GooberMcNutly wrote:

What really torques me off is that while they are raping my personal effects without cause, they are forcing me as a taxpayer to subsidize hundreds of lawyers, GS bureaucrats, paralegals, etc. to perpetrate it. The bill to the taxpayers just for that filing in Ireland is probably $2-300k. For the whole court case so far, probably in the $1-2mil range.

A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking real money.

Strange bedfellows fighting back against indefinite gag orders.

The likes of Apple, Google, and Mozilla--among many others--have put their names to an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit Microsoft filed against the federal government over its controversial and continued use of gagging orders. . . .

The latest development means that an eclectic mix of outfits has now lined up against Washington, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Washington Post, the US Chamber of Commerce, Delta Air Lines, BP America, and Fox News. According to Reuters, five former FBI and justice department officials have also written in support of Microsoft's crusade.

[Microsoft counsel Brad] Smith joked in a statement that "it's not every day that Fox News and the ACLU are on the same side of an issue."

The investigation into the CIA's torture program has been covered here before, but this is a great in-depth series from The Guardian.

The Most Transparent Administration in History^TM not only refuses to hold people accountable for torture, it steals documents from, lies to, and spies on its oversight body.

The Panetta Review saga would spur a furious CIA to take an extraordinary step: it would spy on its own legislative overseers - especially [Senate investigator Daniel] Jones. The episode would spill out publicly the following March, when top committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who had already taken a huge political risk in pushing the torture inquiry, accused the CIA on the Senate floor of triggering what she called a constitutional crisis. Both sides requested the justice department pursue a criminal investigation on the other. The bitterness would nearly overshadow a landmark report, a fraction of which was released to the public in December 2014, that documented in chilling detail the depravations CIA inflicted on terrorism suspects after 9/11.

The CIA has stopped defending its torture program but not its personnel. While it has reknit its relationship to the committee, thanks to a GOP leadership that has all but disavowed the torture investigation, it continues to maintain that the torture report is inaccurate. Obama, whose trusted aide John Brennan runs the CIA, kept the report at arm's length, with his administration declining even to read it.

But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones's fears, the agency's inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy - allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding". Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.

After spying on the Senate committee, the CIA denies doing so, refusing to make a public apology even after its own inspector general concludes its search was inappropriate.

"As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn't do that. I mean, that's just beyond the - you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do," Brennan said.

The years of clashing with the CIA behind closed doors had now exploded into public view. The CIA contacted reporters to provide the agency's preferred version of events, and observers took a scalpel to distinctions between searching and hacking. The implications of Feinstein's charges were profound. If the CIA would lie about torture, what else would it lie about? If it would spy on its legislative overseers, who wouldn't the agency spy on?

The CIA whitewashes history by abusing the declassification process for the report - with full backing by the White House.

"While the study clearly shows that the CIA's detention and interrogation program itself was deeply flawed, the deeper, more endemic problem lies in a CIA, assisted by a White House, that continues to try to cover up the truth," [Senator Mark] Udall said on 10 December 2014. He accused the White House of "letting the CIA do whatever it likes, even if its efforts are aimed at actively undermining the president's stated [torture] policies."

Udall continued: "Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture. In other words, the CIA is lying. This is not a problem of the past."

I look at the Washington Post's position as a good one in the news industry. It reminds people that the job of the first half of the paper is to report on the news and the job of the back half is to editorialize on the news. It's when you forget that they must remain separate that "reporting" fails.

Not publishing the Assange leaks would probably just mean they get released elsewhere, so it would be a dereliction of duty to not report on it. But the editorial staff has always had to keep a very close, incestuous relationship with the various branches of the federal government in order to stay on the leak-train and get the good stories. It's why they are the biggest newspaper in the mid-Atlantic, favorable treatment by PR hacks across the three branches. They wouldn't kill that just for a single story. So they have to play good cop/bad cop on the back pages. It's not like they are the only outlet calling for Assange's punishment.

First, the editorial is about Edward Snowden, not Julian Assange.

While there is nothing wrong with an editorial taking a contrary view to the news side, that's no excuse for getting the basic facts wrong.  Snowden did not publish any documents, nor did he decide which ones it was appropriate to publish.  That was entirely the decision of the four news outlets involved, including the Post.

