● 11.07.15

● Links 7/11/2015: Croatia’s GNU/Linux/LibreOffice Manual, LibreOffice Big in Italy

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

• The sheer versatility of the Linux kernel truly knows no bounds. It can be found, literally, everywhere. From your local library to your local big box retailer, Linux is barely a stone’s throw away. There are very few places in the world that can be considered Linux-free. A small tribal village? Maybe. A shade tree mechanic? Possibly. A Prison? Well … not really. That’s right. It seems that Linux has been sent to the joint, and it poised to be there for a very long time.

• The technology has withstood the test of time by continuously evolving to meet the needs of financial traders – though until recently new features have been largely developed with in-house, proprietary code.

• The way Bloomberg keeps up with users’ expectations is changing, however, McCracken writes. The company is adopting open source technologies such as Linux, Hadoop, and Solr and contributing code back upstream.

• Croatia’s Ministry of Veterans has published a manual on how to use Linux and LibreOffice. The document is part of a feasibility pilot in the Ministry. “The text is intended for public administrations, but can be useful to others interested in using these tools”, the Ministry writes in its announcement on 5 November.

Kernel Space

• The HID driver updates were mailed in on Friday for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

• Takashi Iwai has lined up the sound driver updates for the Linux 4.4 kernel merge window.

• Highlights in the sound/audio realm for Linux 4.4 include new device support for some Firewire sound devices along with MIDI functionality, more ASoC updates around the Intel Skylake support added to Linux 4.3, and Intel’s Lewisburg controller has been added to the HD Audio driver.

• Chris Mason sent in the pull request today for updating the Btrfs file-system for Linux 4.4.

• The Btrfs file-system in Linux 4.4 has a number of sub-volume quota improvements, many code clean-ups, and a number of allocator fixes based upon their usage at Facebook. The allocator fixes should also help improve the RAID 5/6 performance when the file-system is mounted with ssd_spread as previously it hit some CPU bottlenecks.

• Dmitry Torokhov sent in the input driver updates today for the Linux 4.4 merge window.

• New input driver support with Linux 4.4 includes handling the remote controls for the Google Fiber TV Box, FocalTech FT6236 touchscreen controller support, ROHM BU21023/24 touchscreen controller.

• Besides the Btrfs pull request being sent in today for the Linux 4.4 merge window, the EXT4 updates were also sent in today by Ted Ts’o.

• The EXT4 changes for Linux 4.4 largely come down to a smothering of bug-fixes for this stable Linxu file-system. In particular, there’s also fixes around the EXT4 encryption support and Ted is encouraging any EXT4 encrypted users to update their patches against Linux 4.4 to avoid a memory leak and file-system corruption bug.

• One more thing: You know how many of us in FOSS consider the whole Linus Torvalds rant thing as a in-family squabble? Well, thanks to our friends at the Washington Post, now it’s out there for everyone to see — “everyone” meaning the general public and, worse, the non-tech parrots who will now say Linux is insecure (as an operating system, not as an idea). The article also operates under the subtext that because security is not Linus’ main focus, somehow Linux may be lacking in the security department. Internally we know better. Externally this is what the public sees.

• The Washington Post has been doing a series on the vulnerabilities of the Internet. Part five of the series focuses on Linus Torvalds and the state of security in the Linux kernel. Does Linus need to focus more on security?

• The Linux Foundation has announced the Open API Initiative, and some mighty powerful backers are on board. Founding members of the Open API Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.

• “The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to create an open technical community within which members can easily contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for RESTful APIs,” the announcement notes. The new open specification is targeted to allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of respective services without a lot of implementation logic. The Initiative is also aimed to promote and facilitate the adoption and use of an open API standard.

• Don’t send me feature requests. I’ve got more than enough ideas for stuff *I* want to implement. Diffs speak louder than words.

Graphics Stack

• This CLRadeonExtender project has complete GCN assembler/disassembler support for all GCN GPUs from GCN 1.0 through GCN 1.2, including full Fiji support. The assembler supports the binary formats of the AMD Catalyst driver with OpenCL 1.2 as well as Gallium3D compute for using the RadeonSI open-source driver.

Benchmarks

• This is a larger and more interesting comparison than the Linux distro comparison of September plus the fact that all stable Linux distributions are now in use thanks to a lot of distributions having put out their Q4 updates recently.

• OpenSUSE 42.1, Fedora Workstation 23, Ubuntu 15.10, Antergos 2015.10-Rolling, Debian 8.2, CentOS 7, and Manjaro 15.11 were all cleanly installed on the same system and carried out a variety of benchmarks to measure their out-of-the-box performance across multiple subsystems.

Applications

• As you may know, Rendera is an open-source painting and photo-retouching software for Linux,

• As you may know, PyCharm is a Python IDE, having some interesting functions like: code completion, error highlighting, customizable UI and key-bindings for VIM, VCS integrations or automated code refactorings and good navigation capabilities.

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• Frozenbyte has issued a content update for Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power adding a free new level, as well as official support for SteamOS and Linux. Also included are various minor fixes and improvements, such as mid-level checkpoints for the Lost Page levels.

• Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at a Linux Kernel 4.1 update for SteamOS, Nvidia support for Vulkan, Objects in Space and open hardware, and more.

• Obviously, it’s been quite a while now since leaving beta and in just a few days (10 November) is when the Steam Machines are officially out and powered by Valve’s Debian-based SteamOS. Over the past three years we’ve seen Valve make significant investments into the open-source graphics stack and other areas of Linux (in part through their sponsorship of Collabora and LunarG), Valve developers are significantly pushing SDL2, seen more mainstream interest in Linux gaming, have tons more games available natively for Linux, they have been heavily involved in the creation of the Vulkan graphics API, they have given away their entire game collection to the Mesa/Ubuntu/Debian upstream developers, and much more.

• Left 4 Dead 2 looks like one I will be trying out soon when my Steam Controller arrives next week. Also great to see surround sound in more games!

• It would be good to see Valve add native support for the Steam Controller to all of their games, but I am sure they are working on it bit by bit.

• A Story About My Uncle is a rather good looking first person adventure from Gone North Games and published by Coffee Stain Studios (think Sanctum 2 and Goat Simulator). It looks like it’s heading to Linux too, which is obviously awesome.

• Rise: Battle Lines is a quick and accessible multiplayer-focused battle game that delivers meaty strategy in a bite-size format. It’s just been released on Linux (via Steam) for the princely sum of $4.99/£3.99!

• The Rocket League developers recently did a reddit “ask me anything” and in it they stated the Linux port was almost ready.

• This is really great news, as people seem to be falling over themselves playing this game. Checking on it today the peak player count was “26,428″, so it looks like it will still be just as popular when we get it.

• A fellow from Nordic Games has commenting about the disappearance of the announced Darksiders and Darksiders II Linux ports.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Last month our Wayland efforts made a huge step forward. In KWin we are now at a state where I think the big underlying work is finished, we entered the finishing line of the KWin Wayland porting. The whole system though still needs a little bit more work.

• The big remaining task which I worked on last month was geometry handling. That is simplified: moving and resizing windows. Sounds relatively easy, but isn’t. Moving and resizing windows or in general the geometry handling is one of the core aspects of a window manager. It’s where our expertise is, the code which makes KWin such a good window manager. Naturally we don’t want to throw that code out and want to reuse it in a Wayland world.

• Packages for the release of KDE’s Applications and Platform 4.14.3 are available for Kubuntu 14.04.3. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

• For KDE users interested in the latest Wayland porting process, one of the big tasks currently being tackled is on Plasma’s screen management handling.

• KDE’s Sebastian Kügler has written a blog post about screen management in Wayland. The lengthy post goes over the good and bad of screen management in the Wayland world and how it’s going to be implemented within KDE Plasma’s Wayland support.

• KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin has written a monthly status update concerning the state of KWin and KDE Plasma on Wayland.

