• Welcome!…and many thanks to supporters old and new for being here today, to stand up for justice for Australian journalist Julian Assange, and his work as Editor in Chief of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks.

• Although uncharged with any crime, anywhere in the world, at the request of the US , the UK Govt has detained Julian for nearly 5 years now, under constant 24 hour surveillance and house arrest.

• Today marks 3 yrs of his refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Ecuador granted Julian political asylum due to threats on his life and liberty by the US Govt and its agencies.

• The Swedish prosecutor has cancelled an appointment to interview Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, according to the WikiLeaks founder.

• Speaking on the third anniversary of his entering the embassy to avoid extradition over allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, Mr Assange said that the move by Marianne Ny was “reckless”.

• The Australian activist said a long-awaited interview with the prosecutors fell through in what he labelled a “public relations exercise”, although the prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

• Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have gathered outside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to mark the third anniversary of the 43-year-old Australian seeking refuge there.

• Assange has been in the building since June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of sexual assault against two women in 2010. He denies the accusations.

• Ecuador will reply in the coming weeks to the Swedish prosecutors’ request to interview WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who today marked his third year in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the country’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patino, said Friday.

• Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa said Assange hadn’t overstayed his welcome, but that the situation could easily be resolved if Assange was granted immunity. Correa was scathing about the police guard that is keeping Assange inside the London embassy’s grounds.

• WikiLeaks has published more than half a million secret documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry to mark Julian Assange’s third year of asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy on 19 June.

• WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will on Friday mark three years stuck in Ecuador’s London embassy where he took refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden over alleged sex crimes and what he believes would be his eventual handover to U.S. authorities.

• A new cache of documents reportedly leaked from Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry appears to reveal the extent of the Gulf giant’s funding of regional media outlets. The documents also disclose information about Saudi Arabia’s external affairs and could prove embarrassing to the kingdom and its allies.

• WikiLeaks, the transparency advocacy website responsible for publishing leaked documents from various world powers, said on Friday that the 61,000-plus documents published on Friday were the first of around half a million to be released over the coming weeks.

• One of the most inflammatory memos carries the claim that Gulf countries were prepared to pay $10 billion to secure the freedom of Egypt’s deposed strongman, Hosni Mubarak. The memo, written on a letterhead bearing only a single palm tree and crossed scimitars above the words “top secret,” quotes an unnamed Egyptian official as saying that the Muslim Brotherhood would agree to release Mubarak in exchange for the cash “since the Egyptian people will not benefit from his imprisonment.”

• Another top secret memo says Gulf countries were prepared to pay $10 billion to secure freedom of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

• The son of the late al-Qaeda leader and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden sent a letter to the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia to ask for his father’s death certificate – a request that was refused by the diplomatic mission.

• Osama Bin Laden’s son reportedly asked the US for his death certificate and was refused, it has been reported.

• A letter addressed to Abdullah bin Laden, claiming to be from a US embassy official in Saudi Arabia, was published online by Wikileaks.

• WikiLeaks has released a letter revealing how one of Osama bin Laden’s sons had asked Washington for a death certificate after US Navy SEALS said they had taken him out.

• A son of Osama Bin Laden reportedly asked the US for a death certificate for his father, according to the whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks.

• “The Saudi Cables lift the lid on an increasingly erratic and secretive dictatorship that has not only celebrated its 100th beheading this year, but which has also become a menace to its neighbours and itself,” WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said in a statement.

• Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, which came under recent scrutiny amid Clinton’s 2016 presidential run.

• The documents published Friday include reports from Saudi Arabia’s interior and intelligence arms, as well as emails between the diplomatic branch and other foreign entities.

• More than 60,000 diplomatic messages from Saudi Arabia have been published by WikiLeaks. It said it would release half a million more in the coming weeks. The group also released additional Sony Pictures documents.

• WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents to the internet, the transparency website says.

• In a move that echoes its famous release of US State Department cables in 2010, WikiLeaks said it had already posted about 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic.

• And another document from the same year, sent from the Saudi embassy in Abu Dhabi, said the United Arab Emirates was putting ‘heavy pressure’ on the Egyptian government not to try former president Hosni Mubarak.

• The Saudi embassy in Washington did not immediately return repeated messages seeking comment.

• WikiLeaks is in the process of putting more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents online, in a move that echoes its infamous release of US State Department cables in 2010.

• WikiLeaks said in a statement that it had already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most are in Arabic and they are now being examined by The Associated Press.

• Saudi Arabia on Saturday urged its citizens not to distribute “documents that might be faked” in an apparent response to WikiLeaks’ publication on Friday of more than 60,000 documents it says are secret Saudi diplomatic communications.

• The statement, made by the Foreign Ministry on its Twitter account, did not directly deny the documents’ authenticity.

• The released documents, which WikiLeaks said were embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other state bodies, include discussions of Saudi Arabia’s position regarding regional issues and efforts to influence media.

• In new leaked emails released on June 19, it seems Sony executives were worried about the spread of herpes.

• Following the Sony hack last winter, Wikileaks has uploaded a second batch of files containing 276,000 more documents obtained from the incident this week. Although most of the documents are related to legal and financial affairs, Radar Online uncovered a set of unusual questionnaires asking whether or not stars have had oral herpes.

• Sony is yet to comment on the latest revelations, and it’s likely to take some time before details from the huge stack of digitized documents begin to make headlines.

