● 08.16.15

● Links 16/8/2015: 18th Birthday for GNOME, Android M Name

Posted in News Roundup at 3:23 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• You can try to turn Windows 10′s data-sharing ways off, but, bad news: Windows 10 will keep sharing some of your data with Microsoft anyway.

• There is an alternative: Desktop Linux.

Desktop

• The strangest, and largely overlooked news, coming out of the tech sector this week is Dell’s Microsoft betrayal. This isn’t the first time that the PC maker strayed. Linux joined the product stable long ago, and last year an educational Chromebook debuted. But this newer and larger model, which will be available September 17, raises question: WTF?

• Dell’s core PC market is business—small, large, and everything between. Windows, and that smattering of Linux, is core, and longstanding loyalty to Microsoft’s application stack. But the Chromebook 13 announcement, as positioned by the OEM and Google, is all about the competing cloud app stack. Interestingly, selling prices rival Windows laptops, which is another head scratcher: $399 to $899, depending on configuration.

Kernel Space

Graphics Stack

• I’ve just pushed a big update to the Nvidia repository. The list of changes is quite big, so if you are a user of the repository please take your time to read through it.

Applications

• A text editor is always the best friend of any developer. Every developer passes most of his/her time programming with text editor. So that text editor has to be unique and friendly at the same time. Then I remember Atom, one of the most handy text editors. The latest version Atom 1.0.7 released recently with some tweaks into find & replace.

• I have just released version 1.14 of Obnam, my backup program. See the website at http://obnam.org for details on what the program does. The new version is available from git (see http://git.liw.fi) and as Debian packages from http://code.liw.fi/debian, and uploaded to Debian, and soon in unstable.

• Whit, John and I are thrilled to announce Rblapi, a new CRAN package which connects R to the Bloomberg backends.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Marble Muse, a physics puzzle title developed and published by Ketos Games on Steam, has been released on the Linux platform as well.

• Emu-OS is a new Linux-Distro, packed with a collection of game-console emulators & an easy-to-use user interface.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• A month ago I created two mirrors for the KDE Connect repositories in Github, and I’m really happy with it. Projects in Github are more discoverable than in our internal KDE repo (our GIT web interface is not even indexed by search engines!), and makes it easier for new developers to get involved and send contributions, like these pull requests.

• The Randa Meeting is an annual KDE sprint that takes place in Randa, Switzerland from the 6th to the 13th of September.

• This year we hold the sixth edition of the Randa Meetings and during the year we had some really important (for KDE and the users of our software and products) and far-reaching events that happened in the middle of the Swiss Alps.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It’s hard to believe that The GNOME Project started its life 18 years ago, but that’s the truth and its developers are preparing to celebrate the occasion.

• A lot of Linux distributions have their own Gnome installation. Popular Linux distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, and Debian are using Gnome as their default desktop environment.

• On Friday, August 15, 1997, GNOME was founded by two then-university students, Miguel de Icaza and Federico Mena Quintero. Their aim: to produce a free (as in freedom) desktop environment that is beautiful and simple to use. In September, we will welcome the release of GNOME 3.18 which continues to embody those founding principles.

• Dear GNOME community. I just had my second GUADEC together with all of you. It was awesome! Big thanks to all of you, especially those who made this happen as well as the sponsors and the GNOME Foundation for choosing me as a sponsored participant.

Distributions

Reviews

• Q4OS Linux is based on Debian Wheezy so it is similar to AntiX in this regard. If you like KDE 3.5.10 then you’ll like Trinity 3.5.13.2 which is what Q4OS uses.

Red Hat Family

• As the OpenStack cloud computing arena grows, a whole ecosystem of tools is growing along with it. Tesora, the leading contributor to the OpenStack Trove open source project, has been making waves with its cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) technology. Many enterprises are seeking to leverage database-as-a-service tools as they put applications in the cloud.

• Red Hat, the largest open-source software company in the world, has reaffirmed its commitment to the Malaysian market by incorporating its business here.

• Red Hat Malaysia Sdn Bhd marks a new chapter for the company which has been in Malaysia since 2006. Previously, it had an office which reported to the Asean headquarters in Singapore.

Fedora

• Chromium isn’t included with Fedora, but Firefox is and some are wondering if time has come to change that. The topic was discussed this week on the Fedora developers’ mailing list and some feel that if an exception is made for Firefox, perhaps one should be made for Chromium as well. But there are sound reasons why Chromium isn’t allowed.

• How to start a day with some big mistake?

Debian Family

Devices/Embedded

• As you may know, Mycroft is an open-source AI that acts like a virtual artificial intelligence and uses Raspberry Pi 2 and Ubuntu Snappy Core, created for the IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Phones

Tizen

• Around the time of the iPhone’s 2007 release, Intel convinced OEMs to try out a new 4- to 6-inch tablet form-factor called Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs). These Linux- and Windows CE-based devices never made it very far, and were almost unknown in the United States. One reason cited for their demise was the belief that Intel had chosen the wrong size. Indeed, in the first part of this decade, smartphones tended to range from 3.5 to 4.5 inches, while tablets went from 7 to 13 inches. The gap in between was considered a no-fly zone.

Android

• It’s been quite a while since Google first revealed Android M, and we still don’t know the software’s final name. Well, good news: Google on Friday released a video teasing the name’s unveiling, using a cute little tune to hype up the announcement. Marshmallow? Muffin? Marzipan?

• Staff cuts at Lenovo and HTC, a failed patch from Google, and Samsung’s latest flagship smartphones all highlight how tricky selling Android smartphones has become.

• Nestled in Lenovo’s latest earnings report were disappointing figures for both their own brand of smartphones and Motorola, which was acquired late last year. The Chinese company’s response is to do some fairly large-scale restructuring, handing over basically all aspects of Lenovo smartphones to Motorola with the possible exception of marketing. Motorola will continue to develop, make, and market their own line that most Westerners are familiar with.

• For those who do not know, Android Auto, is a car information/entertainment system, that allows car owners to connect to their Android devices. Then, through the car’s dashboard unit, Android Auto provides access to compatible apps, as well as data and features on the device. Android Auto provides a means for users to answer and make calls using voice commands, receive and have messages read to them, dictate and send new messages, as well as access to the device’s maps and navigation. Android Auto is designed to minimize distractions for drivers, by providing a means for users to perform essential actions, without necessary taking their hands off the steering wheels, or their eyes off the road. It accomplishes this by using large widgets that can be easily touched without a need for high precision, voice assisted commands, and by offering apps a limited API set. After all, we don’t want drivers playing Flappy Bird while at the wheel. Talk about road rage! But I digress.

• Touchjet’s Android-based, quad-core “Touchjet Wave” media player attaches to the top of your TV and IR scans your gestures to approximate touch control.

• Indiegogo has gone Indiegaga over the Touchjet Wave finger-tracking device, which has more than doubled its 100K goal to surpass $273,000 in funding, with 28 days remaining. Touchjet, which previously released the Android-based Touchjet Pond pico projector via Indiegogo, is still offering some $99 and $189 (two-pack) early bird packages for the Wave, with many more available at $119. Shipments are set for March 2016.

• We’ve been spending some quality time with Google’s latest Nexus 5 Android 5.1.1 update and today, we want to take a look at how its performance is holding up as we move away from its release date. This is our review of the August Nexus 5 Android 5.1.1 update.

