The Dark Road from the Clipper Chip to PRISM Reveals ‘Crypto Wars’ Never Ended

11 November 2013 — Anti-Fascist Calling

Back in the 1990s, security researchers and privacy watchdogs were alarmed by government demands that hardware and software firms build “backdoors” into their products, the millions of personal computers and cell phones propelling communication flows along the now-quaint “information superhighway.”

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PRISM is driving the uptake of privacy services, but there’s no simple solution to beating the NSA By Nick Pearson

4 November 2013 —  WashingtonsBlog

This article was written by IVPN’s Nick Pearson. IVPN is an online privacy platform, and Electronic Frontier Foundation member, dedicated to protecting online freedoms and online privacy.

While Edward Snowden’s PRISM revelations failed to spark much widespread outrage among the general public, an apparent spike in the uptake of Virtual Private Networks suggests the online privacy market could be entering a golden period. But when commerce is driven by fear there is plenty of opportunity for exploitation and many privacy-concerned citizens may be lulled into a false sense of security over services that won’t protect their data.

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Luxembourg NSA dragnet hauls in Skype for investigation – report

12 October 2013 — RT

[As a Skype user myself, I always understood that it had pretty solid encryption. How wrong can you be! WB]

Once heralded as a communication tool free from eavesdropping, Skype is now reportedly under scrutiny for secretly and voluntarily handing over personal data on users to government agencies.

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Video: Greenwald: Is U.S. Exaggerating Threat to Embassies to Silence Critics of NSA Domestic Surveillance?

5 August 2013 — Democracy Now!

The Obama administration has announced it will keep 19 diplomatic posts in North Africa and the Middle East closed for up to a week, due to fears of a possible militant threat. On Sunday, Senator Saxby Chambliss, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the decision to close the embassies was based on information collected by the National Security Agency. “If we did not have these programs, we simply would not be able to listen in on the bad guys,” Chambliss said, in a direct reference to increasing debate over widespread spying of all Americans revealed by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian. (inc. transcript)

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Video: Has the Gov’t Lied on Snooping? Let’s Go to the Videotape

31 July 2013 — Pro Publica

Since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the NSA’s sweeping surveillance programs, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was forced to admit that part of his congressional testimony was “erroneous.” Here are six claims about NSA surveillance that have been undermined by recent disclosures.

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Edward Snowden: Our man in Moscow By Pepe Escobar

2 August 2013 — Asia Times

So what is the “extremely disappointed” Obama administration, the Orwellian/Panopticon complex and the discredited US Congress to do? Send a Navy Seal Team 6 to snatch him or to target assassinate him – turning Moscow into Abbottabad 2.0? Drone him? Poison his borscht? Shower his new house with depleted uranium? Install a no-fly zone over Russia? 

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GCHQ sells your information to big corporations

3 July 2013 — RT

Prism wartime sell secrets

Journalist Steve Boggan had gate-crashed ‘Secret Work in an Open Society’, an invite only gathering organized by MI5’s then Director General Stephen Lander. Britain’s domestic security service, he found, was quietly offering to sell secrets to companies such as Rolls-Royce, BP, Ernst & Young, arms firm BAe Systems and to a bank since proven to be a multi-billion dollar money launderer HSBC.  

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New Documents Shed Light on NSA’s Dragnet Surveillance

1 July 2013 — Anti-Fascist Calling…

With the Obama administration in full damage control mode over revelations of blanket surveillance of global electronic communications, new documents published by The Guardian, including the draft of a 2009 report by the NSA’s Inspector General marked Top Secret and a Secret 2007 Justice Department memo prepared for then US Attorney General Michael Mukasey, show that “a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata ‘every 90 days’.”

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Greenwald on ‘coming’ leak: NSA can obtain one billion cell phone calls a day, store them and listen

30 June 2013 — RT

The NSA has a “brand new” technology that enables one billion cell phone calls a day to be redirected into its data hoards and stored, according to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who said that a new leak of Snowden’s documents was ‘coming soon.’

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The All-Seeing Eye of Big Brother By Nikolai MALISHEVSKI

30 June 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

Europe and the US are being rocked by scandals related to the creation of a system of total surveillance and control over the population of the planet. In the middle of June, human rights defenders from the American Civil Liberties Union sued the US government and US intelligence agencies for wiretapping. Continue reading

Obama’s Wild Neocon Dream By Melkulangara BHADRAKUMAR

27 June 2013 — Strategic Culture Foundation

It is now clear that the preliminary meeting at Geneva this week of Russia, the United States and the United Nations for setting a date for the Geneva-2 conference on Syria ended inconclusively. The meeting couldn’t agree when the Geneva-2 should be held or who would be invited. A UN statement said that Russian Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and his US counterpart John Kerry will meet next week and further talks are expected to follow.

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