• WikiLeaks has published a second giant cache of documents — 276,394 in all — that it claims hackers stole from the studio in one of the most devastating corporate computer breaches in history.

• A SUPREME Court judge has revoked a suppression order made to protect Australia’s national security and international relations after it was published by WikiLeaks.

• But Justice Elizabeth Hollingworth today granted a temporary stay on lifting the orders until next month to give the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade time to consider whether it will appeal the decision.

• Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government.

• Anyone stupid enough to think Assange has actually committed a crime should hang his head in shame. You are a dog, a slave, a puppet, a fool. You are utterly, deplorably, insane.

• Yes, more interesting than the details of any charges accusations against Assange, is the fact that they were invented for the sole purpose of arresting a dissident. It is a story that has been heard so many times that I don’t know why everyone can’t recognize this farce immediately. Dissident criticizes government, dissident suddenly has some strange and elusive criminal charges like embezzlement or sexual assault to answer for.

• Should we, even for a brief moment, overlook our scumbag politicians – who consorted with pedophiles and tried to cover up their crimes – and instead look at the supposed moral deviations of one dissident who tried to subject them to greater scrutiny? If someone accuses a top politician of being the pedophile he is, the result will be libel charges being brought against the accuser. If some liar accuses of Assange of rape, the result is a case being brought against Assange.

• In reality, the only ones who deserve to be on trial are not Assange but his accusers and, ultimately, the regime that has fabricated this case against an innocent man. They are, each and every one of them, liars, fabricators, and vicious enemies of democracy who deserve to suffocate in their own filth and hypocrisy just for consenting to be part of this offensive spectacle.

• Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño says someone in Sweden must be held responsible for human rights violations.

• In a 18-page report posted by WikiLeaks earlier this month, William McNeilly, a 25-year-old former engineer employed at the Trident facility in Scotland, described the nuclear deterrent’s safety procedures and general state as a “disaster waiting to happen.”

• Greens Co-Deputy Larissa Waters slams the secrecy surrounding the Trade In Services agreement, and says important details have only been made public because of Wikileaks.

• Greens senator Scott Ludlam says Julian Assange’s work needs support, three years after the WikiLeaks founder sought asylum in a London embassy.

• Assange has been unable to leave Britain, living in the Ecuadorean embassy’s quarters in central London over fear of extradition to Sweden or the United States, where authorities are investigating his disclosures of secret information.

• Sarah Tisdall, a former Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) clerical officer, was jailed after she leaked classified British government documents to The Guardian.

• WikiLeaks also posted the link to an article written by Assange titled “How The Guardian Milked Edward Snowden’s Story”. The website did not immediately respond to Hindustan Times’ request for a comment on its tweets.

• The Guardian newspaper has appointed Katharine Viner, currently editor of Guardian US, its 12th editor-in-chief after Rusbridger.

• On Wednesday, WikiLeaks added more than half a million U.S. diplomatic cables from 1978 to its Public Library of US Diplomacy database. The documents include diplomatic cables and other diplomatic communications from and to U.S. embassies and missions in nearly every country. “1978 actually set in progress many of the geopolitical elements that are playing out today,” Assange said. “1978 was the beginning of the Iranian revolution … the Sandinista movement started in its popular form … the war period in Afghanistan began in 1978 and hasn’t stopped since.”

• Wikileaks released 500,000 US diplomatic cables from during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, more than 7,000 of which are related to Colombia.

• [...]

• In Colombia, the US at the time was concerned about the 1978 presidential election race, kidnapping and drug trafficking.

• Ecuador granted him political asylum, but the United Kingdom refuses to grant him safe passage to leave the country. Instead, the U.K. wants to extradite him to Sweden to answer questions about allegations of sexual misconduct, although charges have never been filed.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Spanish government wants to impose new fees on consumers that use batteries to store electric power produced by their own solar panels.

• In early June, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism released a draft of proposed legislation designed to discourage the use of solar charged batteries by people who produce their own electricity.

• Humans will be extinct in 100 years because the planet will be uninhabitable, according to Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders of the effort to eradicate smallpox in the 1970s. He blames overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change.

• Fenner’s prediction is not a sure bet, but he is correct that there is no way emissions reductions will be enough to save us from our trend toward doom. And there doesn’t seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions, anyway. When the G7 called on Monday for all countries to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 85 years, the scientific reaction was unanimous: That’s far too late.

• Over the past few weeks, we’ve heard the initial cannon volleys from the parapets of the GOP hurled in the direction of Pope Francis. But as of yesterday, when the Pope delivered a major encyclical on the climate crisis, there was a thermonuclear freakout, from not just Fox News and AM talk radio, but nearly every Republican with internet access. Already, Greg Gutfeld from Fox News Channel’s The Five referred to the Pope as the “most dangerous man in the world.”

• Derailments and explosions have occurred around North America since the oil boom began, including a 2013 catastrophe that killed 47 people in rural Quebec.

Finance

• Police arrested several activists Friday evening, letting them out on bail on the condition that they not attend Saturday’s march.

• Thousands of people marched through the streets of London Saturday, in a major demonstration against austerity measures. Organizers expected 65,000 people to attend, while those currently at the march are estimating an attendence of 250,000.