• Like most big companies that produce Android phones and tablets, Sony tends to load up its phones with its own custom version of Google’s operating system. But unlike most phone companies, Sony also runs an open source project that provides the tools developers and users may need to install stock Android software on some devices.

Free Software/Open Source

• IBM has joined forces with the open-source movement to turn many of these challenges into solutions. “We have got to be a key part of what’s happening in open source.”

• With Linux, Thomas said, “It was about, how can we build a core technology and knowledge around Linux but then use that to help our clients solve problems. We think we’re at a similar juncture, but now on the data side.”

Events

• As a preview to next week’s LinuxCon, we spoke with Ross Mauri, General Manager, IBM z Systems, about how open infrastructures drive innovation and IBM’s commitment to open ecosystems.

Web Browsers

Chrome

SaaS/Big Data

• This week, LinkedIn announced that it is turning Gradle into an open source project. Alex Bain, senior software engineer for LinkedIn, says that LinkedIn has a vested interest in making Gradle, a plug-in to Hadoop, a bigger part of a rapidly growing Hadoop ecosystem. For example, as the Apache Spark in-memory computing project continues to evolve, Bain says that LinkedIn would like to see open source contributions that extended the reach of Gradle to both Hadoop and Spark.

• Yes, we have Red Hat. But that’s all we have. Investor (and former open source executive) Peter Levine insists that “we will never have another Red Hat,” and he’s right. But this may be because the Amazons of the world are increasingly eating the Red Hats of the world — one SaaS business at a time.

Business

• The unified communications (UC) solutions provider this week released Android and iOS software development kits (SDKs) for its Respoke communications platform. Digium said the kits are now available under a permissive open source license.

Semi-Open Source

• Last year, Pixar made its in-house animation software RenderMan free for non-commercial use, giving would-be filmmakers a powerful tool to get started with animated shorts and films. Now, it’s following this up by making another piece of in-house software not only free, but also open source. Pixar’s Universal Scene Description tool (USD) acts as an assembly station for input from various animation apps, making it easier to combine characters and objects into a single “scene graph” — a basic layer of the animation — for smoother workflow. Unlike with Renderman, though, Pixar doesn’t want to empower just amateur filmmakers, but also create an industry standard that it hopes will drive innovation. The company is preparing the open-source project for a summer 2016 launch, but for more information (and to read exciting terms like “layered overrides” and “cached geometry”), check out Pixar’s full announcement.

BSD

• The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE and introduces some new features.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU ease.js 0.2.6 released [stable]

• This is a minor release, focusing on a single compatibility issue.

• This release succeeds v0.2.5, which was released 28 May, 2015. There are no backwards-incompatible changes; support continues for ECMAScript 3+.

Openness/Sharing

Open Hardware

• Tarek Loubani, an emergency physician working in the Gaza strip, has 3D-printed a 30 cent stethoscope that beats the world’s best $200 equivalent as part of a project to bottom-out the cost of medical devices.

Programming

• As a developer, chances are you’ll spend a good deal of time working with a fancy IDE or code editor. However, also knowing how to get things done at the command line could occasionally make your life easier.

• “Sometimes you find yourself on a machine where stuff has to be done right now and tools are very limited,” one 20-year veteran programmer, who wished to remain anonymous, told me. “Know the shell like you know how to breath. Tools like find, comm, diff, vi/vim, sed, awk. How to write little scripts right on the command line to find the file that needs to change right f’ing now because production is broken and Joe who fat fingered a URL in said unknown file is on vacation in Fiji.”

• Bull, who started using Microsoft tools, then slowly moved to Linux, agreed, saying, “I would have learned the ins and outs of the command line and all of the useful utilities that are available on a *nix system. I can actually recall code that I wrote years ago, and probably spent days or weeks working on, that probably could have been done better in a grep + awk one-liner.”

Leftovers

• A former SAP executive has pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Panamanian officials in an effort to secure government contracts for the software vendor.

• Vicente Eduardo Garcia was SAP’s vice president of global and strategic accounts for Latin America from February 2008 until April 2014, when he was fired. With the plea, he admitted to participating in a scheme to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits bribing foreign officials to obtain business.

• Sentencing is scheduled for Dec. 16 before Senior District Court Judge Charles Breyer of the Northern District of California.

• There has been a fair amount of hand-wringing over the growing number of drones in the skies—and indeed, pilots have reported a sharp rise in plane-drone encounters this year.

• But of the 650 plane-drone encounters reported to the FAA in 2015, none led to a collision. Birds, on the other hand, have been and continue to be a pilot’s worst nightmare. A Vocativ analysis shows that thousands of birds collide with airplanes every year.

• The owner of an NFL football team is throwing his support—as well as his money—behind a new sport: Drone racing.

Science

• We bring you up to date with mobile phone clip-ons that bring the laboratory to your pocket with the swipe of a finger. By Viviane Richter.

Hardware

• The 32 GB of storage included the Galaxy S6 costs Samsung $14.50.

Health/Nutrition

• Water officials, however, said the plume that includes lead, arsenic and other heavy metals now presents little danger to users beyond Lake Powell – such as the city of Las Vegas – because the contaminants will further settle out and be diluted in the reservoir along the Utah-Arizona border.

Security

• It basically worked like this: Kaspersky would inject dangerous-looking code into common pieces of software. It would then anonymously submit the files to malware aggregators such as Google-owned VirusTotal. When competitors added the malware to their detection engines, they’d mistakenly flag the original files because of the similar code.

• Though journalists are often cited as potential users of computer security technologies, their practices and mental models have not been deeply studied by the academic computer security community. Such an understanding, however, is critical to developing technical solutions that can address the real needs of journalists and integrate into their existing practices. We seek to provide that insight in this paper, by investigating the general and computer security practices of 15 journalists in the U.S. and France via in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Among our findings is evidence that existing security tools fail not only due to usability issues but when they actively interfere with other aspects of the journalistic process; that communication methods are typically driven by sources rather than journalists; and that journalists’ organizations play an important role in influencing journalists’ behaviors. Based on these and other findings, we make recommendations to the computer security community for improvements to existing tools and future lines of research.

• The highlight of this year’s Black Hat conference was a remote hack of the Jeep Cherokee and other Fiat Chrysler vehicles, demonstrated by security researches Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek.

• The attack was the culmination of a year of painstaking work that involved reverse-engineering car firmware and communications protocols. It eventually allowed the two researchers to hack into the car infotainment systems over mobile data connections and take over brake, steering and other critical systems. The research forced Chrysler to recall 1.4 million automobiles so they could be patched and prompted a car cybersafety legislative proposal from the U.S. Congress.

• Researchers have demonstrated how a simple text message can be used to control a vehicle.

• Facebook has awarded $100,000 to a pair of Ph.D students for their work in the security of C++ programs which resulted in the detection and patching of zero-day vulnerabilities.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• According to a police spokesman in Upper Franconia, the American pilot managed to eject from the plane and landed with a parachute. His injuries are not believed to be life threatening.

• Former CIA officer and SFRC senior investigator John Kiriacou claims that badly strained US relations with Russia could unexpectedly benefit from revived American diplomatic ties with Cuba.

