The NSA is Phoning it in Again A recent headline from The Week says “NSA: We were just about to stop spying on everyone before Snowden spoke out” (March 30, 2015). At first glance this may seem like a good imitation of an Onion headline but truth is stranger than fiction.
The Associated Press tells us, “The proposal to kill the program was circulating among top managers but had not ... (more)
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Edward Snowden Talks Government Spying and 'Dick Pics' with John OliverIn a sit-down interview with John Oliver, host of HBO's comedy news show Last Week Tonight, that aired on Sunday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said that people should not curb their online habits just because the U.S. government is conducting mass surveillance across the internet.
Asked jokingly by Oliver about whether or not Americans should worry that the National Security Agency is collecting "dick pics" of internet users, Snowden said that people shouldn't change thei... (more)
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FBI Uncovers Another Of Its Own Plots, Senator Feinstein Responds By Saying We Should Censor The InternetAs you may have heard, yesterday the FBI "uncovered" yet another of its own terrorist plots, the latest in a very long line of "terrorist plots" the FBI has "uncovered" -- in which the details always show that it was an undercover FBI "informant" (often doing this to get off leniently for some other issue), who more or less goads hap... (more)
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Police Chief Unable To Simply Do Nothing Over Reported Teen Sexting, Brings Child Porn Charges Against Four MinorsGood, old-fashioned "sexting" has netted more teens some child pornography charges. Despite the teens involved claiming the photographed behavior was consensual, Joliet's (IL) police chief still believes the only way to address a situation he and the laws he enforces aren't built to handle, is to handle it as poorly as possible. (via Ars Technica) Joliet Police Chief Brian Benton sai ... (more)
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Schools To Parents: If You Let Your Kid Play 'Call Of Duty' We'll Call CPS On YouSeveral schools in England are threatening to call child protective services and have parents arrested by police if they allow their children to play video games such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ and ‘Call Of Duty’.
The London Times reported that a group of Principals from 16 schools penned a letter to parents stating that in their be... (more)
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Publishers Actively Monitoring Testing Students' Social Media Posts For Possible CheatingMajor corporations are actively monitoring social media during standardized tests. This is being done to "protect" the "integrity" of test questions and answers. None of this is particularly surprising, other than the fact that a member of school administration was the one to blow the whistle on it. Students in New Jersey are in the middle PARCC te ... (more)
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New Bill Would Have Teachers Diagnose Psychological Issues in Children and Report them to PoliceDallas, Texas -- Texas State Representative Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) is once again in the spotlight after submitting yet another Orwellian proposal, H.B. 985.
Villalba first raised the ire of civil libertarians by proposing a bill, H.B. 2006, which would have eliminated the religious exemption for vaccination, essentially creating a forced government vaccination program without exception.
... (more)
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How The Copyright Industry Wants To Undermine Anonymity & Free Speech: 'True Origin' BillsAs we've noted many times in the past, the entertainment industry likes to take a multi-pronged approach to its quixotic efforts to "stop piracy" (which could be much better dealt with by simply giving the public more of what they want). Working on federal copyright law to continually expand it is one main strategy, but there are a lot of others as well, including pressuring private companies to voluntarily censor content, getting international trade agreements to force laws to change and... get... (more)
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Even If Congress Lets Section 215 Expire, The NSA May Be Able To Keep On Collecting Phone MetadataThe NSA's bulk phone metadata program is unstoppable. Despite being called out by legislators and the administration's civil liberties oversight board as unconstitutional and illegal -- and despite being targeted by several of the administration's surveillance reforms -- it continues un... (more)
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Report: Feds Urge Banks to Call Cops on Customers Who Withdraw $5,000 or MoreThe Justice Department is ordering bank employees to consider calling the cops on customers who withdraw $5,000 dollars or more, a chilling example of how the war on cash is intensifying.
Banks are already required to file ‘suspicious activity reports’ on their customers, with threats of fines and even jail time for directors if financial institutions don’t meet quotas.
But as investor and financial blogger Simon Black points out, last week, &l... (more)
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UK Police Can't Confirm Or Deny Investigation Of Journalists It Publicly Confirmed In 2013If you're a UK-based journalist who's reported on the Snowden leaks, it's safe to say you're under investigation. Not only are you being investigated, but that investigation itself is so secret, it can't be discussed. The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher sent a Freedom of Information request to London's Metropolitan Police (the Met) for more information about the investigation -- something twice publicly confirmed by Met representatives.
But when asked specifically for informati... (more)
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Snowden Docs Reveal Canada a Major Player in Global Spy OperationsCanada's spy agency, the Communication Security Establishment (CSE), is a major player in global hacking operations and boasts a vast array of cyberwarfare tools, revealed in news reports on Monday, that rivals that of the United States' National Security Agency.
Documents initially leaked to the Intercept by Edward Snowden and now reported on in collaboration with the CBC show that the NSA and its northern counterpart "cooperate closely" in "computer network access and ex... (more)
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Senate Intelligence Committee Advances Terrible Surveillance Bill in Secret SessionThe Senate Intelligence Committee advanced a terrible cybersecurity bill called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA) to the Senate floor last week. The new chair (and huge fan of transparency) Senator Richard Burr may have set a record as he kept the bill secr... (more)
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US Threatened to 'Cut Off' Germany Over SnowdenGerman Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel (above) said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said.
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French Government Starts Blocking Websites With Views The Gov't Doesn't LikeWe had been noting, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France, how the country that then held a giant "free speech" rally appeared to be, instead, focusing on cracking down on free speech at every opportunity. And target number one: the internet. Earlier this week, the Interior Minister of France -- with no court review or adversarial process -- ordere... (more)
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The Wolf Is Guarding the Hen House: The Government's War on Cyberterrorism“The game is rigged, the network is bugged, the government talks double-speak, the courts are complicit and there’s nothing you can do about it.”—David Kravets, reporting for Wired
Nothing you write, say, text, tweet or share via phone or computer is private anymore. As constitutional law professor Garrett Epps points out, “Big Brother is watching…. Big Brother may be watch... (more)
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Judicial Committee Gives FBI The First OK It Needs To Hack Any Computer, Anywhere On The PlanetThe FBI and DOJ are one step closer to having one of their "keeping up with the digital Joneses" requests granted. While the default phone encryption offered by Apple (and at some point in the future by Google) still remains free of law enforcement/intelligence "Golden Backdoors," the agencies are one step closer t... (more)
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