• Pro tempore president of Celac – the Community of Latin American and Carribean States – Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa was in Brussels to take part in the EU-Celac summit.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Misleading headline alert: Carly Fiorina is not going to be the GOP presidential candidate. She’s polling at 1.8 percent in the most recent Fox News poll. That puts her in a solid 13th place. It would take every Sherpa in Nepal to guide her to the top against those odds.

• But she will win, in one sense, because she’s positioned herself perfectly for the right side of the slash. As in, Rubio/Fiorina, Walker/Fiorina or Bush/Fiorina.

• In several countries in the region, there are groups that control most of the local press and attack governments when these undertake social programs. There, digital media and networks have become the only hope of countering the propaganda of the Right.

Censorship

• THE revelations contained in RTÉ’s Collusion documentary aired on Monday – which highlighted yet more widespread and systemic collusion between British military and RUC forces with unionist death squads – will not have come as a surprise to most An Phoblacht readers or Sinn Féin activists.

• Does freedom of religion and freedom of speech come as a package or can you pick and choose? Do those suggesting freedom of expression should be “civilised” and that we should be wary of causing offence to people’s religious sensibilities have a point? Or are there too many people who are easily offended? Are our attempts to be polite actually significant obstructions to the discussion of important issues? These were just some of the questions tackled at “The new civility: are religious freedom and freedom of speech intertwined?” the 10 June event organised as part of the Leeds Big Bookend festival.

• If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.

• Accused of publishing government propaganda against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times is using copyright to hit back at its strongest critic.

• The Sunday Times has apparently sent a copyright complaint to critics of its article that claimed British and American overseas spies have had their covers blown by Edward Snowden.

• The London-based newspaper unquestioningly parroted the UK government’s spin at the weekend, claiming that classified files obtained by the NSA whistleblower and leaked to journalists had somehow made their way into the hands of China and Russia. The piece quoted anonymous government sources in Blighty.

• The UK newspaper Sunday Times is accusing US journalist Glenn Greenwald of copyright violations after he debunked the paper’s report on Russian and Chinese spies allegedly accessing Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks.

• It is one of the great allegorical paintings celebrating the French revolution: Liberty Leading the People, by Eugène Delacroix, shows a barefoot, bare-breasted woman – representing Marianne, the female symbol of the republic – brandishing a tricolour in one hand and a bayonetted musket in the other, leading the people over the bodies of the fallen.

• The French data privacy regulator CNIL wants Google to somehow identify French citizens wherever they are in the world and block them from seeing material removed under the Right To Be Forgotten.

• Scarcely a week after the release of a legislative committee report on Australia’s copyright censorship bill, the bill is gathering speed on its roll through Parliament. Although reports that the law has already passed are premature—it has only passed the lower house so far, and is scheduled to be debated in the Senate on Thursday, Australian time—it is clear that the bill is being rushed through, in an effort to get it out of the way ahead of the Parliament’s mid-winter break.

• We addressed some of the serious shortcomings of the bill, which would allow courts to block overseas websites that either infringe copyright, or are merely judged to be “facilitating” infringement…

• But the real problem, of course, lies with the courts’ attempt to control, by application of its view of the law, the content that appears on websites operated by a US corporation outside the boundaries of the court’s lawful jurisdiction. [Google actually offered to remove offending sites from searches that were viewable at Google.ca, but the plaintiffs were not satisfied with that outcome].

• It all began a year ago where a lower court ruled that Google needed to block access to a website globally in a troublesome lawsuit filed against them. The case involved one company charging another of selling copied equipment or counterfeit, and even though Google was not even a party to the case, was directed by the court to make sure no one could find the site in question via Google anywhere in the world.

• A dangerous precedent has been set in Canada where a court rejected Google’s appeal in a case the company has been fighting for years, and now it has to remove links to particular pages from its worldwide search results.

• In response to the school’s meddling, Atrium’s editors took down all of Atrium’s online content, initiating a yea-long standoff. The controversy remained in the shadows until recently, when another censorship controversy erupted at Northwestern. Prof. Laura Kipnis faced a formal Title IX investigation over an essay she wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the sexual politics of American universities. Following this incident, Dreger threatened to go public, and Northwestern allowed all of Atrium’s content to go back online. According to Dreger, though, the school says future issues of Atrium will have to be approved by a group of administrators and public relations staff to make sure they are acceptable.

• As Fidler indicates politely, this has created a terrible mess. There is very little transparency around government requests for censorship (by coincidence, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has just published a short piece complaining that Facebook does not provide any information on U.S. government censorship requests). In addition, different private actors, with different codes and standards, engage in private forms of censorship on their own behalf that generate confusion and inconsistency. Companies have to make complicated judgment calls. For example, I’m aware from my own conversations that YouTube initially censored footage from pro-democracy protests in Iran in 2009 showing the violence perpetrated against the protesters, on the grounds that this violated its code of conduct. After thinking through the political implications of this censorship, YouTube changed its mind — but it could (with different leadership) have opted for the opposite choice.

• Signatories of the petition said the government’s actions in withdrawing funding from the school play A Parallel Of Time, by the al-Midan Theatre, are anti-democratic. The play tells the story of the Palestinian Walid Daka’s time in prison for torturing and murdering the Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.

• Pledging to fight for artistic freedom, cultural figures defiantly offer their names for a government ‘blacklist’

• [...]

• It concludes with the hope that Israel will not stoop to becoming a state that blacklists artists who express their opinions. “But should that happen,” the petition defiantly states, “here is the list.”

