via youtube.com
20130109
Bush-Era Wiretapping Case Killed Before Reaching Supreme Court | Threat Level | Wired.com
A federal appeals court’s August ruling in which it said the federal government may spy on Americans’ communications without warrants and without fear of being sued won’t be appealed to the Supreme Court, attorneys in the case said Thursday.
The decision by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this summer reversed the first and only case that successfully challenged then-President George W. Bush’s once-secret Terrorist Surveillance Program. In December, the San Francisco-based appeals court — the nation’s largest — declined to revisit its decision — making the case ripe for an appeal to the Supreme Court.
The appellate decision overturned a lower court decision in which two American attorneys — who were working with the now-defunct al-Haramain Islamic Foundation — were awarded more than $20,000 each in damages and their lawyers $2.5 million in legal fees after a years-long, tortured legal battle where they proved they were spied on without warrants.
via wired.com
20130105
'Alice in Wonderland' Ruling Lets Feds Keep Mum on Targeted-Killing Legal Rationale | Threat Level | Wired.com
The President Barack Obama administration does not have to disclose the legal basis for its drone targeted killing program of Americans, according to a Wednesday decision a judge likened to “Alice in Wonderland”.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen McMahon of New York, ruling in lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times, said she was caught in a “paradoxical situation” (.pdf) of allowing the administration to claim it was legal to kill enemies outside traditional combat zones while keeping the legal rational secret.
The opinion comes months after 26 members of Congress asked Obama, in a letter, to consider the consequences of drone killing and to explain the necessity of the program. The use of drones to shoot missiles from afar at vehicles and buildings that the nation’s intelligence agencies believe are being used by suspected terrorists began under the George W. Bush administration and was widened by the Obama administration to allow the targeting of American citizens. Drone strikes by the Pentagon and the CIA have sparked backlashes from foreign governments and populations, as the strikes often kill civilians, including women and children.
In the end, however, the government’s claim of national security trumped the Freedom of Information Act. According to Judge McMahon:
… this court is constrained by law, and under the law, I can only conclude that the government has not violated FOIA by refusing to turn over the documents sought in the FOIA requests, and so cannot be compelled by this court of law to explain in detail the reasons why its actions do not violate the Constitution and laws of the United States. The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me; but after careful and extensive consideration, I find myself stuck in a paradoxical situation in which I cannot solve a problem because of contradictory constraints and rules — a veritable catch-22. I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.
via wired.com
20130104
Judge rebuffs feds' secret arguments on no-fly list - POLITICO.com
A federal judge in California has rejected the Obama administration's effort to use secret arguments and evidence to defeat a lawsuit relating to the so-called no-fly list designed to keep suspected terrorists off of airline flights.
U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup turned down a motion by the Justice Department to dismiss former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim's lawsuit against various federal government agencies over her reported inclusion on the no-fly list as well as an incident in September 2005 where she was barred from taking a flight from San Francisco and detained for a couple of hours.
via politico.com
Intelligence Oversight Steps Back from Public Accountability | Secrecy News
The move by Congress to renew the FISA Amendments Act for five more years without amendments came as a bitter disappointment to civil libertarians who believe that the Act emphasizes government surveillance authority at the expense of constitutional protections. Amendments that were offered to provide more public information about the impacts of government surveillance on the privacy of American communications were rejected by the Senate on December 27 and 28.
Beyond the specifics of the surveillance law, the congressional action appears to reflect a reorientation of intelligence oversight away from public accountability. The congressional intelligence committees once presented themselves as champions of disclosure. They no longer do so.
The first annual report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by the late Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, stated in 1977 that “While most of the work of the Committee is, of necessity, conducted in secrecy, we believe that even secret activities must be as accountable to the public as possible.”
via fas.org
20130102
Ubuntu Spyware: What to do? — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software
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Ubuntu Spyware: What to do?
Posted by Richard Stallman at Dec 07, 2012 01:55 AM | PermalinkOne of the major advantages of free software is that the community protects users from malicious software. Now Ubuntu GNU/Linux has become a counterexample. What should we do?Proprietary software is associated with malicious treatment of the user: surveillance code, digital handcuffs (DRM or Digital Restrictions Management) to restrict users, and back doors that can do nasty things under remote control. Programs that do any of these things are malware and should be treated as such. Widely used examples include Windows, the iThings, and the Amazon "Kindle" product for virtual book burning, which do all three; Macintosh and the Playstation III which impose DRM; most portable phones, which do spying and have back doors; Adobe Flash Player, which does spying and enforces DRM; and plenty of apps for iThings and Android, which are guilty of one or more of these nasty practices.
Free software gives users a chance to protect themselves from malicious software behaviors. Even better, usually the community protects everyone, and most users don't have to move a muscle. Here's how.
Once in a while, users who know programming find that a free program has malicious code. Generally the next thing they do is release a corrected version of the program; with the four freedoms that define free software (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), they are free to do this. This is called a "fork" of the program. Soon the community switches to the corrected fork, and the malicious version is rejected. The prospect of ignominious rejection is not very tempting; thus, most of the time, even those who are not stopped by their consciences and social pressure refrain from putting malfeatures in free software.