• Tyler S. Drumheller, a high-level CIA officer who publicly battled agency leaders over one of the most outlandish claims in the US case for war with Iraq, died Aug. 2 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 63.

• Tyler S. Drumheller, a former senior American intelligence official who publicly asserted that President George W. Bush’s administration had knowingly hyped fabricated evidence of Iraq’s arsenal of biological weapons to justify the 2003 invasion, died on Aug. 2 in Falls Church, Va. He was 63.

• Tyler Drumheller was a 26-year veteran of the CIA and he exposed the faulty intelligence that was used to make the case for the Iraq War. He claimed he told his superiors at the CIA that the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction wasn’t true, that it came from a source who was not credible. Tyler Drumheller died on August 2. He was 63.

• Former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has disputed Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush’s charge that Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama are largely responsible for the rise of the group Islamic State, even as he expressed concern that the administration needs “a larger strategy on how to deal with the Middle East.”

• Increasing evidence is coming in that the groups the U.S. is trying to install into power in Syria are actually contending groups of Sunni Islamic jihadists who seem to agree on only one thing: they want to replace the secular government of the Shiite Bashar al-Assad, who is supported by Russia and by Shiite Iran. They want to replace it with a Sunni Islamic government. Some of these groups have perpetrated terrorist attacks (some including beheadings) against Americans, and one such group is even al-Qaeda, the Sunni Islamic organization that, of course, perpetrated the 9/11, 2001, attacks and others.

• Evidence shows that “full spectrum dominance” [i] is the goal. Full spectrum dominance, as described by a U.S Department of Defense (DoD) news article, “means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations.”

• A former CIA contractor says US President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw the USS Theodore Roosevelt from the Persian Gulf shows a goodwill gesture towards Iran in the wake of the nuclear agreement.

• It started when the U.S. CIA overthrew the democratically elected Iranian government of Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953, and installed a brutal dictator (the Shah) in his place.

• The petition is from Credo Action, which bills itself as a “social change organization that supports activism and funds progressive nonprofits,” and has a goal of 200,000 signatures. However, its not exactly clear what will happen if the petition reaches that goal.

• “There’s no excuse for any Democrat to oppose the deal – least of all Senator Schumer, who is in line to take over leadership of the Senate Democrats once Senator Harry Reid retires,” the petition says.

• According to a CIA report released in 2000, by April 1975 it had become clear that “Contreras was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta.” Nevertheless, weeks later, “elements within the CIA recommended establishing a paid relationship with Contreras to obtain intelligence based on his unique position and access to Pinochet.” The suggestion was overruled, the report said, but “given miscommunications in the timing of this exchange, a one-time payment was given to Contreras.”

• Two recent developments in Chile have reignited the struggle for memory against Augusto Pinochet’s lasting culture of oblivion. On Aug. 7, Chileans on both sides of the political spectrum either lamented or celebrated the death of Manuel Contreras, former head of Pinochet’s National Intelligence Services (DINA).

• Contreras’ death ignited a fresh surge of rage and indignation, as the families of the over 3,000 disappeared still face an uphill struggle against the state and the military to uncover details regarding the murder and disappearance of their relatives.

• A retired Chilean general committed suicide yesterday, choosing to end his life rather than begin a 20-year prison sentence for the 1995 killing of a former secret agent who spied on Augusto Pinochet’s regime.

• Hernán Ramírez Rurange, 76, shot himself in the head and died at a military hospital, police announced. He was one of 14 former Chilean and Uruguayan Army officers who lost an appeal on Tuesday against their convictions for the 1995 kidnapping and killing of Eugenio Berrios, whom they wanted to silence before he exposed the crimes of the Pinochet regime. The case is just one of several high-profile ones dating back to dictatorship that has come to trial recently in Chile.

• On September 11, 1973, the democratically-elected leftist Salvador Allende was faced with a violent coup staged by the Chilean Armed Forces, led by Augusto Pinochet (who would then rule until 1990). Less than three weeks prior to the overthrow, Allende appointed the lifelong military man Pinochet to the top position in the armed forces and the Commander-in-Chief of the Army repaid him by ousting him from power.

• On the day of the coup, Pinochet ordered the attack on Allende who remained inside La Moneda, the national palace, in central Santiago. Rather than surrendering or being killed by military forces, Allende committed suicide by shooting himself just minutes before the Chilean Air Force bombed the complex.

• From that day on, Pinochet led Chile with an iron fist for the duration of the dictatorship in 1990 and was facing over three hundred different possible charges of crimes against humanity when he passed away in 2006.

• It was the United States that broke our will when we tried to develop nuclear weapons. They thought we would use the weapons to invade North Korea.

• But he blames the Yemen conflict on the Shia. “There’s a majority of Shia in Yemen,” he said. “That’s why they’re torturing Sunni people. They think the Islam they are following is better than the Islam we are following.”

• During and after the 1963 USS Thresher disaster, the Navy developed powerful deep-ocean search and recovery techniques. The sea service used these techniques effectively in the search for lost H-bombs in 1966 and the USS Scorpion in 1968. It also had the only subs in the world capable of diving deep enough to reach the bucket. They were pretty weird subs.

• Despite Israel’s reliance on a dominated U.S. Congress as a last line of defense for its bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran strategy, other regional and global forces are moving quickly to reshape the Middle East’s geopolitical reality in a more positive way, as ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller discerns.

• So said American Defense Secretary Ash Carter in testimony before an incredulous Senate Armed Services Committee on July 7, explaining that the $500 million American project, announced over a year ago, to train and arm a new Syrian rebel army to bring the Islamic State to its knees and force a political settlement on the Syrian regime simultaneously has, to date, trained just 60 fighters.

• The major US newspapers and television networks, which have full-time Pentagon correspondents and regularly review Pentagon press releases, chose to say nothing about the Law of War Manual, for reasons that become obvious when the content of the document is explored. Nor did they comment initially on the manual’s provisions for journalists until the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) issued a statement July 31 under the headline, “In times of war, Pentagon reserves right to treat journalists like spies.”

• Nearly four years after the controversial drone strike, the U.S. government must release more information about the legal rationale for killing New Mexico-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. .

• For more than a decade now, the US has been using drones in warfare. During this time, thousands of people, especially civilians, have been killed by the unmanned machines. In this interview, Chris Woods, one of the leading investigative journalists on drone warfare, explains to Emran Feroz why use of drones is on the rise and what the consequences are

• How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? It was set up in the early 1980s under President Ronald Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing the CIA had been mixed up in for years.

• The agency was getting an exceedingly bad name. Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Instead, they were shifted to a new organization with a nice-sounding name – The National Endowment for Democracy.

• The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades – and thus eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities. This is why in 1983, the NED was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, non-governmental efforts.”

• According to Ukrainian reports, hundreds of Russian-backed fighters took part in an assault, supported by tanks and artillery fire, on positions near the village of Starognatovka, in the south of the Donetsk region. The attack was repelled and Ukrainian forces made their first territorial gains since February 10. Since then, heavy artillery and Grad rockets have rained down across this section of the front line.

• Was the US deterrence military doctrine aimed against the Soviet Union during the Cold War era really “defensive” and who actually started the nuclear arms race paranoia?

• From a mullah who wants a military operation against women wearing jeans to “uncircumcised” Islamic State fighters, a satirical Pakistani website is using humour to shine a light on current affairs in the turbulent nation.