• Its screening had been due to take place at the Odeon Swiss Cottage. But the director, Rechy Elias, insisted that only women could attend. Elias is from the ultra-conservative Haredi sect of Judaism, which, like extreme movements in all the world’s major religions, is flourishing with a depressing vigour. As with so many other fundamentalist creeds and cults, sex is an obsessive source of interest to the Haredis. A Haredi school in Stamford Hill recently announced that, Saudi–style, it would not allow women to drive children to its gates. With similar reasoning, Ms Elias said her film was controversial because it contained scenes of women dancing. No man could see them, for lord knows what they would do if they did.

• A high-ranking official from the world’s largest free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has criticized Turkey over increasing censorship that its Turkish version — Vikipedi – has been exposed to, vowing to take legal action to stop this censorship.

• Wikipedia has warned its users that Turkey “blocks” a number of its articles and is also monitoring contributors to the site.

• “Did you know that some articles on Turkish Vikipedi have been blocked to users in Turkey?” Wikipedia’s Turkish homepage warns, giving a list of censored articles.

• As of June 19, Turkey blocks a total of five Wikipedia articles: “Human penis,” “Female reproduction organs,” “Scrotum,” “Vagina” and “Opinion polling for the Turkish general election, 2015.”

• If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.

• Facebook vows to be transparent, and yet the Electronic Frontier Foundation discovered that the company is hiding all the ways that it blocks access in the United States, on behalf of law enforcement.

• Almost every major digital platform, including Google and Twitter, publishes a so-called “transparency report,” in which the company in question lists the number of requests it has gotten from government authorities and legal entities to take down information. Facebook does this too, except that its version isn’t nearly as forthcoming on what exactly it has been asked to remove, and by whom.

• It is interesting to note the reasons for the termination of the contract. There is no mention of illegal content, just content which has been deemed politically incorrect. This is clearly a very subjective matter, and Atko says that the hosting provider shut down the server “without issuing a warning or trying to talk to us”. It is something of a blow for freedom of speech if webhosts start to police the content of the sites they power not because they are breaking the law, but because they just don’t like the content.

• The Reddit-clone Voat announced Friday that its hosting provider shut off its servers and terminated its contract.

• Switzerland-based Reddit clone Voat says its servers have been closed down and contracts terminated by its hosting provider, which comes less than two weeks after it saw a surge in signups following a clampdown in online harassment by Reddit.

• European hosting service hosteurope.de recently terminated its contract with Voat, a Reddit clone that promises not to censor users. Voat managed to move its database to an unnamed cloud platform hours ahead of the shutdown to avoid service interruption.

Privacy

• Even the most casual observer must see that the Sunday Times anonymous leak is an effort to distract attention from the utter failure of the US government, as a government, to act responsibly in the task of protecting it’s citizens and the citizens of its allies. It is an attempt to shift blame – pure and simple.

• Is Snowden a good man or a bad man? I have no clue and even less interest. Are we as citizens of this new cyber age, ever going to get a clue? That is the real question.

• When asked if Snowden was working for a foreign power, Hayden replied that, thinking inductively as intelligence operatives are supposed to do, there was “no evidence” Snowden had defected.

• Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on Monday marveled at the puny nature of the surveillance reforms put in place two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a vast expansion of intrusive U.S. government surveillance at home and abroad.

• At The Wall Street Journal’s CFO conference, former National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden disparaged the idea that the leaking of data collection documents by Edward Snowden was a two-year “nightmare” for the agency.

• The former director of the National Security Agency isn’t particularly concerned about the loss of the government’s bulk metadata collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

• “We kill people based on metadata” said General Michael Hayden, former director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the CIA.

• A government commissioned report says that UK intelligence agencies should be allowed to keep their powers to gather bulk communications data on a massive scale – records of emails, phone calls and social media (metadata).

• This is in addition to eavesdropping and reading of the content of communications.

• David Anderson QC, the report’s author, has, however, argued that the power to authorise surveillance warrants should be removed from government ministers and given to a new judicial body. The government is resisting this proposal.

• The secretive federal court that oversees the nation’s spies is laying the groundwork for temporarily reauthorizing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) sweeping collection of U.S. phone records.

• In an order released on Friday, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said that a brief lapse in some Patriot Act provisions would not bar the court from renewing the NSA’s powers. Although the court asserted its ability to renew the controversial NSA program, it has yet to issue an order giving a green light to the spy agency.

• The secretive court that oversees U.S. spying programs selected to not consult a panel of privacy advocates in its first decision made since the enactment earlier this month of major surveillance reform, according to an opinion declassified Friday.

• The secretive court that oversees US government spying requests has indicated that it will temporarily renew the National Security Agency’s bulk phone records collection authority despite a new reform law that ended the dragnet.

• The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) – often seen as a compliant “rubber stamp” for US government spying requests – released an order on Friday positing that lapsed spying powers vested in the Patriot Act – which expired without renewal on June 1 — would not restrict the court from reauthorizing for six months the phone metadata collection program. The FISC order, though, is not yet an official revival of the NSA’s surveillance program.

• In a campaign that’s received nearly as much effort and funding as presidential elections themselves, the U.S. federal government is trying to steer people toward visiting sites that give step-by-step instructions on how to encrypt digital communications.

