Recent quotes:
ANNAPOLIS, Md., February 10, 2014– It’s lights out for the National Security Agency (NSA). State lawmakers in Maryland have filed emergency status legislation that seeks to cut the NSA’s Ft. Meade headquarters off from all material support stemming from the state.
“Maryland has almost become a political subdivision of the NSA,” Tenth Amendment Center Executive Director Michael Boldin said in a statement. “The agency relies heavily on state and local help. This bill bans all of it.”
House Bill 1074 (HB1074) would ban the NSA facility from all public state utilities, ban the use of NSA collected evidence in court, ban universities from partnering with the NSA and ban all political subdivisions from assisting the NSA from within the state.
Any state entity, employee or contractor refusing to comply with the law would be immediately fired and banned from all future contracts within the state.
The bill has eight Republican sponsors and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
Multiple states join Maryland in their attempt to enforce anti-commandeering legislative measures against the NSA. Tennessee, Arizona, California and Washington have all filed legislation. Utah is expected to file legislation within the coming weeks.
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So far, the Maryland and Tennessee (sponsored by Sen. Campfield and Rep. Holt) legislation would have the biggest impact on the NSA. Both states have actual facilities. Meanwhile, other states are passing the legislation as a prophylactic measure.
The wave of legislative measures is being conducted by the Tenth Amendment Center, which along with the Bill of Rights Defense Committee launched the OffNow coalition last year.
condemns in the strongest possible terms the vast, systemic, blanket collection of the personal data of innocent people, often comprising intimate personal information; emphasises that the systems of mass, indiscriminate surveillance by intelligence services constitute a serious interference with the fundamental rights of citizens; stresses that privacy is not a luxury right, but that it is the foundation stone of a free and democratic society; points out, furthermore, that mass surveillance has potentially severe effects on the freedom of press, thought and speech as well as a significant potential for abuse of the information gathered against political adversaries; emphasises that these mass surveillance activities appear also to entail illegal actions by intelligence services and raise questions regarding extraterritoriality of national law.
The British detectives who have examined the records of mobile of thousands of people who were in Praia da Luz in May 2007 describe the phone analysis as "compelling".
El escándalo de la Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia de Estados Unidos muestra el enorme riesgo que supone la introducción del voto electrónico, afirma Christoph Blocher, exministro y actual vicepresidente de la Unión Democrática del Centro (UDC, derecha conservadora). El diputado de Los Verdes, Balthasar Glättli, también se opone a la aplicación del e-voting y ha presentado una moción que pide la suspensión de los ensayos, mientras no haya la suficiente seguridad que garantice el voto secreto. Una postura que respaldan 31 parlamentarios. “Nada es tan peligroso para una democracia como socavar la confianza en las votaciones”, advierte Blocher. Dado que las personas pueden tener más o menos dificultad en el manejo de un ordenador personal, no se descartan ataques con virus o el desvío de los resultados a una página web ajena. En el caso de su aplicación para los suizos en el extranjero se pone también en tela de juicio la fiabilidad de los correos postales.
Edward Snowden’s planned testimony to the European Parliament via a video link may be thwarted by deputies’ fear of a negative reaction from the US, the German news magazine Der Spiegel writes on its website.
The European Parliament is holding hearings over the spying furore that erupted in Europe after the publication of the data provided by the US whistleblower in October. Snowden claimed to have documents which proved that the US National Security Agency tapped cellphone calls of at least 35 heads of state and government across the world, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Snowden’s videoconference was planned for December 18. However, the European People's Party (EPP), the largest party in the European Parliament, is trying to prevent his appearance for fear of a negative US reaction.
Oh, Jacki, what took you so long?
I thought you knew the way
Great Britain, however, will soon take a significant step toward deciding what a private citizen can see on the web even while at home. Before the end of the year, almost all Internet users there will be "opted-in" to a system designed to filter out pornography. By default, the controls will also block access to "violent material," "extremist and terrorist related content," "anorexia and eating disorder websites," and "suicide related websites." In addition, the new settings will censor sites mentioning alcohol or smoking. The filter will also block "esoteric material," though a UK-based rights group says the government has yet to make clear what that category will include.
And government-sponsored forms of Internet censorship are being privatized. New, off-the-shelf commercial products guarantee that an organization does not need to be the NSA to block content. For example, the Internet security company Blue Coat is a domestic leader in the field and a major exporter of such technology. It can easily set up a system to monitor and filter all Internet usage, blocking web sites by their address, by keywords, or even by the content they contain. Among others, Blue Coat software is used by the US Army to control what its soldiers see while deployed abroad, and by the repressive governments in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Burma to block outside political ideas.
The report by the Center for Corporate Policy (CCP) in Washington DC titled Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage against Nonprofit Organizations draws on a wide range of public record evidence, including lawsuits and journalistic investigations. It paints a disturbing picture of a global corporate espionage programme that is out of control, with possibly as much as one in four activists being private spies.
In Berlin, they have settled in a counterculture paradise, home to hackers’ clubs, cheap rent and a fiercely supportive local population that in 2011 gave more than 10 percent of the seats in its regional parliament to the Pirate Party, a political organization that seeks to preserve Internet and information freedoms.
MailPile aims to combine a Gmail-like user friendly interface with a sometimes clunky technique known as public key encryption.
Microsoft is moving to encrypt its Internet traffic based on assumptions the National Security Agency has broken into its internal global communications systems as it did with Google and Yahoo, according to sources familiar with the plans.
Microsoft’s suspicions that the NSA is intercepting traffic
within its private networks were heightened in October, when it
was reported such intrusions have happened to Google and Yahoo,
which have similar global infrastructures. Sources close to
Microsoft’s deliberations told The Washington Post top executives
at the company are to meet this week to decide what encryption
initiatives will take place.
The Post reports two previously unreleased slides obtained via
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest the company is
rightly concerned.
The UN human rights committee unanimously passed a “right to privacy” resolution sponsored by Germany and Brazil that protects the right to privacy against illegal surveillance, following revelations about NSA spying.
The resolution states that surveillance and data interception by
governments and companies "may violate or abuse human
rights.”
This is the first document that establishes protection of human
rights in the digital sphere, Brazil's Ambassador Antonio de
Aguiar Patriota told the AP. It "establishes for the first
time that human rights should prevail irrespective of the medium,
and therefore need to be protected online and offline,”
Patriota said.