• Each year, when we celebrate the anniversaries of the Borderfree Nonviolence Community Centre, I hope we can celebrate such love, because, love heals, love is courage and love is action that will outlast all of us.

• The recent capture of a handful of U.S.-trained Syrian fighters shortly after entering Syria may make it even harder to recruit reluctant volunteers for a new ground force to combat the Islamic State.

• And the Syrian Kurds in the northeast portion of the country have performed exceptionally well, according to Ryder. The Christians of Sadad have already started to flee to Damascus and other safe havens in Syria.

• India can play a lead role in mobilising APIC countries for regional cooperation on this specific issue and deny Islamic State in establishing their operational base or else it will be like repeating the same mistake that world superpowers initially committed in allowing Islamic State in consolidating their present day caliphate in Iraq-Turkey-Syria border. After a year in which signs of progress have been unreliable, they’re reluctant to sound too optimistic in public. “But they pay the jizya [a tax levied on non-Muslims] in exchange for permission to stay”, he said. After months of persuasion, Turkey finally joined the coalition of forces on their fight against Islamic State. They believed that eventually the allies would train and equip about 5,000 fighters.

• Davis also said that the military was anticipating attacks on Syrian forces before it put them into battle.

• The ABC wishes to express its very great disappointment with this review. We are very aware that the Review will not truly reflect opinion in this country because a great number of people who oppose the activities of both the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service have refused to take part in a process which they see as a managed charade and an attempt to legitimise the operations and existence of the two spy agencies.

• [...]

• 2. Oversight

• 2.1. Five Eyes. Throughout the Five Eyes collaboration there is a consistent pattern of systemic oversight failure. The CIA actually spied on the Senate Committee responsible for its oversight. In the UK, the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) itself, responsible for oversight, has recently reported that legislation is “unnecessarily complicated” and the regime “lacks transparency”. In spite of the oversight in Britain the GCHQ was illegally spying on Amnesty International and others. The documented part MI6 played in the rendition and torture of alleged terrorists was never subject to proper Parliamentary control.

• Even the UK former Home Office Minister David Davis, who played a large part in promoting the Bill that set up the British ISC, recently asserted that the ISC had been “captured by the agencies they are supposed to be overseeing” and that Malcolm Rifkind (until recently Chairperson of the ISC) acted as “spokesperson” for the spy agencies rather than a watchdog. To quote two members of the British House of Lords: “Recent events have shown that the Intelligence and Security Committee, as currently constituted, is not really effective” (Foulkes). The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which gives legislative justification for GCHQ surveillance, “… is plainly inadequate to deal with the situation caused by the advances in interception technology” (Sharkey).

• The Army Rangers were immediately taken to hospital, but 31 of the students have already begun training again.

• Forty Army Ranger students and four instructors were struck by lightning as they were undergoing a training exercise about how to protect themselves from lightning bolts during thunderstorms, said U.S. army officials Thursday.

• As prosecutors attempted to discredit him, a white Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer completed nearly six hours of testimony Friday, recounting the events of the night he shot and killed an unarmed black man nearly two years ago.

• Prosecutor Teresa Postell asked why Kerrick turned off his dashcam before reaching the home where there had been a breaking and entering call and challenged entries on his police academy application regarding whether he drank alcohol to the point that he risked being arrested if he attempted to drive a car.

• The reign of police violence in the US claimed 16 more victims over the past week.

• An image of a St. Louis teen whose cop cousin died in the 9/11 terror attacks has become a pro-police symbol after she put herself in front of a row of riot gear-clad Missouri officers to protect them.

• Lexi Kozhevsky, a 19-year-old St. Louis University nursing student, was photographed joining cops Monday night in Ferguson as they stood guard during protests over Michael Brown’s death.

• Police in riot gear contained roughly 200 protesters who had gathered in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri on Monday to mark the anniversary of the police shooting of an unarmed black teen whose death ignited a national firestorm on race relations.

• The demonstrators, some waving flags, beating drums, and shouting anti-police slogans, marched along a street that was a flashpoint of last year’s riots which erupted after white police officer Darren Wilson shot dead the 18-year-old unarmed black teen whose death ignited a national firestorm on race relations.

• On Thursday, July 30, 50 Black and Latino students wearing mock bullet proof vests with stickers that stated #StudentsAintBulletProof #End1033, from the Strategy Center’s Fight for the Soul of the Cities, once again asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give us a list of the weapons they received from the Department of Defense 1033 Program, to return 61 M 16 assault rifles we believe are still in their possession, and to apologize for being in the program in the first place. Students said, after 3 public comment testimonies, four long letters (September 2014, November 2014, May 2015, July 2015), over 3,500 petitions, appeals, and every other method of persuasion “Why is the LAUSD trying to kill us?” This campaign is part of the Strategy Center’s No Cars in LA and the U.S., No Tanks in LA and the U.S.

• Even as the conflict with Russian-backed separatists smolders, Kiev has ratcheted up a no less ferocious public relations war. Hoping to bolster its case against Moscow, Ukraine as well as the country’s foreign Diaspora have zeroed in on the so-called Holodomor or Stalinist-induced famine of 1932-33. In an effort to force Ukrainian peasants to join collective farms, Stalin commandeered their grain and other foodstuffs. The result was disastrous as millions of Ukrainians starved and perished. In some regions, the death rate reached one-third of the population with entire villages laid waste.

• Completely overreacting to 9/11–doing exactly what Osama bin Laden and terrorists historically have wanted–George W. Bush, employing the classic Washington trick of taking advantage of a crisis to promote an unrelated policy agenda, needlessly invaded yet another Muslim country.

• The Anti-Terrorist Committee said the suspects were killed in a raid in the province of Dagestan. It identified one of them as Magomed Suleimanov, the leader of the Caucasus Emirate, a loose group embracing Islamic militants in the Caucasus. Suleimanov’s deputy was also among those killed.

• The reactions to these policies have been compounded further by the bombs and drones used to kill “terrorists” along with significant number of civilians. In January, the U.S. used a “signature strike” — a drone strike based on a pattern of movement and intelligence — against an al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan. The strike killed two Western hostages. In Yemen, another drone strike killed a dozen civilians in a wedding party in 2013. One can only imagine how many civilians have been killed in recent years — the most conservative estimates range from a few hundred to over a thousand — and how much anti-U.S. rhetoric has resulted.

• ANTI-DRONE protesters have appeared before magistrates to deny causing criminal damage at Llanbedr Airfield.

• Sian ap Gwynfor, 59, of Yr Hafod, Llandysul, and Anna Jane Evans, 52, of Cae Corn Hir, Caernarfon, both pleaded not guilty to causing crimi-nal damage by painting slogans on Llanbedr airfield earlier this year.

• Awel Irene, 61, of Garreg Frech, Llanfrothen, Penrhyndeudraeth, did not indicate a plea and Angharad Wyn Tomos, 56, of Betws, Ffordd Haearn Bach, Penygroes, Caernarfon, ref used to plead.

• Because of the pleas, court clerk Ffion Medi told the four defendants that the case had to be adjourned for a trial date to be fixed.

• Rhian Jackson, prosecuting, said that slogans such as “death drones” were painted on the airfield land and that the criminal damage was estimated at £1,750, which the company that runs the airfield was claiming in compensation.

