Orwellian

Why I think the NSA is lying

"It’s IMPOSSIBLE for the NSA to have cracked everything. And my assessment is that this is an intimidation campaign. The NSA wants people to think that they have this capability. And if everyone thinks that the NSA is Big Brother’s Big Brother, all-seeing and all-knowing, then not only will everyone be terrified, but everyone will simply stop using encryption. After all, why bother going through the hassle of encrypting/decrypting if the NSA can still read the contents of your email? It’s in the NSA’s interest for people to think that the agency is almighty. I don’t buy it. These people are seriously vile. But they don’t have superpowers." Continue reading →

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U.S. spy chief criticizes journalists for publishing anti-encryption efforts

"The office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the US’s intelligence agencies, suggested the stories, simultaneously published on the front pages of the New York Times and Guardian, were 'not news', but nonetheless provided a 'road map … to our adversaries'. Privacy groups, however, said the NSA’s activities were endangering privacy and putting both US internet users and businesses users at risk. 'Even as the NSA demands more powers to invade our privacy in the name of cybersecurity, it is making the internet less secure and exposing us to criminal hacking, foreign espionage, and unlawful surveillance,' said the ACLU’s principal technologist." Continue reading →

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John Kerry and the Orwellian Language of War

"To be clear, Secretary Kerry and President Obama are not proposing a war. Yes, they will use cruise missiles to slaughter Syrians, and if they don’t like the Syrian government’s response they may even send ground troops. War profiteers like Raytheon will certainly profit. But the Secretary of State will insist it’s not a war. So, why the Orwellian 'War is Peace' attitude here? Partially because Kerry recognizes this war is not popular with the American public. Polls show substantial public opposition. When most Americans oppose war, the best solution apparently is to change the name to something else." Continue reading →

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U.S. Court: Journalist Barrett Brown Can’t Talk To The Press Any More

"We just wrote about the ridiculousness of Barrett Brown's case, in which he's been in jail and facing a very long sentence mainly for copying a URL from one place to another, but also because the feds have been seeking a media gag. Tragically, the court has now granted that gag order. Neither Brown nor his legal team is allowed to speak to the media. It's perfectly reasonable to expect Brown and his legal team to try to draw attention to the ridiculousness of the case, and the only purpose of this sort of gag order is to silence the press and keep the story from getting the kind of attention it deserves, as yet another example of prosecutorial overreach by the DOJ." Continue reading →

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Schneier on NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure

"Now that we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on theinternet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves. The NSA has turned the fabric of the internet into a vast surveillance platform, but they are not magical. They're limited by the same economic realities as the rest of us, and our best defense is to make surveillance of us as expensive as possible. Trust the math. Encryption is your friend. Use it well, and do your best to ensure that nothing can compromise it. That's how you can remain secure even in the face of the NSA." Continue reading →

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What Exactly Are the NSA’s ‘Groundbreaking Cryptanalytic Capabilities’?

"Whatever the NSA has up its top-secret sleeves, the mathematics of cryptography will still be the most secure part of any encryption system. I worry a lot more about poorly designed cryptographic products, software bugs, bad passwords, companies that collaborate with the NSA to leak all or part of the keys, and insecure computers and networks. Those are where the real vulnerabilities are, and where the NSA spends the bulk of its efforts. While the NSA certainly has symmetric cryptanalysis capabilities that we in the academic world do not, converting that into practical attacks on the sorts of data it is likely to encounter seems so impossible as to be fanciful." Continue reading →

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Schneier: US gov. has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back

"Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. The companies that build and manage our internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: we can no longer trust them to be ethical internet stewards. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community." Continue reading →

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Michael Hastings: A Non-Conspiracy Theory

"Michael had been living in LA [alone] for at least 6-months renting two apartments in the same building; one for living, one for writing. Michael and Elise Jordan had been married less than two-years at the time of his death. In less than a year of marriage, Michael and Elise were technically physically separated for large amounts of time by this move and careers. Worth a glance, if you look at this video of the two of them from last summer [2012], you will notice they do not behave as a loving couple, let alone newlyweds in comparison to the reporter John Avalon and his wife. In fact, the bubbly-ness and warmth Elise usually exudes [in other media appearances] is completely lacking." Continue reading →

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Russian legislators introduce bill to take children away from LGBT parents

"A Russian lawmaker has introduced a bill that would allow the state to remove children from homes headed by LGBT parents. The draft bill was published on the Russian parliament’s website Thursday morning and proposed to make the 'fact of nontraditional sexual orientation' grounds for removing or denying parental custody rights. The bill, if passed, would add sexual orientation to a list of disqualifying factors that includes alcoholism, drug addiction and a history of child abuse. Bill author Alexei Zhuravlev said that the law would be a natural extension of a law passed earlier this year that bans so-called 'homosexual propaganda.'" Continue reading →

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Homeschool raid on family viewed as terror

"The German government is being accused of terrorism on its own citizens for a police squad raid in which officers armed with a battering ram forcibly took four children from their parents because they were being homeschooled. The accusations are being posted on a Facebook page for the German embassy in Washington. The reaction developed after, as WND reported, four homeschooled children, ages 7 to 14, were forcibly taken from their Darmstadt, Germany, home by police armed with a battering ram. The parents, Dirk and Petra Wunderlich, were told they won’t see the children again soon, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association." Continue reading →

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