• The German open-source developer explained that most of the underlying work is finished as is most of the KWin Wayland porting, but the complete stack still needs more time to bake with Wayland. Much of October was spent working on the geometry handling with Wayland and still dealing with X11-specific KDE code.

Distributions

Screenshots/Screencasts

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• With the exception of a brief period in 2009, The PCLinuxOS Magazine has been published on a monthly basis since September, 2006. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

Ballnux/SUSE

• Fashion retailers are constantly investing in new technologies to keep pace with the ever-changing market demand. Mahindra Retail, part of the $6.3 billion Mahindra Group that operates the Mom & Me chain of stores in India, was looking to grow its business. However, its existing ERP system was posing a major challenge. The Bangalore-based fashion retailer implemented SAP ERP, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as the operating system – a move that has helped them to lower operational costs and boost business productivity.

Red Hat Family

• Mizuho reaffirmed their buy rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) in a research report report published on Friday, AnalystRatings.Net reports. They currently have a $88.00 target price on the open-source software company’s stock.

Fedora

• A few weeks ago, Lenovo came out with the Yoga 900, which was the successor to last years Yoga 3 pro and it in turn my Yoga 2 pro. The stats and early reviews looked pretty nice, so I ordered one.

• I was hoping for a smooth Fedora experience, but sadly I ran into two issues right away after booting from a Fedora Live USB.

• This week was the release week for Fedora 23, and the Fedora Project has again worked together with the DigitalOcean team to make Fedora 23 available in their service. If you’re not familiar with DigitalOcean already, it is a dead simple cloud hosting platform which is great for developers.

• One of the things I like about windows is the way the windows snap as you move the actual windows to the left or right of the screen. By default Mate in Fedora 23 doesn’t have this enabled, but it’s an easy fix

• On Monday, the Fedora Developer Portal was released to the public. This is for developers using Fedora, not about developing Fedora itself. It’s a central hub for numerous resources to help both new and current developers set up their workspaces for new projects. Interested? Read more in the announcement post — and please share with your software developer friends!

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• This week marks five years since Mark Shuttleworth shared with us Ubuntu intended to eventually switch to a Wayland-based environment for their Unity desktop rather than an X.Org Server… Most Phoronix readers know how that turned out.

• The Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update continues to receive all kinds of new packages and fixes, and it looks like the developers have had a really busy week.

• As you may know, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, code named Xenial Xerus will be the next big Ubuntu release, a lot of changes being scheduled for it.

• Among the changes, there will be a brand new tool for writing ISO images to USB disks, the good old Startup Creator being completely redesigned. While the software has been ignored a lot lately, the developers are porting it to QML, in order to make it easier for them to maintain and update it.

Devices/Embedded

• MYIR’s “MYC-C437x” and “MYD-C437X” COM and baseboard pair run Linux on TI’s Cortex-A9 Sitara AM437x SoC, and offer dual GbE ports and touchscreen options.

• MYIR first tapped the Sitara AM437x SoC from Texas Instruments earlier this year with its Rico Board. While the Rico had an integrated SBC design, the new MYD-C437X development board is one of MYIR’s sandwich-style concoctions featuring a separately available MYC-C437X computer-on-module. Similarly, MYIR’s Zynq-based MYD-C7Z010/20 offers a sandwich-style alternative to its Z-turn Board SBC.

Phones

Android

• Google’s latest version of Android, Marshmallow, only started rolling out last month. As such, it shouldn’t come as surprise to see that the current adoption numbers for it are extremely low.

• Google has not confirmed reports that it intended to merge Chrome OS and Android. Is the idea really that far-fetched? Here’s how the resulting products of such a marriage would be beneficial to users and the enterprise.

• LG’s new V10 smartphone is a compelling device that remains one of the last remaining modern smartphones with a removable battery and microSD card. There’s more for the road warrior too.

• The fall from grace of the Canadian technology firm BlackBerry has been well documented, but a new release on Friday featuring some Google-developed software has won over critics who are calling it the “best BlackBerry in a decade.”

• Officially launched in the U.S and the U.K. Friday, industry websites have been beaming out favorable reviews for the new Blackberry Priv. Thenextweb.com called it probably one of the best Android phones it has ever used and the U.K.’s Daily Mirror newspaper described it as “the comeback that gadget fans have been waiting for.” Technology website AndroidCentral stated that “BlackBerry can make one hell of an Android phone.”

• Google is hopeful that a shiny new phone will entice companies to give Android for Work a try. The first 3,000 companies to set up Android for Work with a participating enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution by December 31, 2015, will get a brand new Nexus 5X smartphone.

Free Software/Open Source

• The advantages of open source are well known: lower costs, the security and higher quality that arise from a large developer community and the absence of ties to one manufacturer are powerful arguments. In some areas open source products are already leaders in their field.

• As part of the company’s regular engagement with the wider coding community, Etsy engineers Maggie Zhou and Melissa Santos recently told an audience at O’Reilly’s OSCON open-source programming conference in Amsterdam exactly how Etsy successfully updates its technology to meet growing data demands.

• [...]

• The Etsy team uses open-source software and is committed to keeping its coding practices transparent.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenStack is finding its way into carriers and enterprise deployments around the world, but what about developers? At the recent OpenStack Summit in Tokyo, Japan, developers gathered to discuss the Mitaka release of OpenStack, set to debut in 2016. One of the themes that is emerging in OpenStack is the idea of focusing on a developer story, according to Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski.

• Mirantis is one of the largest contributors to OpenStack and has raised $200 million in equity to help fuel its efforts. Mirantis co-founder Boris Renski also sits on the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, giving him particular insight into the open-source cloud project.

• Large funding rounds by Hadoop-focused startups seem to be par for the course these days, as the open source big data framework becomes more of an attraction for businesses everywhere. The concept of making Hadoop easier to use is also not new. We’ve reported on the new front-ends and connecting tools that are appearing for the platform.

• Now, Cask Data, an open source software company that helps developers deliver enterprise-class Apache Hadoop solutions for simplifying its use, has announced that it’s raising a $20 million Series B financing round led by Safeguard Scientifics, with participation from Battery Ventures, Ignition Partners and other existing investors.

Databases

• Pretty much every name offers some possibility for being turned into a schoolyard taunt. But even though I’m an adult who left the schoolyard decades ago, my name still inspires giggles among the technologically minded. My last name is “Null,” and it comes preloaded with entertainment value. If you want to be cheeky, you will probably start with “Null and void.” If you’re a WIRED reader, you might move on to “Null set.” Down-the-rabbit-hole geeks prefer the classic “dev/null.”

• As a technology journalist, being a Null has served me rather well. (John Dvorak, you know what I’m talking about!) The geek connotations provide a bit of instant nerd cred—to the point where more than one person has accused me of using a nom de plume to make me seem like a bigger nerd than I am.

• But there’s a dark side to being a Null, and you coders out there are way ahead of me on this. For those of you unwise in the ways of programming, the problem is that “null” is one of those famously “reserved” text strings in many programming languages. Making matters worse is that software programs frequently use “null” specifically to ensure that a data field is not empty, so it’s often rejected as input in a web form.

• In other words: if lastname = null then… well, then try again with a lastname that isn’t “null.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Brescia explained that the Bitnami cloud launchpad is now available to Oracle Cloud users, providing over one hundred different open-source applications and development environments. Bitnami is no stranger to cloud deployments and is also available on the Google Cloud as well as other cloud environments. Bitnami’s core promise is that it enables users to rapidly deploy applications, which is a mission the company has been on since 2011.

Business

FUD/Openwashing

BSD

• pfSense® software version 2.2.5 is now available. This release includes a number of bug fixes and some security updates.

• Today is also the 11 year birthday of the project. While work started in late summer 2004, the domains were registered and the project made public on November 5, 2004. Thanks to everyone that has helped make the project a great success for 11 years. Things just keep getting better, and the best is yet to come.