• India opened fire Friday at about 8am without any provocation, targeting the civilian population. The Indian firing was in progress until last reports. The people of the firing-hit villages close to this side of the LoC in Haveli were confined to their houses the whole day due to the Indian firing. However, the morale of the local population was high and there was no report of shifting of the people to some safer place.

• Authorities launched investigations at the hotel that was attacked in central Mali, a United Nations official said Monday.

• Now, those almost seem like the good ol’ days. Not only do we have to worry about out-of-control vehicles, but we also have to watch the skies so we don’t find ourselves on the latest viral YouTube video taken by one of the rapidly growing number of drones. But are they trespassing in your airspace? Depending on their altitude, maybe — and maybe not. Currently, this seems to be a legal question that rivals “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin” when it comes to agreeing on a consistent standard. So fasten your seat belt and get ready for a long and somewhat bumpy flight as I take you on a brief evolution of the law.

• The doctrine being developed to legally justify targeted killing is contingent on vague and dubious presumptions about who is an enemy qualified to be killed, and the kind of threats he or they purportedly pose. Decisions about who and when to kill involve two intersecting registers: surveillance and threat assessment. Technologically, drones can function as “unblinking eyes” capable of “total surveillance” because they are equipped with dozens of high-resolution cameras aimed in all directions, and software that sends a constant stream of footage to remote centers and aggregates it into a single view. Even though human operators blink, the footage doesn’t; it is archived and can be viewed by multiple people. Threat assessment, in contrast, is (to date) entirely human and involves interpreting and acting on surveillance data. Sometimes targets are specifically identified individuals; bombing them is termed “personality strikes.” But because the model of security is predictive, more often assessment of who and where to bomb derives from observed behavior—specifically, “patterns of life” and those behaviors that are interpreted to be anomalous and thus deemed actually or potentially threatening. The bombings of people whose individual identities are not known to the killers but who are deemed kill-able because of their behavior are termed “signature strikes.”

• The iconic scene at the start of Terminator 2 documents that humanity created an artificial intelligence computer network called Skynet as part of an American defence plan. But after turning it on, the software becomes self-aware, decides humanity is the big threat, hijacks the nukes and wipes most of humanity out. In the future, those still alive have to face Skynet’s autonomous robotic killing machines, in the form of the Terminators. This includes the iconic image of a dusty skull being crushed by a grinning laser-toting Terminator as it begins to kill the human resistance.

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• The risk of such contraptions thinking for themselves and duly killing with no recourse or human way to stop them is a troubling one, and is also a concept that has massive moral and ethical dilemmas. Yet the momentum is seemingly in favour of its arrival, and its an uncomfortable thought that somewhere, scientists are spending their time creating something with extinction level possibilities for no discernible reason.

• This is the immediate danger with AI weapons: They are easily converted into indiscriminate death machines, far more dangerous than the same weapons with a human at the helm.

• So Carter has had a bit of a tabula rasa to work with, which he has filled with annual home-building projects for Habitat for Humanity, monitoring elections around the world (he cut short a monitoring trip to Guyana in May, his 39th, because he wasn’t feeling well, though it’s unclear whether that ailment was tied to recent diagnosis), serving as a mediator or fact-finder in disputes around the world, publishing 27 books (he published two others before becoming president), as well as criticizing George W. Bush over his decision to invade Iraq, and Obama over human rights issues and the use of drones to kill civilians.

• All of which has earned him the support of a lot of political progressives, though it has done little to soften the views of Republicans who believe the Reagan presidency saved the nation.

• We all want peace, don’t we? Peaceful relationships and communities; an absence of violence and conflict: a World at Peace. This is surely everyone’s heartfelt desire. Without peace nothing can be achieved, none of the subtler essential needs of our time, such as feeding everyone and providing good quality health care and education to all – let alone the urgent need to save our planet (S.O.P.), beautify the cities and develop sustainable alternative energy sources.

• Despite the fact that we all hanker after peace, there are currently around thirty armed conflicts taking place across the globe – wars in which many hundreds or many thousands of innocent people are being killed. They are not on the whole conflicts between one country and another, not directly anyway, although some may be. Ideology fuels much of the fighting, as well as popular armed resistance to corporate state power, state terrorism and repression. It’s worth saying at this point, that in addition to armed conflict the ‘war’ on independent ‘free’ thinking, true democracy and the freedom of the individual is a constant one. Brutal and unrelenting, it is fought by the ‘Masters of Mankind’ (Adam Smith’s famous term for the ruling elite) against the rest of us, the 99%.

• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe acknowledged that Japan inflicted “immeasurable damage and suffering” on innocent people in World War II, but stopped short of offering his own apology, drawing criticism from China and South Korea.

• In a widely anticipated statement 70 years after his country’s surrender, he said Friday that Japan’s repeated past “heartfelt apologies” would remain unshakeable, but that future Japanese generations should not have to keep apologizing.

• I suggest Harari, and many others, read Daniel Yergin’s “The Prize,” in which you will find that U.S.-Iran history didn’t begin in 1979-80. Our government assisted in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government in the 1950s, and installed the Shah, who ruled brutally until overthrown through the Iranian revolution.

• I’m not sure anyone can know today if a deal with Iran, bringing them back into the world of nations, is better or worse than continued sanctions. However, the countries of the Middle East are rightfully angry with our never-ending meddling in their countries, including drone strikes in which we kill innocent civilians.

• Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Why did we fight these wars?

• Pope Francis’ recent comments regarding war, the environment and economic justice inspire our letter, which cites segments of his new encyclical, Laudato Si. “War always does grave harm to the environment and to the cultural riches of peoples,” Pope Francis writes, “risks which are magnified when one considers nuclear arms and biological weapons.” In the light of this reality, our letter suggests that Pope Francis avail himself of the challenging opportunity to acknowledge that the United States is “the most prolific polluter and, not coincidentally, the greatest war maker on the globe.”

• We don’t need more military spending – we need less. Our military aggression makes us a target.

• RAAF pilots are poised to begin flying deadly American Reaper drones over Syria, taking for the first time Australia’s involvement in the fight against the so-called Islamic State from Iraq into the more complex neighbouring country.

• Meanwhile, in Yemen, officials say a suspected U.S. drone strike killed five men on Wednesday. The officials say the men were suspected of being militants with the group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

• A US drone has crashed in Afghanistan’s Kapisa province, the NATO has announced without explaining the cause of the crash.

Transparency Reporting

• At least two classified messages on Hillary Clinton’s home-brew email server contained top-secret intelligence including signal intercepts and information from keyhole satellite conducted by the CIA and the Pentagon’s satellite-spying National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

• U.S. Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough reported to Congress on Wednesday that the sensitive information dated from 2006 and 2008, and was ‘classified up to “TO.PSECRET//SI/TK//NOFORN”.’

• A pair of classified emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server that should have been marked “top secret” originated in the Central Intelligence Agency, raising questions as to why they had been stripped of their classification markings by the time they reached the secretary of state.

• Multiple off-the-record sources told the News&Guide the VIP on the jet was CIA Director John Brennan, in town for the same conference that drew former President Bill Clinton and CNN correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. That would correspond with the U.S. Air Force’s acknowledgement that it had a C-40B in the valley, but the military’s public affairs desk has refused to say who the jet’s passengers were or why it was here.