• The passage of the USA Freedom Act, the declassified documentation about the NSA’s secret sister agency NSAC, and the passage of “net neutrality” have all been cleverly orchestrated to deliver one resounding message: “Just a friendly reminder, citizen: it’s time to protect yourself from our fascist predations.”

• An exposé claiming that the top-secret files leaked by Edward Snowden have been obtained by Russia and China has come under fire.

• The story in ‘The Sunday Times’ claimed Western intelligence agencies were “forced into rescue operations” to mitigate the damage, and one UK government source claimed that Mr Snowden had “blood on his hands”.

• But Snowden confidante Glenn Greenwald has attacked the report as “journalism at its worst”.

• Describing the report as “the very opposite of journalism” Miranda’s partner and the man who was central to the publication of the Snowden documents, Glenn Greenwald, has written a scathing review of the Sunday Times report.

• Tom Harper wrote the ridiculous cover story in the Sunday Times in which anonymous government sources claimed that the Russians and Chinese had somehow gained the power to decrypt copies of the files Edward Snowden took from the NSA, depite the fact that these files were never in Russia and despite the fact that the UK government claims that when criminals use crypto on their communications, the state is powerless to decrypt them.

• There has been a fair amount of criticism of last weekend’s Sunday Times story claiming that sensitive NSA files taken by Edward Snowden have ended up in the hands of the Russian and Chinese governments – and that British intelligence staff have been put at risk as a result.

• If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself to watch this video. It’s CNN’s George Howell interviewing Sunday Times buffoon Tom Harper about his now-discredited report that said the governments of Russia and China have decrypted files leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

• Harper made that statement during a CNN interview during which he was pressed on why British authorities believe that their Chinese and Russian counterparts have accessed the files. It was an ugly defense for what was always going to be a thinly-sourced story. Since the Snowden story first broke two years ago, press reporting about his revelations have been riddled with claims by various officials — both named and not — claiming that the leak had undermined vital intelligence powers and cost lives. These reports share a common characteristic: a lack of hard evidence.

• In case you missed it, a front page story in the UK-based Sunday Times magazine generated a furor this weekend. It covered the purported repercussions of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks for western intelligence agencies. The report—which relied heavily on unnamed “senior officials” and “senior government sources”—parroted a number of unsubstantiated claims, according to its critics, hammering home a single point of view: that of the British government.

• CNN’s George Howell speaks with Sunday Times correspondent Tom Harper about reports that Russia and China have decrypted files stolen by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Harper explains the process of how he and his paper source news stories based on what the British government tells them, without independently checking facts; they even submitted the final draft of the story to the Home Office for approval.

• The story is based on sources including “senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services”. The BBC said it had also also been briefed anonymously by a senior government official.

• Anonymous sources are an unavoidable part of reporting, but neither Downing Street nor the Home Office should be allowed to hide behind anonymity in this case.

• China and Russia have copies of Edward Snowden’s leaked documents by hacking the NSA itself before the whistleblower even arrived in Russia, according to security expert Bruce Schneier.

• He believes lax security controls at the US spy agency, rather than Snowden residing in Russia, being responsible for allowing foreign countries to get their hands on top secret documents.

• Bruce Schneier has claimed that China and Russia have laid hands on the intelligence documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, in a further twist to a controversial story run by the Sunday Times last weekend.

• British surveillance functionaries placed a story over the weekend in the Sunday Times (London) claiming that the Russians and Chinese had gotten hold of the documents that Edward Snowden sneaked out of the NSA computers and had broken their encryption. As my colleague Scott Shackford points out the Sunday Times offered nothing more than the assertions of unnamed British spy agency sources as evidence. He noted that one of the Sunday Times’ reporters actually admitted on CNN: “We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment.”

• The Edward Snowden documents were in China and Russia’s possession before he even took them and went on the run, believes renowned security specialist Bruce Schneier.

• Writing in Wired, the cryptographer, entrepreneur and former chief technology officer of BT Counterpane, part of telecoms giant BT, added that the documents were already “certainly” in the possession of China and Russia – but not due to Snowden, who has become a convenient scapegoat for security services’ failings.

• A journalist who published the first reports from Edward Snowden’s leaked documents offered a detailed rebuttal Monday to allegations that Russian and Chinese spies accessed the former intelligence contractor’s files.

• Glenn Greenwald, writing on the online news website The Intercept, said the reports by the Sunday Times and BBC were based on the false premise that Snowden kept possession of the files he took from the US National Security Agency.

• Robert Tibbo could not be more straightforward. “There was no possibility of interception. Zero,” says the Canadian lawyer from Montreal who has represented Edward Snowden in Hong Kong since June of 2013. That was when the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor leaked classified documents on America’s mass surveillance programs to members of the press. Mr. Tibbo’s client came under pressure after British sources revealed last weekend that spies were pulled out of operations because China and Russia have cracked Mr. Snowden’s files.

• “He left this place [Hong Kong] with no data on him”, Mr. Tibbo claimed in a telephone interview from Hong Kong on Monday. He was one of the only two people, along with solicitor Jonathan Man, who had any knowledge of Mr. Snowden’s whereabouts in the city at the time. In an interview Mr. Tibbo was with Mr. Snowden when the whistleblower left Hong Kong for Russia.

• The American journalist said the Sunday Times had “quietly deleted” from its online report the claim that Mr Miranda had met with Snowden in Moscow before being detained.