• Many moons ago, OpenBGPd was extensively used throughout the networking world as a Route Server. However, over the years, many have stopped using it and have migrated away to other implementations. Recently, I have been getting more involved with the networking community, so I decided to ask “why”. Almost exclusively, they told me “filter performance”.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• In today’s Friday Free Software Directory IRC Meeting we started things off by getting some tips from Yaron Koren of WikiWorks related to improving our Approved Revisions process, which should be completed over the next week.

Public Services/Government

• Italy’s Ministry of Defence is pioneering the use of open-source office productivity tools with the migration of 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice

Openness/Sharing

Open Data

• In a speech earlier this week, Matt Hancock, minister for the Cabinet Office, referred to data as being “no longer just a record” but a “mineable commodity, from which value can be extracted” and outlined how the UK government intends to improve its use of the information at its disposal and help others exploit the data too.

• “Government data is no longer a forgotten filing cabinet, locked away in some dusty corner of Whitehall,” Hancock said. “It’s raw material, infinite possibility, waiting to be unleashed. No longer just a record of what’s happened, but a map of what might be.”

Programming

• Eclipse IoT, a working group of the Eclipse Foundation, has launched a challenge to encourage IoT developers to create innovative IoT solutions based on open source and open standards.

Leftovers

• His statement came shortly after Blatter’s spokesman, Klaus Stoehlker, said the 79-year-old Swiss official was under “medical evaluation” for stress-related reasons and had been told by doctors to relax.

• Sepp Blatter has been ordered by doctors to take five days off work after having a medical evaluation for stress.

• The 79-year-old, currently suspended from his role as Fifa president, consulted a doctor after feeling unwell, and although no underlying problem was discovered he has been ordered to rest.

• If you grew up in the ‘70s or ‘80s, the name Ralph Bakshi got your blood pumping. His films were bold and profane, hysterical, politically incorrect, gothic and gorgeous to look at. They were shot through with a real sense of rock and roll and street smarts — see the dirty satire “Fritz the Cat” (a take on R. Crumb’s famously horny feline, which was the first animated film to be rated X).

Health/Nutrition

• “Earlier this year, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead played sold-out ‘Fare Thee Well’ concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of their band,” says Ben Mark of Collectors Weekly. “But Jerry Garcia and company did not start using the name Grateful Dead until December of 1965. The exact date is surprisingly hard to pin down, as my story for Collectors Weekly reveals, but we do know that the Grateful Dead’s sound grew out of its experiences as the house band at the Acid Tests of 1965 and 1966, which were organized (if that’s even the right word…) by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

• Trying to write a definitive history of the Acid Tests, a series of multimedia happenings in 1965 and 1966, in which everyone in attendance was stoned on LSD, is like trying to organize an aquarium’s worth of electric eels into a nice neat row, sorted by length. You will never get the creatures to stop writhing, let alone straighten out, and if you touch them, well, they are electric eels.

• The DEA is a bloated, wasteful, scandal-ridden bureaucracy charged with the impossible task of keeping humans from doing something they’ve been doing for thousands of years – altering their consciousness. As states legalize marijuana, reform sentencing laws, and treat drug use more as a health issue and less as a criminal justice issue, the DEA must change with the times. Federal drug enforcement should focus on large cases that cross international and state boundaries, with an exclusive focus on violent traffickers and major crime syndicates. All other cases should be left to the states.

Security

• ProtonMail is getting its first taste of life as an entity known to criminals looking for a quick, easy payday.

• Throughout most of yesterday and through to this morning, the encrypted email service, set up by CERN scientists in Geneva last year to fight snooping by the likes of the NSA, was offline. The company had to use a WordPress blog to disclose what was happening to customers.

• Its datacenter was effectively shut down by waves of traffic thanks to two separate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. One of the groups responsible for flooding the servers demanded ProtonMail cough up 15 Bitcoin (currently worth around $6,000), or the attack would continue.

• A newly discovered ransomware is attacking Linux Web servers, taking aim at Web development environments used to host websites or code repositories.

• A new bit of ransomware is now attacking Linux-based machines, specifically the folders associated with serving web pages. Called Linux.Encoder.1 the ransomware will encrypt your MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders. The system then asks for a single bitcoin to decrypt the files.

• A federal judge Tuesday indicated he will dismiss with leave to amend a class action claiming Ford, Toyota and General Motors made their cars vulnerable to hackers.

• Over the last several weeks, reporting has revealed a coordinated insider effort at Volkswagen to insert a malicious piece of software—a defeat device—into the car’s electronic control module. The device was able to sense when emission tests were being conducted by monitoring things like “speed, engine operation, air pressure and even the position of the steering wheel,” and triggered changes to the car’s operations to reduce emissions during the testing process so that those cars would pass the tests. When the malicious software remained dormant, the emission controls were disabled and the cars spewed up to 40 times the EPA-mandated emissions limits. Through the defeat device, Volkswagen was able to sell more than half a million diesel-fueled cars in the U.S. in violation of U.S. environmental laws.

• Digital technology is often seen as a curiosity in revolutionary politics, perhaps as a specialized skill set that is peripheral to the hard work of organizing. But the growing trend of “cyber-resistance” might hold more potential than we have given it credit for. Specifically, the popularized use of encryption gives us the ability to form a type of liberated space within the shifting maze of cables and servers that make up the Internet. The “web” is bound by the laws of math and physics before the laws of states, and in that cyberspace we may be able to birth a new revolutionary consciousness.

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

• A U.S. warplane shot people trying to flee a burning hospital destroyed in airstrikes last month, according to the charity that ran the facility.

• “Thirty of our patients and medical staff died [in the bombing],” Doctors Without Borders General Director Christopher Stokes said during a speech in Kabul unveiling a report on the incident. “Some of them lost their limbs and were decapitated in the explosions. Others were shot by the circling gunship while fleeing the burning building.”

• The hospital in Kunduz was bombed on Oct. 3 as Afghan government forces fought to regain control of the city from Taliban insurgents.

• After the U.S. gave shifting explanations for the incident — which Doctors Without Borders has called a war crime — President Barack Obama apologized to the charity. The U.S. and Afghan governments have launched three separate investigations but the charity, which is also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is calling for an international inquiry.

• An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America’s national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country’s educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.

• Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.

• The U.S. drone program creates more militants than it kills, according to the head of intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the U.S. military unit that oversees that very program.

• “When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” remarked Michael T. Flynn. The retired Army lieutenant general, who also served as the U.S. Central Command’s director of intelligence, says that “the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.”

• Not everyone accepts the assessment of the former JSOC intelligence chief, however. Still today, defenders of the U.S. drone program insist it does more good than harm. One scholar, Georgetown University professor Christine Fair, is particularly strident in her support.

• First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.

• Wednesday brought a veritable smorgasbord of “new” information about the Russian passenger jet which fell out of the sky above the Sinai Peninsula last weekend.

• First there was an audio recording from ISIS’ Egyptian affiliate reiterating that they did indeed “down” the plane. Next, the ISIS home office in Raqqa (or Langley or Hollywood) released a video of five guys sitting in the front yard congratulating their Egyptian “brothers” on the accomplishment.

• David Cameron has said it is increasingly likely a “terrorist bomb” brought down the Airbus jet on Saturday, killing all 224 people on board.

• The rocket which reportedly came “within 1,000ft” of a British aircraft as it approached Sharm el-Sheikh in August was fired by the Egyptian military during a routine training exercise, the Government has said.

• The Thomson flight took evasive action after the pilot spotted the missile, The Daily Mail reported.

• Their source said: “The first officer was in charge at the time but the pilot was in the cockpit and saw the rocket coming towards the plane.

• “He ordered that the flight turn to the left to avoid the rocket, which was about 1,000ft away.”

• They reportedly went on to say that the staff were offered the chance to stay in Egypt, but chose to head back to the UK on a flight which took off with no internal or external lights.