• ‘Within western democracies the UK has a powerful and persistent culture of secrecy. Richard Crossman, Labour Cabinet Minister and commentator on the British constitution, once called it the real “BRITISH DISEASE”.’

• These very words are quoted from David Vincent’s book, ‘The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832–1998’, published by the Oxford University Press in 1998.

• On December 15th, 1858 William Hudson Guernsey, was tried on the charges of stealing 10 printed papers and 10 pieces of paper from the “Sovereign Lady, the Queen”. The documents related to the malicious role of the Colonial Office in conspiring to colonize and suppress the rights of the people of the colonized Islands. The documents were initially dismissed as ‘forged’.

• When the scandal refused to go away (even in those days) Guernsey was arrested. The basis of arrest was the very same ‘forged’ documents, published in The Daily News on November 12th 1858. The alleged documents, initially called ‘forged’ and then used as the evidence to arrest Mr. Guernsey, were written by the Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, John Young, concerning the future of the Ionian Islands.

• One almost feels the history of the empire repeating itself, if we are viewing the events of history that shaped the Cayman Islands once we got separated from Jamaica in 1967. The British ‘abandoned’ Jamaica and ‘colonized’ the Cayman Islands to further their financial interests. Standard script should we say?

• Swedish prosecutors have dropped part of their sexual assault inquiry against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but the most serious part of the probe remains in place. The announcement was made as the statute of limitations ran out on three parts of the investigation. Assange has been holed up for three years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he’s received political asylum. He fears he will be extradited to the United States to face prosecution for his role at WikiLeaks if he leaves the embassy. Both Ecuador and Sweden accuse the other of delaying a possible Swedish police interview with Assange inside the embassy. Sweden has never charged him with any crime.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Kyushu Electric Power Company reported the startup of the Sendai Nuclear Power Unit Tuesday morning, calling it “one of the important steps on the restart process of the nuclear reactor.” After the radiation leak at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in 2011, Japan gradually shut down all of its nuclear facilities.

• Electric vehicle owners may soon be able to wirelessly charge their cars as they drive on the UK’s motorways.

• Personally, I never killed anything I didn’t plan to eat. My last hunt was in 1981, when I found “hunters” on motorcycles far into a canyon it had taken me all day to walk to. Since that time, I have seen “hunting” taken over by technology.

• Timed to coincide with #WorldElephantDay on Wednesday, August 12, The Wildlife Conservation Society’s 96 Elephants Campaign is rallying Americans against the ivory trade and elephant poaching crisis and urging support of the proposed Federal ban on ivory sales.

• An animal rights group battling to protect seals in the north-east have invested in sophisticated drone technology to deter marksmen. Sea Shepherd UK are waging war on individuals who they allege have killed seals to protect salmon stocks.

• It’s not just humans who want to shoot something. More often it’s organized criminals who want to cut up animals and sell them to different humans who think they’ll make them live longer or look good on a wall. Other times it’s impoverished people looking for ready cash, or even a meal.

• You can see the devastation everywhere: in the hollowed-out shells of buildings, in the anguished faces of relatives, in the parade of scorched cars.

• You can see the devastation everywhere: in the hollowed-out shells of buildings, in the anguished faces of relatives, in the parade of scorched cars.

• But what set off the terrifying explosions that ripped through warehouses containing hazardous chemical materials, shooting fireballs across the sky and shaking buildings more than 2 miles away?

Finance

• The German economy picked up pace in the second quarter of the year, growing by 0.4 percent from the previous three-month period, official figures showed Friday.

• And Heinz issued layoffs not long after the 3G/Berkshire takeover as well.

• The fact that most people have still never heard of the world’s biggest trade deal—the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the US and Europe—even after two years of negotiations, might suggest that whatever its problems, maintaining secrecy is not one of them. But the European Commission begs to differ: since the end of July, instead of sending up-to-the-minute summaries of its talks with the US to EU politicians, the Commission now requires that national politicians travel all the way to Brussels to a special reading room where the texts can be viewed under tight security. MEPs must also use this same system.

• The social environment of an area, including factors such as poverty, stress, and living conditions, contributes to the disease burden. A recent study published in AJPH shows that patients from a disordered environment don’t stick to their medication schedule, even for a potentially lethal condition like HIV. As the researchers found, residents of highly disordered neighborhoods will sell or trade their antiviral medication rather than taking it and adhering to their drug plans.

• Finance ministers of the 19-nation euro single currency group on Friday approved the first 26 billion euros ($29 billion) of a vast new bailout package to help rebuild Greece’s shattered economy.

• The approval came after Greece’s parliament passed a slew of painful reforms and spending cuts after a marathon overnight session that divided the governing party, raising the specter of early elections.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• A dirty business, the CIA devised schemes to create or utilize social organizations, phony pass-through entities, universities, various media, artist groups, foundations and charities to service their propaganda wars—attempting to place a “progressive” or even “humanitarian” veneer upon America’s expanding grip.

• When we think of propaganda, the distribution of information of a biased or misleading nature for the purpose of promoting a point of view or political agenda, what do we think of? World War II and the Nazis perhaps? Alarmingly, some of the most pertinent examples of propaganda can be found much closer to home, in two of the United States’ biggest institutions – Hollywood and the CIA.

• Some insiders in the Democratic Party are discussing having former Vice President Al Gore make another run for U.S. presidency, BuzzFeed reported on Thursday, adding that the man who won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election has not taken any steps toward entering the current race.

• “They’re figuring out if there’s a path financially and politically,” an unnamed Democrat told BuzzFeed about the insiders. “It feels more real than it has in the past months.”

Privacy

• Mirza Abdul Rahim informed the students that all kind of data uploaded at Facebook was monitored by the CIA which help to collect all required information about persons and organisation from all over the world. He advised student to remain careful while using computer, internet, mobile phone, IPod, Skype and other such applications and platforms.

• FREQUENT visitors to the Hustler Club, a gentlemen’s entertainment venue in New York, could not have known that they would become part of a debate about anonymity in the era of “big data”. But when, for sport, a data scientist called Anthony Tockar mined a database of taxi-ride details to see what fell out of it, it became clear that, even though the data concerned included no direct identification of the customer, there were some intriguingly clustered drop-off points at private addresses for journeys that began at the club. Stir voter-registration records into the mix to identify who lives at those addresses (which Mr Tockar did not do) and you might end up creating some rather unhappy marriages.

• Recently I went on a BBC news programme to give “the privacy side” of a technology story. Employees of a software company in Sweden had implanted chips in their wrists that activated the company photocopier. Yes, you read that right. Having minor surgery instead of just remembering a four-digit PIN is a pretty daft idea. You’d have to be a tech utopian to want to do it.

• Security experts have begun issuing advice on how to prevent iPhone users from becoming the victims of a new phenomenon known as cyber-flashing. The advice has started to appear online in the wake of a woman contacting the police after she was sent explicit and unsolicited photos from a stranger in her close vicinity on a train in London.

• Using AirDrop – a feature on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers where users can send files, such as images, to each other at close range – the cyber flasher can request to send photographs to any fellow iPhone users within the range of a Bluetooth connection – usually around 10m. Even if the receiver rejects the photo, they are still shown an uncensored preview of the image.