The other point is that now, what leaker will ever go to the Post in the future?  Only those who are doing so to support an administration - which seems to be the intended result of the editorial.  Whistleblowers already know that going to the New York Times is not worthwhile.

choad wrote:

GooberMcNutly wrote:

It's why they are the biggest newspaper in the mid-Atlantic, favorable treatment by PR hacks across the three branches. They wouldn't kill that just for a single story. So they have to play good cop/bad cop on the back pages.

Meanwhile Katie Graham, with her tit in Nixon AG John Mitchell's celestial wringer, rolls over in her grave.

You don't undercut your own staff that way, especially not in a business as reviled as reporting. Fuck Jeff Bezos and the whores he rode in on.

Come on, that was Nixon. He would have NEVER let it rest, she had to stand strong.

I would lay the real blame at Rupert Murdoch's tasseled loafers though, Bezos was but a boy when Murdoch "integrated" all of the media arms of his low-brow hydra in the wake of relaxing the rules on single-company media penetration back during Reagan 1, I think. It's when "news" stories about movies, songs, products, certain politicians, etc., became coordinated across news shows, newspapers, magazines, radio monopolies, everything got filtered before it ever reached the public's notice. Soon the line between reporting and advertising slipped off the shoulder of Lady Liberty like the strap on her silk camisole. But, hey, now 1 DJ can cover 20 markets at once and nobody questions why something is news and something else is not. Too much bother.

A monopoly on information is just as harmful to the greater good as a monopoly on any other vital resource.

Just keep pushing the myth that government workers can blow the whistle.

When asked whether these official channel grievances have led to any reforms, or whether those whistleblowers are retaliated against, [Congressional spokesman Jack] Langer said he could not comment on individual cases, "though we take allegations of retaliation -- both as the subject of a claim and following a claim -- extremely seriously."

However, Congress doesn't have much legal power to protect intelligence community employees from such retaliation. The Pentagon's inspector general website concedes Congress cannot "grant special statutory protection for intelligence community employees from reprisal for whistleblowing."

In most cases of personal or professional retaliation, it ends up being the whistleblower's problem, says Tom Devine, the legal director for the Government Accountability Project. "The problem is that whistleblowers making most complaints proceed at their own risk," he said in an interview. "There are no independent due process protections for any intelligence community whistleblowers. And contractors don't even have the right to an independent investigation unless there's security clearance retaliation."

But hey, Obama and the gang just seem to be taking their cue from the private sector.

"Each team member, no matter where you are in the organization, is encouraged to raise their hands," [Wells Fargo CEO John] Stumpf told lawmakers. He mentioned the anonymous ethics line, adding, "We want to hear from them."

But that's not the experience of some former Wells Fargo workers.

One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues.

Oh, documents are over-classified?  Yeah, we'll get right on that.

Recognizing the threat posed by over-classification, Congress passed legislation in 2010 to counter the pervasive problem of bureaucrats making benign government records secret. One of the most highlighted provisions of the Reducing Over-Classification Act (ROCA) was a new tool for agencies: cash incentives for employees who accurately classify (and declassify) documents.

Congress hoped that by offering a proverbial carrot to the line-level employees making initial and derivative classification decisions within federal agencies, it could increase transparency and allow greater information sharing between federal agencies and local law enforcement. Responses to EFF's FOIA requests with 27 agencies demonstrates, however, that those carrots have rotted on the shelf.

Based on the FOIA responses EFF has received, it does not appear that a single federal agency with the power to classify documents has ever taken advantage of ROCA's cash incentives program.

Cell phone location data - collected by service providers to connect and access records - is inaccessible to the customers who place the calls, unlike other 3'd party records, even though they pay for their collection and storage.

Only the phone company and the government are trusted to market your history and conduct warrantless searches.

Reassured?

https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=4th+amendment

Baywolfe wrote:

They're welcome to all my phone calls and emails.  The sheer boredom should kill at least one of them.

You don't mind living in a rabid kleptocracy, zero privacy shouldn't trouble you either.

Why spy when you can buy?

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday outed Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for feeding a Chicago-based company their user streams--a feed that was then sold to police agencies for surveillance purposes.

After the disclosure, the social media companies said they stopped their data firehouse to Chicago-based Geofeedia. In a blog post, the ACLU said it uncovered the data feeds as part of a public records request campaign of California law enforcement agencies. Geofeedia touts how it helped police track unrest during protests.

It's never been about the encryption, it's the stupid machine friendly - human unfriendly password. 