• Greenwald also said the Sunday Times “mindlessly” repeated a claim that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, when there was no evidence to support the number.

• Norway’s government has refused to allow the NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden to cross over the border from Russia to to collect a freedom of speech prize, warning that he may be at risk of arrest.

• House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) clearly hates being on the end of a losing vote. He is now working overtime to reverse his most recent policy and legislative loss.

• [...]

• Clapper also claimed that the ban on mandating that American tech companies build in encryption “back doors” to their products would prevent the FBI and the Intelligence Community from working with tech companies “even with their consent”. Also false. The amendment simply prohibits the government from forcing companies to make defective products. Nowhere does the amendment prohibit voluntary cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies.

• Around the world repressive governments are trying to stop Internet users from either posting anonymously or using encryption to communicate securely. Russia requires bloggers with more than 3,000 visitors to register with the state and identify themselves; pseudonyms are outlawed in Vietnam; Ecuador requires commenters on websites to use their real name; Pakistan’s government must grant approval for the use of encryption; and Ethiopia convicted members of the dissident blogging collective Zone 9 on terrorism charges based in part on participation in an online encryption workshop.

• Cyber-threats ‘one of the biggest challenges’ in the coming years, according to Germany’s defence minister, as Bundestag reportedly hacked

• The head of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence service is reportedly aiming to bring more oversight to the agency and hire external advisers, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the NSA spying scandal that engulfed it this year.

• German intelligence is reportedly facing a major overhaul in response to a damaging scandal after it emerged it had spied on European partners at the request of the US.

• Gerhard Schindler, the head of the BND intelligence service, wants to bring all 6,500 of its field officers back under central control, according to Süddeustche Zeitung newspaper.

• The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has decided to reorganize the agency to stop a repeat of the US National Security Agency (NSA) spying scandal that has engulfed it this year.

• Germany’s foreign intelligence agency BND spied on its own branch, gathering information at the US request, the German Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported Sunday.

• Moreover, as Techdirt noted back in 2013, the refusal by the US authorities to address these and other allegations of surveillance is contributing to the German public’s jaundiced view of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which are increasingly in trouble. That skepticism is reflected by the fact that among the 2 million signatures gathered so far by the pan-European Stop TTIP online petition, fully one half come from Germany. The decision to drop the investigation into claims that the NSA listened in on Merkel’s phone calls is unlikely to make things better.

• German member of the European Parliament Udo Voigt claims that the reform of the German intelligence service BND should make the body less dependent from NSA.

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proposed that a third-party investigator be appointed to inspect a list of targets that German intelligence tracked on behalf of the US National Security Agency.

• President Obama wants to share U.S. secrets with a German parliamentary committee investigating the National Security Agency’s spying in Germany. The move is in direct opposition to Congressional restrictions, which were added to the fiscal 2016 intelligence authorization bill that would block intelligence sharing.

• In a notice sent to Congress Tuesday, the Office of Management and Budget outlined a series of objections to the current House intelligence bill, including a section of the bill that would prevent sharing classified U.S. intelligence in response to requests by foreign governments.

• A new notice from the Office of Management and Budget is objecting strongly to language in the newest intelligence funding bill which would ban any intelligence sharing with foreign countries, saying the language imperils foreign relations on several fronts.

• The federal government has refused to recognise a decision by a US appeals court which ruled that mass collection of telecommunications metadata.

• Parliament today rejected a motion by Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam that the senate take note the ruling and recognise that “Australians and the global community have legitimate and ongoing concerns about the erosion of privacy caused by the unchecked growth of government electronic surveillance programs”.

• A bipartisan Oregon bill that would prohibit law enforcement from obtaining information from electronic devices without a warrant in most cases overwhelmingly passed the state House last week. The proposed bill would not only protect privacy in Oregon, but would also address a practical effect of NSA spying.

• Sen. Chip Shields (D-Portland), Rep. Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), Sen. Tim Knopp (R – Bend) and Rep. John Huffman (R-The Dalles) introduced Senate Bill 641 (SB641) in February. The bill prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from using forensic imaging to obtain information contained in a portable electronic device except with a warrant, or by consent. “Forensic imaging” means “using an electronic device to download or transfer raw data from a portable electronic device onto another medium of digital storage,” but does not include photographing or transcribing information “observable from the portable electronic device by normal unaided human senses.”

• The government agencies that defend America are in the midst of a charm offensive — trying to win the hearts and minds of Silicon Valley’s tech workers.

• The move is evoking considerable skepticism from the U.S. tech community.

• In recent months, the U.S. Defense Department and Department of Homeland Security have announced the opening of Silicon Valley offices as part of an effort to mend fences.

• While ensconced in safety and security in Russia, the likelihood of Snowden being the spark that lights the fuse for real change in governments’ accountability around the globe dims with each passing day. Still, Snowden’s role in exposing the villainous plot in charge of Washington was a pivotal decision; on his part, a real personal sacrifice; but for the rest of the West, a good starting point.

• The USA Freedom Act is literally as much an oxymoron as its parallel predecessor — the Patriot Act.

• To sum it up, be it a real move or a temporary fix to keep up appearances, the fact is that monitoring and tracking activities by US intelligence services are continuing at full speed. Furthermore, these laws pertain only to the intelligence activities regarding US citizens and do not include any articles on restricting intelligence activities regarding non-US citizens or US citizens abroad.