• Arik, 54, works in an Israeli communications company that operates in Africa. He had intended to travel on to Israel after landing in Addis Ababa.

• “About 20 minutes before the plane started its descent the passenger sitting behind me identified me as Israeli and Jewish,” Arik told Ynet.

• “He came up behind my seat and started to choke me with a lot of force,” he continued, “and at first I couldn’t get my voice out and call for help.

• “He hit me over the head with a metal tray and shouted ‘Allah akbar’ and ‘I will slaughter the Jew.’ Only after a few seconds, just before I was about to lose consciousness, did I manage to call out and a flight attendant who saw what was happening summoned her colleagues,” Arik added.

• According to Arik, most of the passengers on the half-empty flight refrained from getting involved. “After they pulled him off me he hit me and shouted in Arabic. Some of the flight staff took me to the rear section of the plane and two guarded the attacked during the last part of the flight.”

• The US military-intelligence complex is engaged in systematic preparations for World War III. As far as the Pentagon is concerned, a military conflict with China and/or Russia is inevitable, and this prospect has become the driving force of its tactical and strategic planning.

• Three congressional hearings Tuesday demonstrated this reality. In the morning, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a lengthy hearing on cyberwarfare. In the afternoon, a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee discussed the present size and deployment of the US fleet of aircraft carriers, while another subcommittee of the same panel discussed the modernization of US nuclear weapons.

• The new US Department of Defense Law of War Manual is essentially a guidebook for violating international and domestic law and committing war crimes. The 1,165-page document, dated June 2015 and recently made available online, is not a statement of existing law as much as a compendium of what the Pentagon wishes the law to be.

• As part of a major overhaul of the U.S. government’s strategy against the Islamic State, President Barack Obama last week authorized the deployment of “fewer than 50” U.S. special operations troops to northern Syria, where they will work with local forces in the fight against the militants, according to Military Times.

• When Cheney and Bush used the NSA to institute flagrantly, unabashedly unconstitutional surveillance on American citizens, I didn’t see you guys pulling out your side-arms. Were you protecting the constitutionally guaranteed right to assembly and redress of grievances against armed police in Ferguson, Missouri, or Baltimore, Maryland?

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Ford Motor Company, despite its much-hyped commitment to the environment, has been quietly funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group widely criticized for its promotion of climate change denial and for its opposition to the development of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.

• A Ford spokesperson, Christin Baker, confirmed the ALEC grant to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch, but said that the funding was not intended to be used by ALEC to block action on climate change.

• “Ford participates in a broad range of organizations that support our business needs, but no organization speaks for Ford on every issue. We do not engage with ALEC on climate change,” said Baker.

• And it gets worse. “From 1998 to 2005,” Egan writes, Exxon contributed “almost $16 million to organizations designed to muddy the scientific waters.” I suppose it isn’t shocking that a titan of the decaying industrial economy would seek to distort the science and profit from our collective predicament. What is shocking, however, is that such a campaign would be so successful.

• Today, three Iowa politicians signed a pledge calling for “a World War II-scale mobilization” to fight climate change. Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie, State Rep. Dan Kelley, and State Senator Rob Hogg, a leading candidate for US Senate, all Democrats, signed a document calling on the US government to reduce emissions 100 percent by 2025 by “enlisting” tens of millions of Americans to work on clean energy projects—creating full employment in the process.

• It’s likely the most ambitious pledge to fight climate change put forward this election cycle, even if right now, it’s a symbolic gesture aimed at drawing attention to climate policy during the high season of presidential campaigning.

• The timing is accidental but impeccable. Just as governments are about to launch an unprecedented effort to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions, one of the biggest carbon-dioxide gushers ever known has erupted with record force. At times during the past several weeks, fires in Indonesia have released as much carbon as the entire U.S. economy, even as they have destroyed millions of acres of tropical forest, a natural carbon sink. Neighboring countries, along with economic giants such as the U.S., China and Europe, have to join forces to turn off this tap.

Finance

• Discussions about changing the dynamic code that runs the Bitcoin blockchain should constantly be happening. Over the course of the past year, the talks of changing the block size have been an overwhelming topic of conversation. There have been some pretty stubborn people when it comes to changing the protocols code, and this is not to say that forking the code is the right step. There has been censorship and subsequently has created a rift between people who want to raise the block size and those that don’t. In time, other discussions may have to occur regarding the underlying hash functions involved with the Bitcoin protocol and to assume things will always stay the same may be naive.

• Of course, that confidence that the US government will kill the innovation is perhaps the biggest weakness of Dimon’s argument. We have no doubt that governments are already trying their damnedest to kill off innovation around cryptocurrencies, but the larger question is really whether or not that’s even really possible.

• Here’s the problem for Dimon: should Bitcoin really reach the point at which Wall Street really views it as a true threat, then it’s probably too late for it to be stopped. That’s one of the (many) interesting parts about cryptocurrencies. The ability to stop them as they get more and more successful becomes significantly more difficult, to the point of reaching a near impossibility. But, it sure will lead to some amusing and ridiculous regulatory fights.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Israel “Izzy” Klein has left the Podesta Group for a small lobby shop, which is rebranding itself as Roberti Global: Irizarry-Klein-Roberti. He will serve as a managing partner at the firm, which has offices in Washington and New York. Prior to joining Podesta in 2009, Klein served as a senior aide to Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Ed Markey (Mass.).

• You hear a lot in the US media about a “clash of narratives” in the fighting between Palestinians and Israelis. But the truth is US news is shaped much more by one perspective than the other.

Censorship

• In July this year, 16-year-old blogger was given a four-week backdated jail sentence after being found guilty of making offensive remarks against Christianity, and for circulating an obscene image.

• Well, well, well. It looks like there’s something perfect little Singapore is not excelling in: Freedom on the net.

• We may be a powerhouse in a lot of areas — trade, commerce, economy, health, education and anti-corruption — but when it comes to freedom on the Internet, our results are pretty dismal. This was revealed in the report ‘Freedom on the Net 2015’, an annual study by the group Freedom House, an independent watchdog organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world.

• The level of Internet freedom in Singapore declined this year, according to an annual report by US-based NGO Freedom House.

• Singapore scored 41 on a scale of 0-100, with 0 indicating the most free and 100 indicating the least, up from 40 last year.

• Myanmar, Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Thailand and South Korea all saw declines in internet freedom over the last year, according to a report by US-based think tank Freedom House released this week.

• Despite the introduction of mobile carriers Telenor and Ooredoo to the market, Myanmar saw the biggest decline in internet freedom in the region, followed by Australia, which is considered to have the freest internet in Asia Pacific (New Zealand was not measured).

• Facebook has brought out the ban-hammer on its competitors in the past. Most notably, the social media giant banned advertisements from users for links to Google+, when that was still a thing. That said, the most recent example of Facebook banning what can be seen as a competitive product has gone even further, preventing users from linking to Tsu.co in status updates or on its messaging service.

Privacy

• But, in response to Vaz, May apparently insisted that there was nothing at all in her records that anyone might find surprising — leading some to question whether this was May agreeing to release her phone and internet records. Apparently Chris Gilmour decided to find out for sure, and has filed a Freedom of Information request in the UK for a bunch of May’s records (found via Ryan Gallagher).Dear Home Office,

• Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I hereby request the following information from and regarding the Rt Hon Theresa May MP (Con), Secretary of State for the Home Department (the “Home Secretary”):

• 1) The date, time, and recipient of every email sent by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

• 2) The date, time, and sender of every email received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

• 3) The date, time, and recipient of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) made by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

• 4) The date, time, and sender of every internet telephony call (e.g. “Skype” call) received by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

• 5) The date, time, and domain address of every website visited by the Home Secretary during October 2015.