Passwords should be MAX 4000 characters and you should be able to use any printable ASCII character in it.  "MyPa$$word01!" can be cracked in a matter of weeks.  "My friend is a purple dinosaur named Barney." with spaces and period is estimated to take (by current standards) over 100 years to crack.

square wrote:

For example, your connection to High Street is not encrypted and your traffic can be viewed in full by anyone who can monitor packets passing back and forth.  Logging in here with your password identifies to the site who you are, but doesn't protect your traffic from view.

High Street will slip into the blacklist binary void, if inertia doesn't claim it first, long before anyone monitors this far down the food chain.

UK data collection illegal, but of course no talk of actual punishment.

Due to litigation brought by the charity, the Tribunal ruled that there was not adequate oversight of the bulk communications data system by which GCHQ and MI5 secretly collected data from public electronic communications networks (PECNs) through secret directions given under section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984, until after July 2015.

Baywolfe wrote:

Information is a commodity and everybody wants to sell. 

I'm waiting for the next round of links to other websites not working due to content intellectual property.  At least until almost all websites are pay to view.

My favorite newspapers went paywall this month, asking $25 p/month for digital subscription.  That be a shit load of money for something I don't need.

Well this is for the Omaha World-Herald. 

Best part is that they only push subscriptions on out-of-state readers during the college football season, cuz well it is Nebraska and they are pretty much the best source on the state university team.  Us Nebraska Ex-pats really only care during the college football season soooo....  they paywall and charge an outlandish amount for annual digital subscriptions during the season.

Get this, to unsubscribe you have to email:  postmaster@omahaworldherald.com

Fucking hilarious.

Power attracts the corruptible.  And, these days, everybody votes party, not people.

Which makes it even more dramatic the number of hard-core Conservatives that have endorsed Clinton.  They may hate her Liberalism but they fear the alternative.

Emmeran wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

Power attracts the corruptible.  And, these days, everybody votes party, not people.

Which makes it even more dramatic the number of hard-core Conservatives that have endorsed Clinton.  They may hate her Liberalism but they fear the alternative.

Wait:  Liberalism?

The only thing Clinton sales is Clintonism and they are happy to slap any label on it you can pay for or vote for.  The House of Clinton has out maneuvered both the House of Kennedy and the House of Bush.  We are witnessing a modern form of Feudalism.

That's a nice knee jerk reaction, but she'll be a good democrat and try to push things slightly to the left where she can.  They're all out for themselves, you can't even use that anymore.  If Billary was truly responsible for some of the Whitewater deaths, how dirty are The Donald's hands? Good people rarely run and are almost never elected.

So why don't we pay the President $100 million a year for a salary, senators $50 mil a year and Reps $30 mil a year? The pool of candidates would expand, we would get many more choices to pick from and actually competent executives would consider running. It would also be much harder to bribe them with a few paltry $million if they were risking their salary. Of course, any impeachment would eliminate their pay and benefits forever.

As my grandad always said: If you are going to steal, make it for enough to be worth it!

choad wrote:

Ed Snowden: "Heads up: Any major email service not clearly, categorically denying this tomorrow -- without careful phrasing -- is as guilty as Yahoo."

Yahoo belatedly tries to skate away from blame.

Yahoo's top lawyer published an open letter on Wednesday, "demanding" that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "provide clarity" about whether the company was ordered to perform mass spying on all of its users.

square wrote:

Smile!

Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Tuesday. That means there's about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database

"It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the cafe, your figure, your dress, that I still see." ~ Franz Kafka, from Letters to Milena"

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

If only Eisenhower had warned us about the surveillance-industrial complex.

Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why. . . .

Hemisphere isn't a "partnership" but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company's massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public. . . .

While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian.

"Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn't have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate," Soghoian said.

The Most Transparent Administration in History^TM seems to have trouble letting the proles know what the law is.

The Justice Department has kept classified at least 74 opinions, memos and letters on national security issues, including interrogation, detention and surveillance, according to a report released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice.

Also still classified are between 25 and 30 significant opinions issued between 2003 and 2013 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secretive federal court that interprets the law governing foreign intelligence-gathering inside the United States.

And at the State Department, 807 international agreements signed between 2004 and 2014 have not been published.

Despite President Obama's pledge to make government more open and transparent, federal agencies are still keeping a considerable amount of policy and legal interpretations under wraps, the Brennan Center found.

choad wrote:

square wrote:

...at some point I hope to get off my ass and get a Let's Encrypt HTTPS certificate set up here.

Holler when you're ready.

Me Too!!  Melon's web site needs this also.

If you have a site running on Linux, it's pretty easy.  Can't say what other systems are like.