• The cost to the tech industry as a result of NSA spying is estimated to reach $200 billion by 2016…

• The recent showdown over renewal of certain provisions of the USA Patriot Act (often called simply the Patriot Act) and the subsequent enactment of the USA Freedom Act have raised a number of questions about the ongoing impact of these laws on data traversing or being stored in the United States. While the new law takes the NSA out of the direct business of maintaining metadata (which includes phone number called, the time and duration of the call, and location information) on all phone calls originating or terminating in the US (with a declared intent of transitioning instead to a program that will allow court-moderated access to phone company data) and reinstates provisions that enable so-called “roving wiretaps” and monitoring of “lone wolves,” it essentially leaves unchanged the underlying laws that govern the US authorities access to data stored in the cloud.

• Libertarians and constitutionalists feel betrayed by the long hated extreme surveillance measures implemented in the misnamed Patriot Act (should be named Surveillance of Americans Act) of October 2001, six weeks after 9/11. Authors of the bill knew at the time such measures meant an unprecedented expansion of government and loss of privacy for most Americans — hence the five year renewal provisions of the more Draculan parts. Both recent presidents have requested its continuance in 2005 and again in 2010.

• Sen.Rand Paul’s heroic June 1 Senate filibuster helped prevent the Senate from extending the Patriot Act, as wanted by most Republicans, and as had happened twice before. Thank God, Paul and the Democrats for its defeat. The five-year renewal of the Patriot Act did not have the votes. Instead, we got virtually the same thing in the so-called USA Freedom Act, again misnamed. How can freedom be enhanced by the government’s enhanced surveillance of its own citizens? Thanks to President Barack Obama and the Republicans, government’s unwarranted and indefinite storage of private records and communications continues.

• A former U.S. Justice Department attorney predicts some Republicans seeking the White House would continue the controversial collection of Americans’ information.

• Both privacy advocates and the NSA are celebrating the USA Freedom Act that passed the Senate on June 2. The act legalized and simplified the collecting of phone metadata for the NSA. Meanwhile Skype continues to collect voice, chat, video and other data, and deliver it to the Five Eyes international spy coalition.

• The passage of the USA Freedom Act — penned by General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA — was followed by general celebration over what is considered a small victory for privacy advocates, and the biggest surveillance reform since the 1970s.

• The Commission Mixte Paritaire — a joint parliamentary committee responsible for reaching a compromise between the lower and upper house — met on 16th June to reach an agreement on the final version on the Surveillance Bill, between the version approved by the National Assembly on 5th May, and the one approved by the Senate on 9th June. However, a last minute change modified deeply the spirit of the Bill and its application on French territory. La Quadrature du Net regrets this umpteenth anti-democratic procedure and renews its call to French representatives to reject this text during the final vote on the 23rd and 24th June.

• Assange: In some ways the higher echelons of Google always seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. When my colleague told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his entourage had gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

• Now finally, Western civilization has produced a god, the god of mass surveillance. How is it like a god? It’s a little bit Abrahamic. If you look at most definitions, a god is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. In particular, god knows when you are doing something that you shouldn’t be doing and whether you are playing according to god’s rules. The conception of national security agencies and mass surveillance is that the overwhelming majority of communications are surveilled upon. Even conversations happening in person may be recorded through an Android phone, or through other electronic gadgets that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Maybe your friend, although you just talked to them in person, can gossip over electronic media about what you said.

• It’s the oldest trick in the book—when Dad tells you no, ask Mom if you can do it. Now President Barack Obama is playing that game with the surveillance of Americans’ phone records.

• The Obama administration, on the same day the USA Freedom Act became law on June 2, went to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court) with a request (pdf) to continue sweeping up phone records during a six-month “transition” period before the Freedom Act provisions take effect.

• The USA Freedom Act specifies that call records be maintained by the phone companies, and the government may access them only with a warrant from the FISA court. That’s evidently not good enough for the Obama administration.

• NSA isn’t commenting on its plans for retaining these phone call records.

• But with nothing forcing the Corporate Store to close for business, ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey said, “This NSA database may grow even more quickly than ever before.”

• Most of the Snowden disclosures have shed light on the NSA’s basic mission of gathering foreign “signals intelligence”, but the way the agency does its job in the Internet age by necessity involves exploiting weaknesses in the same technology the rest of United States use. He also cited laws in Europe and in South America protecting citizens from mass surveillance. Until now, this program was never disclosed to the public. What gives this protocol another layer of security is the fact that Apple has no access to all the encryption keys which means that the company can’t produce any data stored on their own devices even if issued by a warrant from a government agency. In the wake of 9/11, the government dismantled this protection, arguing that it would impede the investigation of terrorists.

• Taken together, those measures could amount to a new backdoor for government surveillance, according to some experts. The revelation earlier this month that the NSA monitors Americans’ Internet traffic in its hunt for foreign cybersecurity threats has only heightened those fears, according to Jennifer Granick of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society.

• The hyperbole that followed yesterday’s story was astonishing – Professor Anthony Glees reportedly branded Snowden “a villain of the first order” – Darth Vader eat your heart out.

• So let me be completely clear: Edward Snowden is a hero. Saying so does not make me an apologist for terror – it makes me a firm believer in democracy and the rule of law. Whether you are with or against Liberty in the debate about proportionate surveillance, Anderson must be right to say that the people and our representatives should know about capabilities and practices built and conducted in our name.