• Yours faithfully,

• Chris Gilmour

• In the past few days there have been a flurry of stories about the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai peninsula, which investigators reportedly think may have been caused by a bomb. Notably, anonymous US officials have been leaking to journalists that they believe ISIS is involved, and it’s actually a perfect illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the US government’s position on the Edward Snowden disclosures.

• Why do US officials allegedly have a “feeling” that ISIS was involved? According to multiple reports, US intelligence agencies have been intercepting ISIS communications discussing “something big” in the region last week.

• In an interview with Swedish media, whistleblower Edward Snowden opened up about CIA torture, ISIS, and mass surveillance. Two-and-a-half years after revealing the NSA’s mass surveillance tactics, he says he’s “very comfortable” with his choices.

• The interview, conducted by journalists Lena Sundström and Lotta Härdelin for Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter newspaper, took place at a Moscow hotel. Just as you might expect at the beginning of an interview, the two reporters began by asking Snowden how he’s doing.

• “It’s hard for me to talk about what it’s like, because anything I say is going to be used by US critics. If I say good things about Russia, you know, like ‘it’s not hell,’ then they’ll be like ‘he fell in love with the Kremlin’ or something like that. If I say something terrible, then it’s the same thing. Then they’ll go ‘oh, he hates it in Russia, you know he’s miserable,’” Snowden told the journalists.

• The Nameless Coalition letter was signed by over 80 individuals and organizations. The signatories, which include US-based groups like the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence and the ACLU as well as digital rights and human rights groups from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia such as the Internet Democracy Project, India, serve different populations and work on different issues. But we all agree on one thing: Facebook should get rid of its names policy altogether.

• In this post, I want to focus on a narrow slice of Charlie Savage’s much-anticipated book Power Wars (published today…go ahead, order it now!), one that might not generate as much attention as the material covering more recent national security law episodes. In particular, I want to highlight the book’s discussion of an area of NSA surveillance activity sometimes labeled “transit authority.” It is a very useful case study of the way in which legal and policy questions may be impacted by technological change (and also a handy illustration of why it is significant that the private sector owns telecommunications infrastructure in the United States).

• Antivirus and security firms that serve enterprise and government customers on occasion disclose their source code to acquire lucrative contracts.

• In Britain, allegedly, no one cares that the state is collecting vast data on all of us. In the US things are clearly very different.

• As Cold War tensions increased throughout the 1970s, the Soviets pulled out all the stops when it came to digging up information from US diplomats. This NSA memo from 2012 explains how several IBM Selectric typewriters used in the Moscow and Leningrad offices were successfully bugged with electromechanical devices that could possibly have been the world’s first keyloggers.

• Leading up to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to the United States, media buzzed with talk of an unprecedented cybersecurity agreement on par with previous governance around the creation and handling of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

• But what was built up to be the first arms control accord for cyberspace actually turned out to be quite anticlimactic.

• Like millions of Americans, this past week I was sitting on my couch, drinking a cold beer, watching Game 1 of the World Series – professional baseball’s hallowed championship. Suddenly the satellite feed went out, the screen went dark. Naturally, as FOX Sports scrambled to get their live feed fixed, many of my fellow Americans took to twitter to speculate as to what had caused the outage. I was, sadly, unsurprised to see that the most common joke people were making was that China must have hacked the World Series.

• On the one hand, it is understandable given the barrage of propaganda about Chinese hackers as a threat to corporate and national security; seemingly every week there is a new news item highlighting the great red cyber-menace. On the other hand, it is a perfect illustration of the hypocrisy and ignorant arrogance of Americans who, despite being citizens of unquestionably the most aggressive nation when it comes to both cyber espionage and surveillance, see fit to cast China as the real villain. It is a testament to the power of both propaganda and imperial triumphalism that a proposition so disconnected from reality, and bordering on Orwellian Doublethink, is not only accepted, but is ipso facto true.

• The TransPacific Partnership trade agreement has been released, and it goes way beyond resolving a few trade and tariff disputes. US and other trade negotiators leaped into a host of policy and legal matters, including the fight over when governments can demand access to encryption keys.

• Edward Snowden isn’t the only government leaker gunning to reform the nation’s surveillance laws: The former NSA contractor is credited with getting the USA Freedom Act passed earlier this year, but WikiLeaks source Pvt. Chelsea Manning now has a proposal of her own, which she revealed on Tuesday.

• Security seemed foolproof at the windowless vault in TRW corporation’s compound in Redondo, California. Understandably so – it was a core component of the Rhyolite eavesdropping satellite system that TRW built and operated for the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s. One of the vault’s key functions was to handle communications from the Rhyolite satellite ground station TRW operated under CIA guidance at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. But Redondo’s security measures did not stop Christopher Boyce, a young, dope-smoking, high school dropout, from stealing large quantities of classified information from the vault in 1975 and 1976, and selling it to the Soviet Union.

• FBI General Counsel James Baker today spoke about how encryption is making it increasingly difficult for law enforcement agencies to conduct surveillance. While the FBI has previously argued in favor of backdoors that let authorities defeat encryption, Baker said the issue must ultimately be decided by the American people.

• An executive order may allow the collection of American electronic communications that routinely cross international borders, a panel of experts appeared to agree Friday. But what exactly is being done under Executive Order 12333? The experts wouldn’t say.

• When it comes to snooping and surveillance, Glenn Greenwald is one of the most vocal advocates of the dangers of such services. In fact up until 2014, the anti-NSA crusader wrote a column for the Guardian on the ‘vital issues of civil rights, freedom of information and justice’.

• Just as the United States is taking a first step toward placating European privacy concerns about U.S. surveillance, several European countries are passing laws dramatically expanding their own spy programs.

• GCHQ and the other five eyes agencies have a large array of tools, as disclosed through the Snowden and other leaks. They also have internally developed tools, with funny names like SWAMP DONKEY and ANGRY PIRATE. We don’t know exactly what GCHQ can and can’t do. But every time there’s a leak, the details are often both impressive and scary from a hacker’s perspective.

• Two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the vast reach of U.S. and U.K. surveillance, the U.S. Congress rolled back the most manifestly unconstitutional element: the bulk collection of domestic phone data.

• In honour of Bonfire Night, The Huffington Post UK has imagined two possible outcomes if it came down to an epic battle between Guy Fawkes and Theresa May.

• Despite all this, Dropbox has been heavily criticised for its attitude to privacy. The company has Condeleezza Rice on its board of directors, regarded as one of the architects of the NSA PRISM snooping programme, leading whistleblower Edward Snowden to describe it as “hostile to privacy”.

• Timothy Libert, a researcher with the University of Pennsylvania, has published a study that provides an analysis of the privacy compromises on one million popular websites. In his findings, the study adds that almost nine in ten websites leak user information to third-parties and claims that the “users are usually unaware of.” Further, the study suggested that over six websites in ten spawn third-party cookies and over eight in ten load Javascript code from an external party onto a user’s system.

• Exasperated by the widening chasm between security theatre and reality, they wondered if there was another way to resist the industrial spying/marketing/data-siphoning complex, one that didn’t require major policy or technology overhauls. The resulting book bills itself as “a user’s guide for privacy and protest”, and as an encyclopedia of the various ways people have covered their tracks, it’s both intriguing and instructive. But if you were looking for something “for dummies”, it falls somewhat short as many of its best exemplars are has-beens or never-weres.

• On October 6, 2015, the European Court of Justice invalidated “Safe Harbor”, a pact which for nearly fifteen years allowed United States companies to transfer electronic data from European companies and satisfy accompanying European privacy standards by self-certifying that the American companies do, in fact, offer adequate privacy protections. European Union prohibits data from being transferred and processed to parts of the world that do not provide “adequate” privacy protections.

• Legal challenges to Safe Harbor came after Edward Snowden leaked details about the National Security Agency’s (“NSA”) surveillance program known as the Prism, which allegedly resulted in NSA accessing, inter alia, Facebook data.

• The European Commission (EC) has effectively told the United States the ball is in their court regarding the future progress of the Safe Harbour data agreement.