But not always. Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)
This is just like the first surveillance practice I learned about in Windows. My late friend Fravia told me that when he searched for a string in the files of his Windows system, it sent a packet to some server, which was detected by his firewall. Given that first example I paid attention and learned about the propensity of "reputable" proprietary software to be malware. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ubuntu sends the same information.
Ubuntu uses the information about searches to show the user ads to buy various things from Amazon. Amazon commits many wrongs (see http://stallman.org/amazon.html); by promoting Amazon, Canonical contributes to them. However, the ads are not the core of the problem. The main issue is the spying. Canonical says it does not tell Amazon who searched for what. However, it is just as bad for Canonical to collect your personal information as it would have been for Amazon to collect it.
People will certainly make a modified version of Ubuntu without this surveillance. In fact, several GNU/Linux distros are modified versions of Ubuntu. When those update to the latest Ubuntu as a base, I expect they will remove this. Canonical surely expects that too.
Most free software developers would abandon such a plan given the prospect of a mass switch to someone else's corrected version. But Canonical has not abandoned the Ubuntu spyware. Perhaps Canonical figures that the name "Ubuntu" has so much momentum and influence that it can avoid the usual consequences and get away with surveillance.
Canonical says this feature searches the Internet in other ways. Depending on the details, that might or might not make the problem bigger, but not smaller.
Ubuntu allows users to switch the surveillance off. Clearly Canonical thinks that many Ubuntu users will leave this setting in the default state (on). And many may do so, because it doesn't occur to them to try to do anything about it. Thus, the existence of that switch does not make the surveillance feature ok.
Even if it were disabled by default, the feature would still be dangerous: "opt in, once and for all" for a risky practice, where the risk varies depending on details, invites carelessness. To protect users' privacy, systems should make prudence easy: when a local search program has a network search feature, it should be up to the user to choose network search explicitly each time. This is easy: all it takes is to have separate buttons for network searches and local searches, as earlier versions of Ubuntu did. A network search feature should also inform the user clearly and concretely about who will get what personal information of hers, if and when she uses the feature.
If a sufficient part of our community's opinion leaders view this issue in personal terms only, if they switch the surveillance off for themselves and continue to promote Ubuntu, Canonical might get away with it. That would be a great loss to the free software community.
We who present free software as a defense against malware do not say it is a perfect defense. No perfect defense is known. We don't say the community will deter malware without fail. Thus, strictly speaking, the Ubuntu spyware example doesn't mean we have to eat our words.
But there's more at stake here than whether some of us have to eat some words. What's at stake is whether our community can effectively use the argument based on proprietary spyware. If we can only say, "free software won't spy on you, unless it's Ubuntu," that's much less powerful than saying, "free software won't spy on you."
It behooves us to give Canonical whatever rebuff is needed to make it stop this. Any excuse Canonical offers is inadequate; even if it used all the money it gets from Amazon to develop free software, that can hardly overcome what free software will lose if it ceases to offer an effective way to avoid abuse of the users.
If you ever recommend or redistribute GNU/Linux, please remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute. If its practice of installing and recommending nonfree software didn't convince you to stop, let this convince you. In your install fests, in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don't install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.
While you're at it, you can also tell them that Ubuntu contains nonfree programs and suggests other nonfree programs. (See http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html.) That will counteract the other form of negative influence that Ubuntu exerts in the free software community: legitimizing nonfree software.
Reference
Privacy in Ubuntu 12.10: Amazon Ads and Data Leaks by Micah Lee at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Copyright 2012 Richard Stallman
Released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noderivatives 3.0 license
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20121225
Revealed: NSA targeting domestic computer systems in secret test | Internet & Media - CNET News
Newly released files show a secret National Security Agency program is targeting the computerized systems that control utilities to discover security vulnerabilities, which can be used to defend the United States or disrupt the infrastructure of other nations.
The NSA's so-called Perfect Citizen program conducts "vulnerability exploration and research" against the computerized controllers that control "large-scale" utilities including power grids and natural gas pipelines, the documents show. The program is scheduled to continue through at least September 2014.
The Perfect Citizen files obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and provided to CNET shed more light on how the agency aims to defend -- and attack -- embedded controllers. The NSA is reported to have developed Stuxnet, which President Obama secretly ordered to be used against Iran's nuclear program, with the help of Israel.
via news.cnet.com
20121224
20121215
Military judge allows total blackout of 9/11 plotters’ torture testimony | The Raw Story
A military judge presiding over the trials of the accused 9/11 plotters decided last week that any and all testimony relating to their treatment by U.S. personnel shall be censored, according to a ruling released Wednesday.
In a statement sent to reporters, the American Civil Liberties Union made it clear that they are deeply troubled by the judge’s ruling.
“The government wanted to ensure that the American public would never hear the defendants’ accounts of illegal CIA torture, rendition and detention, and the military judge has gone along with that shameful plan,” ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi said in an advisory.
via rawstory.com
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