• For years, UK and US governments broke the law. For years, they hid the sheer scale of their spying practices not just from the British public, but from parliament. Without Snowden – and the legal challenges by Liberty and other campaigners that followed – we wouldn’t have a clue what they were up to.

• Protonmail, the easy-to-use encrypted mail service that launched in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying and was built in part by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, opened to the general public Sunday evening.

• The founders of the Switzerland-based service announced the news on its website and released a link for easy sign-up. They also said Protonmail now has 500,000 users. Financial contributors have been able to get accounts for about a year.

• The hacker collective Anonymous is taking credit for a massive cyber-attack on the federal government that made multiple government websites go dark this afternoon — apparently in protest against the Harper government’s controversial security legislation, C-51.

Civil Rights

• There was only any public enthusiasm for Blair in 97 – and to put that in perspective, it was less than the public enthusiasm for John Major in 1992.

• Radack was not part of the original criminal defense team that represented Drake during 2010 and 2011, and she has said that she found out about the alleged destruction of records relating to Drake’s case via the OSC. The information she has comes from secret complaints that were filed by officials from the Pentagon inspector general’s office, some of whom still work there. It is not known who they are as they formally requested the OSC respect their anonymity for fear of retaliation.

• It is understood that the Justice Department claimed prior to Drake’s impending 2011 trial that some documents had been destroyed, but that this has been done according to “a standard document destruction policy.” Radack maintains that there is no such policy, and that rather the inspector general’s office has a Records Management Program that demands documents are kept on file.

• Drake has been quoted as saying these allegations are his last chance to hold the NSA accountable for “illegal retaliation” against whistleblowers.

• Two government watchdog agencies are investigating whether the Pentagon inspector general destroyed evidence improperly during the high-profile leak investigation of former National Security Agency senior official Thomas Drake.

• The Justice Department acknowledged the probes in a letter last week to a federal magistrate judge who recently received the allegations from Drake’s lawyers. The judge is determining whether she should take further action in a case that ended in 2011 when Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge.

• Government watchdog agencies are looking into whether officials at the Pentagon improperly destroyed evidence documenting whistleblower cases, McClatchy reported Monday. The documents in question involve the 2011 prosecution of Thomas Drake, who was charged under the espionage act with leaking documents about National Security Agency surveillance to the media.

• The investigation centers on whether Pentagon officials were right to destroy documents related to Drake’s case in 2011. At the time, officials said they were destroyed “pursuant to a standard document destruction policy.” Most federal agencies are required to keep schedules that detail which documents should be retained and which can be destroyed.

• For instance, a draft Inspector General report found that CIA Director Leon Panetta disclosed such information about the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. Similarly, former CIA director David Petraeus provided classified information to his biographer. Panetta was never charged, and Petraeus was let off with a misdemeanor.

• Snowden, meanwhile, sits in exile — a fugitive for exposing his own government’s unprecedented system of surveillance. While Snowden’s critics say he should come back to the United States to air out his grievances in open court, journalist Glenn Greenwald notes: “He’s barred under the Espionage Act even from arguing that his leaks were justified; he wouldn’t be permitted to utter a word about that.”

• CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling was notified at the end of last week that he will serve his prison sentence of three and a half years at Federal Correctional Institution Englewood, a medium-security facility in Littleton, Colorado, that is around 900 miles away from where his wife and family live in St. Louis. That is at least a 12-hour drive.

• In addition, agencies “are motivated to continue retaliation indefinitely because it creates a chilling effect that silences others,” testimony said.

• In the wake of mass violence, a nation struggling to understand turns to its news outlets to see how they frame events. The language journalists use in the immediate aftermath of a bloodbath helps form public attitudes and has a major impact on official reactions.

• When two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, killing three and injuring hundreds, it was inevitably a huge story: A search of the Nexis news database for US newspapers on the next day turns up 2,593 stories mentioning the marathon, virtually all of them about the bombing. Of these, 887, or 34 percent, used the word “terrorism” or a variant (“terrorist,” “terroristic” etc.)–even though the bombers, let alone the bombers’ motivations, would not be known until days later.

• If someone told you that there is less coverage of women’s sports on televised news programs today than there was in 1989, would you believe them? It would be reasonable if your response was “no.”

• Certainly, girls and women’s participation in sport has dramatically increased over the past 25+ years, and there are a number of professional women’s leagues today that did not exist in 1989. There’s also been a tremendous growing interest in and fan base for women’s sports over the last quarter century.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• The UK’s music industry has successfully landed a significant judgement from the UK’s High Court, countering a copyright exception that was brought in by the UK government last year. Since last October, there was a law that allowed you to make private copies of your own music; now the future of that law is uncertain.

• The exception finally legalised what everyone has been doing for decades: making copies for personal, private use of copyright works they had bought, including format-shifted versions. Despite the marginal nature of the exception—it did not extend to making copies for family and friends, for example—the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, the Musicians’ Union, and UK Music successfully applied to the High Court for a judicial review of the change to UK law.

• Several music industry organizations in the UK have won a judicial review which renders the Government’s decision to allow copying for personal use unlawful. According to the High Court, there’s insufficient evidence to prove that the legislation doesn’t hurt musicians and the industry at large.

• What may happen now is that a reference to the CJEU is made, seeking further clarification about questions yet to be determined.

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