• Japanese researchers have announced the commercial launch of a “privacy visor” which confuses facial recognition technology in cameras, social networks and software.

• Surveillance is a standard element of daily life in the West. In the UK alone, there is at least one surveillance camera for every 11 citizens, and we encounter them on our streets, in our stores and online through tracking cookies, government programs and GPS-linked applications.

Civil Rights

• Belarus is frequently called “Europe’s last dictatorship.” Unlike starfighters, samurai, or of the Mohicans, this is not a good thing to be the last of. We sat down with a man who’s lived most of his life in Belarus, and asked him what life was like in a modern country ruled by a despotic leader who can’t seem to pull his ass out of the 19th century.

• Huckabee, who is a fan of reinstating the repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and has previously made ugly comments about trans people, probably isn’t interested in some of the more prosaic reasons a military should strive for open LGBTQ service: to live up to the core values of dignity, integrity, and respect; to reflect the diversity of the country it serves; to bring its long-outdated medical standards up to date; or to recognize that there is “no compelling medical reason for the ban,” according to a report from a commission co-chaired by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders. So let’s just assume that his main concern is that the armed services are prepared to kill people and break things.

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• A few months ago, I asked Okros what the United States could learn from Canada’s experience. Okros pointed out that when Canada lifted its military ban, it hadn’t taken into account many of the administrative policies it would need to codify for a smooth transition. What’s more, at the time, Canadian society wasn’t particularly hospitable to gay and transgender individuals. Nevertheless, despite open hostility and a lack of administrative planning, the Canadian Forces was able to open its ranks without compromising military readiness.

• CIA Director John Brennan made a rare public appearance Monday to try to address the agency’s “woeful” record of hiring and promoting Hispanics.

• Accompanied by the agency’s highest ranking Latina, Brennan traveled to New York for the annual convention of the Association of Latino Professionals for America (ALPFA), to meet with potential applicants at a job fair and deliver remarks to the organization’s leadership at lunch.

• In response to questions from three Senate Democrats, the head of the CIA is walking back a previous claim that U.S. intelligence agents never work with countries that abuse human rights.

• “While we neither condone nor participate in activities that violate human rights standards, we do maintain cooperative liaison relationships with a variety of intelligence and security services around the world, some of whose constituent entities have engaged in human rights abuses,” Director John Brennan wrote in a letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) sent last week.

• The director of the CIA vowed a thorough investigation into an Alabama man’s claim that he was subject to sexual harassment while serving as a contractor in Afghanistan.

• The Director of the CIA today addressed recent allegations by a gay CIA contractor who said he was harassed while on a dangerous deployment by other CIA contractors and staff officers, saying his spy agency has “zero tolerance” for such behavior and indicating the agency is moving swiftly in response.

• A former CIA officer described as the latest victim of the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers has issued a scathing open letter to civil rights groups asking, “Where were you?”

• In the letter published at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jeffrey Sterling, who is black, specifically calls out the NAACP, National Action Network, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Congressional Black Caucus, writing “I saw you when other black faces were either killed or mistreated.” But, to these civil rights groups, he writes, he is “invisible.”

• In a case that relied on circumstantial evidence, Sterling was convicted in January on nine separate felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.

• Where were you?

• Where were you when I was faced with blatant discrimination at my job, when my employer told me I was “too big and too black” to do the job?

• Where were you when I, one of the first black officers to do so, filed a discrimination suit against the Central Intelligence Agency?

• Where were you when the justice system of the United States dismissed my discrimination suit because the U.S. government maintained that trying my suit would endanger national security?

• Where were you during the many years I reached out to you, begging, pleading for help from you while the United States government pursued and tormented me for years, bent on retaliation and persecution?

• Where were you when I begged for help from Congressman Lacy Clay’s office and they told me to run away, to leave the country? I was there … and I didn’t run.

• Where were you when the United States government arrested me, put me in jail and branded me with espionage?

• The CIA is about to enter into one of its most ambitious restructuring exercises in its history. In March Director John O. Brennan unveiled the blueprint, and the plan is set to have a massive impact on the organisation structure of the major directorates of espionage and analysis, which have been part of the agencies structure for decades. In its new model the agency will create a hybrid unit that combines analysts and operators in centres which are focused on specific regions, such as the Middle East, as well as on security issues including weapons proliferation. The new approach is modelled on the success of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Centre, which has enjoyed considerable influence since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

• A prisoner of US military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay may soon starve to death, as after more than eight years of force-feeding his body is said to be unable to take the nutrients he is pumped with. The DoD opposed the ailing man’s release.

• Tariq Ba Odah, a Saudi resident of Yemeni descent, was captured in Pakistan and held in Guantanamo facility since 2002. In 2009 he was cleared for release by the Obama administration, but remains in US custody. In 2007 he went on a hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without charges. After more than eight years without taking food voluntarily, he weighs less than 34 kilograms and may soon die, his lawyer says.

• Guantanamo’s continued importance for the US government was to continue to hold suspects captured in the War on Terror. Therefore, Obama needed a legal strategy allowing him to continue to hold detainees on US territory before he could feel free to close the facility, Kiriacou said.

• “The CIA accidentally released a document to me under FOIA and then asked that I refrain from posting it,” says VICE’s Jason Leopold.

• On July 28, 2014, the CIA director wrote a letter to senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss — the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and the panel’s ranking Republican, respectively. In it, he admitted that the CIA’s penetration of the computer network used by committee staffers reviewing the agency’s torture program — a breach for which Feinstein and Chambliss had long demanded accountability — was improper and violated agreements the Intelligence Committee had made with the CIA.

• Jason Leopold — terrorizer of FOIA staffers throughout the US government — has again obtained documents many would have expected to remain out of reach for years to come. Certainly, the CIA thought one of the documents would remain its little secret for the rest of whatever.

• After CIA agents hacked into the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computer network and accessed a report the Senate was preparing on the agency’s torture program, CIA Director John Brennan drafted an apology letter to Vice Chairman Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a report by VICE News reveals.

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology doctoral candidate, who says his interests include “animals, civil liberties, national security and freedom of information,” took note when members of the U.S. Senate alleged last year that CIA employees had hacked into a computer network used by staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee. At the time, the committee was looking into, among other things, allegations about the CIA’s involvement in torture.

• We already wrote about Jason Leopold “accidentally” receiving a letter the CIA never actually sent that was an apology for spying on Senate staffers, but there was a lot more that Leopold received in that FOIA dump as well. Beyond the document Leopold wasn’t supposed to receive, the 300 pages handed over by the CIA (not by its voluntary desire to respect FOIA stipulations, but rather because a judge told it to) provide additional details about the alleged Senate breach and its “investigative” spying — and the ensuing fight that set off something of a Constitutional crisis in the separation of powers between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

• Leopold’s article goes into great depth on the subject and is well-worth reading in its entirety. One of the many, many details worth noting is that the CIA’s “firewall” between it and Senate staffers wasn’t really anything of the sort. A Google-powered custom search function allowed staffers to search CIA documents, but only the documents the CIA wanted them to see. The problem was that the search didn’t work correctly. Keyword searches were returning documents the CIA hadn’t approved for Senate perusal. This was how the hidden Panetta Report was discovered.