• The 1995 EU Data Protection Directive sets out rules for transferring personal data from the EU to non-EU countries. Under these rules, the Commission may decide that a non-EU country ensures an “adequate level of protection”. These decisions are commonly referred to as “adequacy decisions”.

• Just a “handful” of senior cabinet ministers were aware the security services had powers to collect the phone records of British citizens in bulk, Nick Clegg has claimed.

• Earlier, the Home Secretary Theresa May admitted that United Kingdom spy agencies MI5, MI6 and GCHQ secretly collected communications data for decades to protect “national security”.

• Home Secretary Theresa May has revealed the existence of an MI5 programme to collect vast amounts of data about UK phone calls – how and why was it kept secret?

• Journalists, not usually known for their computing skills, may be unsure how to go about familiarising themselves with the various techniques for encrypting their communications and data. This section, therefore, hopes to introduce a number of tools and concepts, together with resources for continued learning; hopefully, it can provide the basis for journalists to begin the journey.

• All the tools detailed below, unless stated otherwise, are open-source and freely available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. Given the high chance that Windows and Mac OS X are compromised, it is recommended to use Linux in situations where security is critical.

• Naturally, as with all software, bugs and security problems are constantly being found (and hopefully fixed); it goes without saying that the latest (stable) version of all the following tools should always be used, and security warnings on the developers’ websites checked regularly.

• For critical applications, one should already be familiar with the tools in question to avoid potential errors that could compromise security. Most of the tools described below provide comprehensive guides that should be studied carefully.

• In addition to encrypting communications, journalists will often need to encrypt documents they are working on, such as articles in progress or documents passed to them in confidence. Commonly used compression tools often provide encryption support; though commercial tools are potentially compromised and should not be trusted.

• A reliable open source compression tool is 7zip, which supports the AES-256 encryption standard. As noted previously, the strength of the encryption will be compromised by a trivial password. The full set of US diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks was distributed as a 7zip-encrypted file; it was decrypted only after Guardian journalist David Leigh published the password in a book by mistake.

• Another popular tool is Truecrypt (not strictly open-source, though the source code is available), which offers a wider range of cryptographic functions, such as encrypting entire file systems.

• If you were German, on the other hand, I’d adjust my expectations. There, I learned this week, it’s quite common for a suggested Skype video chat to founder on the discovery that your friend blocked up the little eye on their laptop long ago. Once it emerged, via Edward Snowden, that the snoopers of the National Security Agency had access to supposedly encrypted Skype calls, Germans reached for the duct tape. They wanted Big Brother to wear a blindfold.

• Do the British public, especially the younger generation, care about privacy? Are they apathetic, or is it that they just regard security in at time of Islamist threats as the overriding concern?

• Polls suggest the UK, in contrast with countries such as the US or Germany, tends to be largely apathetic about privacy.

• And yet the whistleblower Edward Snowden, sitting in exile in Russia, has attracted 1.6 million followers on Twitter, many of them from the UK. Scepticism about the pervasiveness of government surveillance has seeped into public conscious and culture, with people routinely joking about GCHQ or other agencies listening in on iPhones.

• So privacy-v-secrecy has become a staple of in spy thrillers, from Homeland to Spectre. But there are big some big reasons to be concerned about the issue in real life.

• The former National Security Agency analyst said it had taken 30 years for Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam war, to shift from being described regularly as a traitor.

• But not once in the debate had Snowden been referred to as a traitor.

• “When eventually I wanted to do something about it — I knew these programs were wrong and I was thinking about coming forward — I wanted to make sure I wasn’t a crazy person,” he said, noting he revealed his reservations to colleagues.

• “Everybody has their shop talks,” Snowden added. “It’s not like anybody at the NSA is a villain. No one’s sitting there thinking ‘how can I destroy democracy?’

• “They’re good people doing bad things for what they believe is a good reason. They think the end justifies the means.”

• Snowden said the policies of the U.S. government often end up creating unintentional harm.

• In 2013, the world learned that the NSA and its UK equivalent, GCHQ, routinely spied on the German government. Amid the outrage, artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter thought: Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them.

• Former NSA contract worker and whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke about online surveillance and cybersecurity via Google Hangout to students and the public at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville on Tuesday.

• The talk runs from 6:30 pm to 8pm – doors open at 6pm – with a 45 minute keynote address by Snowden about the changing nature of surveillance and current state of espionage, followed by a 35 minute question period moderated by Dr. David Lyon of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s.

• Neurosurgeon, author, and new GOP frontrunner Dr. Ben Carson weighed in this week about the future of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

• When ThinkProgress asked Carson during a book signing on Tuesday outside of Tampa whether he would be open to pardoning Snowden, he replied: “It would set a very bad precedent. There are appropriate ways to reveal things, and that was an inappropriate way, because it jeopardized our country.”

• WHEN former US spook Edward Snowden leaked masses of classified National Security Agency (NSA) data two years ago, he did something heroic.

• This is not because leaking classified intelligence is inherently virtuous or even because of the huge personal sacrifices Snowden made — giving up his well-paid job and his relationship and being forced to live in exile.

• The U.S. National Security Agency, seeking to rebut accusations that it hoards information about vulnerabilities in computer software, thereby leaving U.S. companies open to cyber attacks, said last week that it tells U.S. technology firms about the most serious flaws it finds more than 90 percent of the time.

• The re-assurances may be misleading, because the NSA often uses the vulnerabilities to make its own cyber-attacks first, according to current and former U.S. government officials. Only then does NSA disclose them to technology vendors so that they can fix the problems and ship updated programs to customers, the officials said.

• Britain is working to push through new laws that will effectively ban the use of strong encryption in the country, forcing companies to provide unscrambled content if served with a court warrant.

• Given the widespread abuse of RIPA by the police, and coppers then covering it up, this is a concerning attack on the most fundamental basics of press freedom. They’ll be entering newsrooms to smash up hard drives next…

• While the world was distracted by the UK Pry Minister’s ban-working-encryption, log-everything-online Investigatory Powers Bill, the civil service was urging government and enterprises to adopt better cryptography for voice calls.

• CESG, “the information security arm of GCHQ, and the national technical authority for information assurance”, dropped new guidance (called “Secure voice at OFFICIAL”) about protecting voice calls, noting that the PSTN has been considered insecure (“suitable for UNCLASSIFIED calls only”) for some years.

• Today, the UK government will announce details of the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, a piece of legislation that will propose sweeping surveillance powers for law enforcement. These are expected to include the retention of citizens’ internet browsing history, and restrictions on encryption.

• The Telegraph reports the legislation will ban companies such as Apple from offering customers robust end-to-end encryption which results in communications not being accessible to law enforcement even when they have a warrant. Other reports suggest the idea of a ban will be walked back.

• “You can’t just uninvent encryption, so if this government stops innocent people using unbreakable encryption via legitimate businesses, the only people left using it will be the criminals.”

• The Investigatory Powers Bill could leave UK citizens at risk of data theft even though end-to-end encryption has not been banned.

• Home Secretary Theresa May presented the proposed legislation, known colloquially as the Snooper’s Charter, to Parliament today, and if passed, it would require ISPs to store Internet Connection Records (ICRs – which domains people visit) for up to 12 months.

• This includes details of which services a device has connected through, such as a website or instant messaging (IM) platform.

• Shami Chakrabarti, the Liberty director, has just been on BBC News making the same point David David Davis has been making. (See 4.20pm.) She said:

• On Wednesday, the Investigatory Powers Bill was published in draft form, but it was in the wake of 9/11 that the UK government started its mass surveillance programs, spying on the online activities of British citizens. Under the guise of the 1984 Telecommunications Act, this surveillance was moved up a gear in 2005. Former deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says that very few politicians knew about it.

• Hacking powers, known officially as computer network exploitation, can involve anything from remotely hacking into servers, to localised systems like keyboard loggers, that record every key pressed.

