snowden watch

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 12 Feb 2014, 11:14

Lavabit founders speaks with BBC and talks about Dark Mail.

I just feel that the ability for individual law-abiding citizens to communicate privately without a fear of government surveillance is so important and the courts and the politicians so naive that the only way to ensure that we retain this ability to communicate privately is to come up with a long-term technical solution.

And that's what Dark Mail is trying to do.

They are trying to bring cryptography down to the common man. It's unfortunate but in the world today the only people who can have a secure conversation electronically, are cryptographers.

The people that need to be able to communicate securely, the lawyers, the activists, the doctors, they don't know how to use the current suite of encryption technologies.

We should support his project.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 13 Feb 2014, 10:30

If Barack Obama can be given a peace prize, why not Edward Snowden! It seems the public support for whistle-blower Edward Snowden has been growing over the year.

Source

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 14 Feb 2014, 17:32

Some nasty stuff about:

Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it's a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.

Source

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 14 Feb 2014, 21:07

I hope and trust that he's lodged stuff somewhere that will only be revealed if he snuffs it.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 14 Feb 2014, 21:45

I thought the grauniad has it all safely dispersed (and not on the computer the silly-billies trashed).

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 18 Feb 2014, 15:23

RenewableCandy wrote:I hope and trust that he's lodged stuff somewhere that will only be revealed if he snuffs it.

I read somewhere that that is, indeed, the case.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 18 Feb 2014, 20:51

Excellent news re Snowden elected as rector of Glasgow University : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-g ... t-26243567

RenewableCandy · Post by **RenewableCandy** » 18 Feb 2014, 21:19

While there, he can learn the most difficult-to-crack code ever devised: Glaswegian

!

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 20 Feb 2014, 14:47

He got the job. But he may as well be on Mars.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 21 Feb 2014, 10:35

Snowden 'vindicated' by US security head.

“with greater transparency about these intelligence programs, the American people may be more likely to accept them.”

Get the advert right and the Americans will buy anything.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 28 Feb 2014, 17:06

I hadn't seen this till now. Interesting.

Last Thursday [20/2/14?] Chris Hedges opened a team debate at the Oxford Union at Oxford University with this speech arguing in favor of the proposition “This house would call Edward Snowden a hero.” The others on the Hedges team, which won the debate by an audience vote of 212 to 171, were William E. Binney, a former National Security Agency official and a whistle-blower; Chris Huhne, a former member of the British Parliament; and Annie Machon, a former intelligence officer for the United Kingdom. The opposing team was made up of Philip J. Crowley, a former U.S. State Department officer; Stewart A. Baker, a former chief counsel for the National Security Agency; Jeffrey Toobin, an American television and print commentator; and Oxford student Charles Vaughn.

biffvernon · Post by **biffvernon** » 28 Feb 2014, 17:50

I must admit that I'n never sat naked in front of a webcam, but I can imagine some folk were pretty miffed by the latest, er, revelations.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/f ... rnet-yahoo

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/f ... estigation

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 06 Mar 2014, 11:57

In a piece on the UK's disgraceful detention of David Miranda and its equally worrying justification, Glenn Greenwald takes a cool look at British 'culture':

The political elite of that country cling desperately to 17th century feudal traditions. Grown adults who have been elected or appointed to nothing run around with a straight face insisting that they be called “Lord” and “Baroness” and other grandiose hereditary titles of the landed gentry. They bow and curtsey to a “Queen”, who lives in a “palace”, and they call her sons “Prince”. They embrace a wide range of conceits and rituals of a long-ago collapsed empire. The wig-wearing presiding judge who issued this morning’s ruling equating journalism with terrorism is addressed as “Lord Justice Laws”, best known for previously approving the use of evidence to detain people that had been derived from torture at Guantanamo [...].

None of this behavior bears any relationship to actual reality: it’s as though the elite political class of an entire nation somehow got stuck in an adolescent medieval fantasy game. But the political principles of monarchy, hereditary privilege, rigid class stratification, and feudal entitlement embedded in all of this play-acting clearly shape the repressive mentality and reverence for state authority which Her Majesty’s Government produces. That journalism disliked by the state can be actually deemed not just a crime but “terrorism” seems a natural by-product of this type of warped elite mindset, as does the fact that much of the British press led the way in demanding that the Guardian’s journalism be criminalized (not unlike how many members of the American media have become the most devoted defenders of the NSA and have taken the lead in demonizing the journalistic transparency brought to that and other government agencies).

Source

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 07 Mar 2014, 10:53

Articles like this one endear me to Greenwald.

emordnilap · Post by **emordnilap** » 12 Mar 2014, 10:32

More on the US's (the UK's) attempts to intervene in other countries' affairs.

the NSA had helped create and find "loopholes" in New Zealand law to allow widespread eavesdropping. The former NSA employee said the spy agency's Foreign Affairs Division pressured other countries to modify their laws to create legal gaps so a mass surveillance will be possible.

Mr Snowden said the lawyers at UK's GCHQ assisted in finding those legal hopes while both agencies slipped the changes past unknowing politicians. The Foreign Affairs Department's "legal guidance" operations have been going on between Sweden, Netherlands and New Zealand.

Surely not Sweden!

"Legal guidance" = illicit interference