• The Justice Department said Friday that former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. authorized three subpoenas or search warrants last year for journalists or people viewed as members of the media, though two of the three were not ultimately used.

• Convict faces solitary confinement over unauthorized toothpaste, books.

• California’s efforts to ease its famously harsh use of solitary confinement are clashing with a bloody reality after an inmate who spent decades alone in a tiny cell was sent back to the general population and killed by fellow inmates within days.

• Hugo “Yogi” Pinell’s repeated assaults on guards landed him in solitary confinement beginning in the early 1970s, making him one of the longest-serving solitary confinement inmates in the nation, said Keramet Reiter, a University of C

• During his trip to east Africa the president chastened Kenyans about gay rights, domestic violence, genital cutting, forced marriage and equal rights for women. He went on and on with no mention of how well his country lives to any accepted standards of human rights.

• American presidents have no business chastising others. The country with the world’s largest prison state, military and history of aggressions is on shaky ground when giving anyone else advice. In the neighboring country of Somalia the United States regularly sends drones intended to kill al-Shabaab fighters but they deliver collateral damage to other people too. The blowback has killed many Kenyans, who are targeted by al-Shabaab because of their country’s role as an American puppet.

• Because hypocritical Americans have made gay rights the new measurement of societal well being all over the world, the president took the opportunity to castigate Kenyans about that too. Of course homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia, America’s partner in crime. Yet there is no record of public shaming for any Saudi prince or king on that or any other issue. Their sensibilities are deemed too delicate for tongue-lashing. It must be pointed out that Saudis take lashing quite literally.

• The official announcement that Jonathan Pollard will be paroled on November 21, having served 30 years for transmitting classified American documents to the Israeli government, is a welcome – if much-belated – development. The fact of his prospective release, however, must not be allowed to overshadow the injustices of his life sentence – and 30-year prison term – as set forth below.

• [...]

• Sixth, false accusations have likewise been made by U.S. government agencies that Pollard compromised intelligence operations in Eastern Europe and was consequently implicated in the deaths of American informants. Yet, these accusations were never part of his indictment, and no evidence for them has ever been adduced. In fact, the architect of these treasonable acts, and the source of the disinformation against Pollard, was none other than senior CIA official Aldrich Ames, who pleaded guilty to them in 1994.

• The CIA’s torture-era leadership won’t repent. Even after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its report saying in no uncertain terms that the CIA had tortured its prisoners, that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that torture never elicited any actionable intelligence that saved American lives, Bush-era CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and several of their underlings announced plans to release a book justifying torture.

• They intend to repeat a lie over and over again in this book: that torture worked. They hope that the American people are either so gullible or so stupid that they’ll believe it. It’s up to the rest of us to ensure that our government swears off committing this crime against humanity.

• I know that these former intelligence leaders are lying because I worked with them at the CIA. When I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, they came down on me like a ton of bricks.

• It’s not necessarily news that these former CIA heavyweights believe in torture, even if they refuse to call it what it is. Many television news outlets still run clips of George Tenet’s 2007 appearance on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in which he repeats “We do not torture! We do not torture!” as though he were unhinged and living in a dream world. Perhaps what Tenet needs to do is to read the United Nations Convention on Torture, to which the United States is a signatory.

• Dr. Scott A. Allen, professor of medicine, was a co-author of a report that concluded the American Psychological Association (APA) coordinated with federal officials to create an ethics policy on national security interrogations that aligned with the government’s legal justification for the post-9/11 CIA torture program. Featured in a New York Times story published in April, the study characterized the collaboration between the APA and officials in the CIA, White House and Department of Defense as secretive.

• The vote occurred at the APA’s first convention since the release of an extensive independent investigative report confirming the APA leadership actively colluded with the Pentagon and the CIA during the Bush administration to facilitate torture programs. It concluded that the APA Board and some senior staff, including its ethics director, engaged in a pattern of secret collusion with the Department of Defense officers to defeat efforts by the APA Council to introduce and pass resolutions that would have prohibited psychologies from participating in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and other U.S. detention centers abroad. Specially, the then-APA board president and then-APA president-elect were cited as key players who participated in this collusion.

• …many psychologists helped the CIA develop torture techniques after 9/11, making huge amounts of money in the process.

• It was a stunning about-face for the APA. Having spent the better part of the last eight years supporting the “dissident psychologists” in their battle against the organized profession, I had trouble believing my ears as the steady wave of yesses rolled through that Toronto conference room last week. It was as if we had stepped into an alternate reality.

• The real APA is all too real, I responded, but it is no longer my APA. I resigned in December 2007 after the August 2007 annual meeting effectively endorsed a professional role for psychologists in torture.

• During the American Psychological Association’s conference in Toronto, members reflected on how the group and the discipline can recover from revelations about torture. Some also attended a separate gathering of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, which held a teach-in focused on the matter of psychologists involved in torture.

• The health condition of Palestinian detainee Mohammad Allan, who has been on a hunger strike for two months and has passed into a coma amidst a dispute over force-feeding him hit the front page headlines in Palestinian dailies.

• It is close to midnight. The silhouettes of ink-black hills across the valley are outlined against a sky splashed with hundreds of stars. A cool breeze causes the branches of the surrounding olive trees to wave in unison while bringing relief from the heat wave currently scorching the Middle East.

• Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the U.S. government if he becomes president.

• Republican candidate Jeb Bush says torture is inappropriate, but use of brutal questioning methods may be justifiable and necessary for the US government

• Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush has declined to rule out resuming the use of torture under some circumstances by the US government.

• Over 60 inmates at New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility have complained of abuse by prison guards in the wake of the June escape of convicted killers David Sweat and Richard Matt.

• Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois announced a “landmark” agreement with the Chicago Police Department and the City of Chicago on stop and frisks by police officers. However, in the days following, it became evident that activists from the local movement for police accountability were upset because they believed the ACLU’s settlement undermined their efforts.

• The Chicago Police’s CIA-style black site, Homan Square, has seen more people detained than died on 9/11 or imprisoned at Guantanamo, according to a new report by the Guardian. The newspaper, which sued the Chicago police to obtain further details on Homan Square, reports overwhelming targeting of minorities as well as other sordid and violative policies.

• The U.S. Department of Justice, after settling most of its own civil rights lawsuit against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, will be able to intervene in a separate lawsuit that found the sheriff’s office had engaged in racial profiling against Latino drivers.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Thanks to edmundedgar on reddit I have some more accurate data to update my previous bandwidth growth estimation post: OFCOM UK, who released their November 2014 report on average broadband speeds. Whereas Akamai numbers could be lowered by the increase in mobile connections, this directly measures actual broadband speeds.

DRM

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

• Millions of users lost access to their personal files when Megaupload was raided and soon this data loss may be permanent. Carpathia Hosting’s new parent company has asked the court’s permission to wipe the servers clean, arguing that it should not bear the high financial costs. Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom disagrees and says his legal team will do its best to prevent any data from being destroyed.

• The U.S. studio behind the movie Dallas Buyers Club (DBC) has been handed a devastating blow in Australia. The company wanted to ‘fine’ downloaders many thousands of dollars each but the Federal Court has seen through the scheme and has refused to hand over alleged pirates’ identities unless DBC pays a AUS$600,000 bond.

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