• Perhaps the most profound change is that it requires all internet service providers (ISP) to retain a log of all customers’ internet usage for one year. So under the new rules, everything you do online will be accessible by the security services or the police should they want to take a look.

• While in the US modest attempts have been made to curb the NSA’s powers in the wake of the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations, the UK is going the other way.

• The British government on Wednesday published draft legislation on surveillance, its response to the documents disclosed by Snowden to the Guardian two and a half years ago revealing the scale of snooping by the NSA and its British sister agency, GCHQ.

• The UK’s draft bill not only consolidates in law bulk data collection but it adds even more intrusive powers. Privacy, according to polls, is less of a concern for the British than security.

• A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.

• Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.

• A new, more limited system for monitoring Americans’ phone calls for signs of terrorist intent is so slow and cumbersome that the U.S. National Security Agency will likely never use it, a senior Senate Republican said.

• Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, opposed the new system when it was mandated earlier this year. He said this week he was not concerned by how the NSA will transition to it because it will probably not be used.

• A group of engineers — myself among them — decided to create and fund open source hardware engine designs capable of strong and reliable encryption and decryption for email, plus public-private key encryption for digital signatures, DNSSEC, files and other uses.

• For the Bush-Cheney administration, the introduction of warrantless wiretapping outside the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) brought to fruition the aspirations that Vice President Dick Cheney had harbored from his time in the Ford administration. Savage explains that Cheney “wanted to refight the battles of the 1970s, reducing the power of Congress and the courts and restoring the power of the presidency” (page 43). The architects of the Bush-Cheney era shared a common goal — to leave the Presidency stronger than when they found it. The point was not whether the President already had the authority. To the contrary, the administration “was in the business of creating executive-power precedents” (page 46).

• Disclosing a ruling showing how the government proposed using data that the National Security Agency tapped from the “Internet’s backbone” could “reasonably be expected to cause grave damage to national security,” a federal judge ruled.

• In October, the European Union’s highest court struck down the “Safe Harbor” Privacy Principles, a provision that allowed for the sharing of European personal data between the EU and U.S. The verdict is meant to preserve EU citizens’ inherent right to privacy given the reality of U.S. national security laws, specifically The Patriot Act, which provide the NSA nearly unilateral access to data managed by U.S. companies.

• James Bridle’s new essay (adapted from a speech at the Through Post-Atomic Eyes event in Toronto last month) draws a connection between the terror of life in the nuclear shadow and the days we live in now, when we know that huge privacy disasters are looming, but are seemingly powerless to stop the proliferation of surveillance.

• With just over a year left in office, President Obama is running out of time to fulfill his longstanding promise to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. The imprisonment of foreigners at Guantánamo is one of several Bush-era policies that continue under Obama’s presidency. While Obama has shut down the CIA’s secret prisons and banned the harshest of Bush’s torture methods, many others—the drone war, presidential secrecy, jailing whistleblowers and mass surveillance—either continue or have even grown. The story of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism legacy is told in the new book, “Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Charlie Savage.

• The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law heard testimony on the security risks posed by the multibillion-dollar data-broker industry that mines, analyzes and sells consumer information.

• The European Parliament voted on October 29 to drop all criminal charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and offer him asylum and protection from rendition from third parties, The Independent said that day.

• By urging EU members to stop the persecution of Edward Snowden, the European Parliament showed its independence from the United States, the chairman of the independent non-profit organization Workshop of Eurasian Ideas told Radio Sputnik.

• The EU Parliament has adopted a non-binding resolution calling on member states to give Edward Snowden asylum.

• And Alternativet and Enhedslisten have drafted a resolution encouraging a vote to give Snowden residence.

• PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen begs to differ.

• Reading news online, you could be forgiven for thinking that trolling is a synonym for “doing something on the internet.” Gamergaters are “trolling” women. Edward Snowden is “trolling” the NSA. President Obama is “trolling” Republicans — with a “hilarious ‘grumpy cat’ meme,” no less. You don’t even need to be online to troll: The Walking Dead is, apparently, “trolling” its audience.

• Anyone who values their privacy will be aware of Tor, the distributed “onion routing” network that makes it possible to avoid surveillance (though it is thought that even the sophistication of the Tor system may not be enough to avoid NSA scrutiny if they really want to get the login for your Ashley Madison account).

• The web most of us use isn’t one built for privacy — the NSA aside, advertising is what makes the World Wide Web go ’round, and advertising often means marketers getting to know you better than you’d like. While most of us probably aren’t getting actively snooped on, maintaining high standards for privacy is good practice in general, and there are many activists worldwide who have good reason to think they’re being spied on. That’s why Tor exists — a system of web browsing that bounces server requests along several nodes to obscure the source of the request (that’s you). Until now, Tor has been used mostly for secure web browsing, but that technology has finally been extended to instant messaging, and it’s going to work for some services not exactly known for their sterling privacy records.

• The Federal Communications Commission said Friday that it can’t force Internet companies like Google, Facebook and ad providers from tracking users online. The commission had been petitioned by the privacy advocacy group Consumer Watchdog to make the “Do Not Track” setting in many browsers illegal to ignore.

• “Do Not Track” was created by researchers as a standard signal browsers can send along with other data when visiting a website. When detected, it is supposed to limit the amount of data advertisers and other online tracking companies collect. That reduced collection, however, must be voluntary: The setting merely indicates a preference, it doesn’t obscure the user’s data the way encryption does.

• The Going Dark encryption debate surfaced again on Wednesday at a small security conference here, and as in previous iterations before larger technical audiences and even Congress, the issue continues to spin on a hamster wheel going nowhere.

Civil Rights

• A veteran FBI agent who was caught on camera shoving a 15-year-old boy to the ground and threatening the teen with his gun has been found guilty of assault.

• Gerald John Rogero, 45, was off-duty last December when he meddled into a Maryland family’s dispute over a child custody drop-off.

• The agent, who knew one of the family members involved, was rebuking a man for being late to drop off his child when a teenager confronted him for intruding.

• “[S]ee what you can do without drawing attention. This involves family so I don’t want anyone to know.”

• That’s what a North Carolina local judge told an FBI official in seeking the agent’s cooperation to get the text messages of two different phone numbers, according to the federal indictment (PDF) lodged against Wayne County Superior Court Judge Arnold Ogden Jones.

• How much is that illegal, warrantless surveillance worth?

• About three weeks ago, a team of teenage hackers managed to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. In the process, they were not only able to access Brennan’s personal correspondence, but also sensitive security information regarding top-secret Intelligence matters.

• Hackers who broke into the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan have struck again.

• This time the group, which goes by the name Crackas With Attitude, says it gained access to an even more important target—a portal for law enforcement that grants access to arrest records and other sensitive data, including what appears to be a tool for sharing information about active shooters and terrorist events, and a system for real-time chats between law enforcement agents.

• A cybersecurity expert once told me something I’ll never forget: “don’t underestimate what bored teenagers can do.”

• A group teenagers that call themselves “Crackas With Attitude” reminded me of those words when they were able to hack into the personal AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan. The teenagers, who described themselves as “stoners,” even had the guts to give multiple media interviews, boasting about their feats.

• A human rights group has criticised the “smokescreen” surrounding the ongoing probe into CIA rendition flights landing at Scottish airports.

• Amnesty International’s Naomi McAuliffe said “excessive secrecy” was “fuelling the national security threat”.

• Police Scotland is investigating claims airports were used as stop-offs for planes transferring suspected terrorists to secret jails overseas.

• A sneak peek of a soon-to-be-released documentary reveals mixed sentiments among former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency on the United States’ use of torture.

• I joined the CIA in January 1990.

• The CIA was vastly different back then from the agency that emerged in the days after the 9/11 attacks. And it was a far cry from the flawed and confused organization it is today.

