omnibus PRISM/NSA/free Edward Snowden/encryption tutorial thread

http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/blog/maybe-the-most-orwellian-text-message-ever-sent

Wow. Must admit I have not been following the recent Ukraine govt vs protestors events

amazing

not amazing actually, just yikes

yurp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/independent-review-board-says-nsa-phone-data-program-is-illegal-and-should-end/2014/01/22/4cebd470-83dd-11e3-bbe5-6a2a3141e3a9_story.html?hpid=z4

But Prez and many others don't care what this board majority thinks, alas

At risk of dog piling even more info into this thread, the sessions from from the recent Chaos Communication Congress are of exceedingly high quality:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CCCen

If you only watch one, watch Paglen's "Seeing The Secret State" presentation. HFS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j56s46e97Lo

I spent a fruitless half day getting the friend of a certain Rolling Stone writer to recant her addled definition of "traitor" as it applied to Snowden.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/snowden-denies-stealing-passwords-to-access-secret-files/2014/01/23/d1f7d9e4-8472-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-disagrees-with-watchdog-groups-conclusion-that-nsa-phone-program-is-illegal/2014/01/23/7a945564-8464-11e3-8099-9181471f7aaf_story.html

One more thing to read that I haven't read yet http://www.salon.com/2014/01/23/glenn_greenwalds_heroism_standing_up_to_our_new_orwellian_police_state/

got into it on twitter with cathy fitzpatrick today as she insisted that snowden, greenwald, the EFF, and anyone who wants useful encryption are secret anarchists plotting "anarchy, where anarchists are in charge"

that was fun

Uh, who is she?

kinda thinking someone who thinks anarchy is 'where anarchists are in charge' is prob terminally confused about what words mean in general

Uh, who is she?

― curmudgeon, Friday, January 24, 2014 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

historian/"human rights activist"/weirdo loved on the right for her writing about the USSR's large body count, with apparently a sideline in the technical details of encryption.

lol, looked her up and immediately found a horrified tweet from her about how 'there really is a magazine called JACOBIN!'

lmao

Just read a good NYROB piece on Snowden-Manning-Assange. Not up yet, unfortunately.

love "where anarchists are in charge"

dreamt last night i was at a party w all my high school friends + snowden; we went out for beer but he convinced me to help raid some vague government facility on our way back and i got beaten up by a russian(?) soldier, then it turned into some weird body horror thing w parasites on my wounds, glad to be awake

Following President Barack Obama's reelection in November, 2012, Fitzpatrick penned an entry on her own blog in which she alleged that Republican challenger Mitt Romney's campaign's "ORCA" digital operation had failed because Targeted Victory, the company responsible for much of its online and digital strategy had employed African-American developers who she alleged to have favored the Obama campaign and whose politics was somehow deliberately reflected as bugs left in their work.

black people bug like this

first mistake was calling it ORCA not MOBY

was going to write something else making light fun of her but christ what a vile person, fuck her

yeah i hadn't wiki'd her prior to politely engaging on twitter and being met with derision, she's so deep in the black hole of dumb i didn't even want to follow her down to potshots

U.S. Willing to Hold Talks if Snowden Pleads Guilty
By STEVE KENNY NY Times
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. did not specify the guilty pleas the Justice Department would expect before it would open talks with Mr. Snowden's lawyers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/us/on-childrens-website-nsa-puts-a-furry-smiley-face-on-its-mission.html

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090819011825/lossimpson/es/images/9/9c/Poochie.png

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTM4ODYwNDY3NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjYxNjEzMQ@@._V1_SY317_CR6,0,214,317_.jpg

Talking about that for years over here:

Kids section of websites by professionally paranoid or otherwise creepy organizations

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-intelligence-director-calls-on-snowden-to-return-nsa-documents/2014/01/29/7bd9c9ee-88f7-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html?hpid=z1

Clapper focused his opening remarks on Snowden, delivering a blistering stream of criticism in which he described the former contractor for the National Security Agency as a hypocrite who has severely undermined U.S. security.

Clapper said the documents exposed by Snowden have bolstered adversaries, caused allies to curtail cooperation with the United States, enabled terrorist groups to alter the ways they communicate, and put lives of U.S. intelligence operatives at risk.

versus Senator Wyden

At one point, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) decried what he described as a “culture of misinformation” among U.S. intelligence officials, cataloguing misstatements and falsehoods that had been exposed by Snowden.

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

Meanwhile Mike Rogers reminds us why we need a Bill of Rights in the first place.

He and Clapper have deleted the first and 4th amendments now

he's gonna force the issue- on principle

Surely the Bill of Rights was never intended to tie the government's hands.

it's not a suicide pact, u kno

it would genuinely shock me if GG actually got arrested.

we track 'em, you whack 'em

Should there be a thread for the intercept

That article's great

so Snowden 'web crawled' the data away from the NSA

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/02/09

I'm sure that Sunday Times article wd be even funnier if i understood it.

wget the planet

When inserted with Mr. Snowden’s passwords, the web crawler became especially powerful.

'when he spoke his incantation the crawler grew 3 sizes from computer magic'

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/the-day-the-internet-didnt-fight-back-482493?site=classic

All was not lost. By late Tuesday, some 70,000 calls had been placed to legislators and roughly 150,000 people had sent their representatives an email. But on privacy forums and Reddit, significant discussions failed to materialize.

bcz even if a quarter of a million people contact their representatives, it doesn't really matter if no one on reddit is into it

protest will always be pooh-poohed henceforth unless we throw our bodies in the gears of the machine

Sites like Tumblr, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, which were listed as organizers, did nothing to their homepages

The eight major technology companies — Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Apple, Twitter, Yahoo and LinkedIn — that joined forces in December in a public campaign to “reform government surveillance” only participated Tuesday insofar as having a joint website flash the protest banner.

No DuckDuckGo, and no AOL=no credibility with lawmakers

it's exceedingly well stage managed by one side or the other these days. xp

Snowden elected rector of University of Glasgow...

fresh at the intercept

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/18/snowden-docs-reveal-covert-surveillance-and-pressure-tactics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/

Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, these documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name.

The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.

Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in surveillance issues, says the revelations shed a disturbing light on the NSA’s willingness to sweep up American citizens in its surveillance net.

“All the reassurances Americans heard that the broad authorities of the FISA Amendments Act could only be used to ‘target’ foreigners seem a bit more hollow,” Sanchez says, “when you realize that the ‘foreign target’ can be an entire Web site or online forum used by thousands if not millions of Americans.”

can't believe glenn hasn't been running with 'the snowden files' as a term its gold jerry