• One reason for those flaws — and for the convulsions the agency has experienced over the past decade and a half — is its utter lack of ethics in intelligence operations.

• It’s no secret that the CIA has gone through periods where violating U.S. law and basic ethics were standard operating procedure. During the Cold War, the agency assassinated foreign leaders, toppled governments, spied on American citizens, and conducted operations with no legal authority to do so. That’s an historical fact.

• I liked to think that things had changed by the time I worked there. CIA officers, I believed, were taught about legal limits to their operations — they learned what was and wasn’t permitted by law.

• More than two dozen civic groups groups are asking why government agencies haven’t found somebody to respond to possible human rights violations within the agencies’ areas of responsibility — as required by a 1998 executive order.

• The groups sent letters to six agencies on Wednesday — the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — echoing their past request for a point of contact who can respond to violations of international human rights treaties.

• The authors of the letter, including government accountability, civil rights, and consumer advocate organizations, pointed to the recent decision by the EU Court of Justice — invalidating a free-flowing data-sharing pact between the U.S. and Europe out of privacy concerns — as a reason for urgency in filling the role.

• The US intelligence community is in a very poor position to be trusted with protecting civil liberties while engaging in intelligence work. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re a skilled intelligence professional, everything looks like a vital source for collection.

• Members of the intelligence community are, it’s true, under immense stress to prevent a devastating national catastrophe. I understand a little of how that feels: while working as an analyst in Iraq, thousands of military personnel, contractors and local civilians were dependent on our ability to effectively understand the threats we were facing, and to explain them to US military commanders, the commanders of Iraqi forces and the civilian leadership of both nations.

• General Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security, frequently pushed very hard to “collect it all”; during my time as an intelligence analyst, I completely agreed with his mantra. So it’s not surprising that today’s intelligence community – as well as law enforcement at all levels of government – aggressively pursue an increasingly large and sophisticated wish list of intelligence tools regardless of whether appropriate oversight mechanisms are in place.

• The intelligence community’s top lawyer said Thursday that giving contractors whistleblower protection is “complicated.”

• Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, said a contractor “isn’t working for the government,” and as a result, under current law: “The government doesn’t straight out have the authority to say whether that person can be fired; that’s up to the contractor.”

• The lack of whistleblower protection for intelligence community contractors has become a central issue in the debate over whether Edward Snowden, then working at the National Security Agency as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, did the right thing in taking his concerns about surveillance programs — and a trove of documents — to journalists. Public figures including Hillary Clinton have incorrectly asserted that Snowden would have been protected from reprisal had he gone through proper channels.

• Litt was correct in saying that whistleblowers who work as contractors for intelligence agencies can be fired, silenced, or otherwise retaliated against for blowing the whistle with almost no legal protections.

• Earlier this year, a hacking group broke into the personal email account of CIA director John Brenner and published a host of sensitive attachments that it got its hands on (yes, Brenner should not have been using his AOL email address for CIA business). Now, Wired reports the group has hit a much more sensitive and presumably secure target: a law enforcement portal that contains arrest records as well as tools for sharing info around terrorist events and active shooters. There’s even a real-time chat system built in for the FBI to communicate with other law enforcement groups around the US.

• The group has since published a portion the data it collected to Pastebin and Cryptobin; apparently it released government, military, and police names, emails, and phone numbers. But the portal the hackers accessed held much more info. All told, they got their hands on a dozen different law enforcement tools, and Wired verified that a screenshot of the Joint Automated Booking System (JABS) provided by the hackers was legitimate. The JABS vulnerability is noteworthy because it means the hackers can view arrest records as they’re entered into the database — regardless of whether or not the arrests were under court seal. Typically, those arrests might not be made public for long periods of time as a way of keeping big investigations secret.

• New Zealand’s spy watchdog has launched an inquiry into her country’s links to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

• Cheryl Gwyn, the inspector general for intelligence and security, said the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in December 2014 named a number of countries that were involved in the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees — “but the names of those countries have been redacted.”

• That wasn’t OK with her.

• The government has rubbished calls for changes to the oversight of the country’s spy agencies as the Inspector General investigates any links between them and the CIA’s torture programmes.

• A report revealed the SIS failed to provide the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Cheryl Gwyn with copies of visual surveillance warrants as required by law.

• Instead, the Inspector General discovered them during a warrant review process.

• Sabrina De Sousa is one of nearly two-dozen CIA officers who was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced by Italian courts in absentia in 2009 for the role she allegedly played in the rendition of a radical cleric named Abu Omar. It was the first and only criminal prosecution that has ever taken place related to the CIA’s rendition program, which involved more than 100 suspected terrorists and the assistance of dozens of European countries.

• Last week, it was written here that federal bureaucrats issued a burdensome judge-less subpoena to McDonald’s after the company took a position on the minimum wage contrary to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)’s. McDonald’s had already spent a million dollars to produce documents complying with a judge-less subpoena from the SEIU’s “partner” in government, the National Labor Relations Board, and the NLRB still wanted the emails of McDonald’s employees.

• [...]

• The 4th Amendment’s protections of the security of papers and effects were designed to prevent the political abuses now found in the use of administrative subpoenas. Administrative subpoenas, which are issued without approval by judges, are impossible to reconcile with the 4th Amendment. They are a bigger threat to liberty than the NSA’s warrantless collection of phone call metadata precisely because they are used to intimidate and silence political opponents.

• The same decades that saw the growth of national-security secrecy saw the rise of the public’s “right to know.”

• An actress from Iran has gone on the run after igniting a backlash by posting photos of herself on social media showing her not wearing a hijab, the traditional Muslim head cover. Sadaf Taherian began posting the controversial photos on Facebook and Instagram over the last two weeks and the response from Iranians was as swift as it was extreme. In an interview with Masih Alinejad, a journalist who runs a Facebook page called “My Stealthy Freedom,” which features photos and videos of Iranian women walking in public with their heads uncovered, Taherian reportedly said she was initially “nervous” about the reaction the images might trigger. Indeed, many Iranians lashed out at Taherian with insults and called her “immoral.”

• No one reads those interminable terms of service agreements on Instagram, WhatsApp and their like. But they could make the difference between life and death, according to Rebecca MacKinnon.

• “It may be about whether you get tortured for what you wrote on Facebook or not, or whether you get tried based on some of the stuff you had in your text messages or something you uploaded. They’re worth a lot to human beings,” said MacKinnon, the leader of a new project that hopes to show people just what they are signing away when they blindly click “agree”.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The assertions by Australia and USTR that the ISDS provisions do not apply to intellectual property were efforts to spin and exaggerate the importance of several limited exceptions to the ISDS, most of which do not actually remove key decisions and policy from ISDS arbitration.

• There is, as in earlier drafts, a limited exception for compulsory licenses or the “issuance, revocation, limitation or creation” of intellectual property rights, but only ” to the extent that the issuance, revocation, limitation or creation is consistent with Chapter 18 (Intellectual Property) and the TRIPS Agreement.” This means private investors will have the right to use the ISDS mechanism to interpret the IP chapter of the TPP and also the TRIPS agreement itself.

• The deal is long and complex: it stretches to 2,000 pages and is written in largely technical and legal language, making quick analysis difficult.

• President Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he intends to agree to the massively controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal in a letter to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate.

• The letter, released just hours after the full text of the agreement became public after years of secret negotiations, is basically a formality. Still, it shows that Obama is serious about signing the TPP, and highlights the fight ahead.

• Even if Obama is gung-ho on the deal, prominent fellow Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have strongly opposed the TPP as it currently stands. There’s no guarantee that Congress will approve of the agreement.

Copyrights

• The RIAA is demanding a preliminary injunction to bring the downed Aurous music service to its knees. While Aurous is fighting back, the RIAA’s lawyers are giving their adversaries a legal beat down, using developer Andrew Sampson’s words against him and giving his legal team a mountain to climb. But with all that said, peace is now on the horizon.

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