risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

Under the guidelines of the ordinance, any registered drone hunter would be given $100 if he presents "identifiable parts of an unmanned aerial vehicle whose markings and configuration are consistent with those used on any similar craft known to be owned or operated by the United States federal government."

According to KMGH-TV, the licenses would cost $25 a year. The board will consider the measure on Aug. 6.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/17/colorado-town-concerned-about-surveillance-considers-drone-hunting-licenses/?test=latestnews#ixzz2ZRr3KjIC

You have to KNOW the full might of the NSA will be focused on any editor that dares cross them.

A US court has ordered the Obama administration to declassify a 2008 court decision justifying the Prism spying programme revealed last month by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The ruling, issued earlier this week, will show how the state has legally justified its covert data collection programmes under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Judge Reggie Walton of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued the ruling to declassify the decision. The government is expected to decide by August 26 which parts of the 2008 decision may be published.

The scope and scale of Prism, which collects millions of private foreign communications with American citizens, was leaked to the media last month by Snowden. Its operation is overseen by the FIS Court and its appeals body, the FIS Court of Review.

The ruling to declassify comes after a challenge by the internet firm, Yahoo, on the constitutionality of the programme.

It and a number of internet firms including Facebook, Google, AOL and Microsoft, were compelled to provide information to the National Security Agency (NSA), which runs Prism.

A statement from Yahoo on Tuesday said that it was "very pleased" with the court's ruling.

"Once those documents are made public, we believe they will contribute constructively to the ongoing public discussion around online privacy," Yahoo said.

NSA sued

Meanwhile, 19 organisations represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a suit against the NSA for violating their right of association by illegally collecting their call records.

The coalition includes Unitarian church group, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy groups.

"The First Amendment protects the freedom to associate and express political views as a group, but the NSA's mass, untargeted collection of Americans' phone records violates that right by giving the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties," Cindy Cohn, the legal director for the EFF, said.

"Who we call, how often we call them, and how long we speak shows the government what groups we belong to or associate with, which political issues concern us, and our religious affiliation.

"Exposing this information – especially in a massive, untargeted way over a long period of time – violates the Constitution and the basic First Amendment tests that have been in place for over 50 years."

Data requests

Meanwhile a number of major US Internet companies, including Microsoft, Google and Facebook have asked the government for permission to disclose the number of national security-related user data requests they receive.

Also on Tuesday, Microsoft published an lengthy letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder asking for greater freedom to publicly discuss how it turns over user information to the government.

The letter was a response to a The Guardian newspaper report that said Microsoft had given authorities the ability to circumvent encryption of Outlook emails and to capture Skype online chats. The company says that report is inaccurate.

The former head of the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the USA claims that he has seen hard evidence that communications company Huawei has engaged in espionage on behalf of the Chinese government.

In an extraordinary interview with the Australian Financial Review newspaper, General Michael Hayden alleged that Huawei has shared “intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems” with the Chinese state.

He claimed to have reviewed a briefing paper from Huawei two or three years ago, when the company was trying to establish a footprint in the United States. While acknowledging that the paper said “all the right things,” Hayden still refused to endorse their presence in the US.

“God did not make enough briefing slides on Huawei to convince me that having them involved in our critical communications infrastructure was going to be okay. This is not blind prejudice on my part. This was my considered view based on a four-decade career as an intelligence officer,” he said.

He went on to say that the burden of proof is on Huawei to prove that its networking equipment does not contain any insidious hardware implants or backdoors that would feed information back to the Chinese state.

“Based upon the House Intelligence Committee’s open hearings in America last year, Huawei was well short of providing any comforting testimony that would make me begin to question the intuitive premise that Huawei presents serious national security risks on a first-principles basis,” he said.

Hayden is a director of Motorola Solutions, which provides voice and data communications products and systems to the US government. Huawei and Motorola have previously been engaged in intellectual property disputes for a number of years.

Huawei's global cybersecurity officer, John Suffolk, described the comments made by Hayden as “tired, unsubstantiated, defamatory remarks” and said they distract from real-world concerns related to espionage, which demand serious discussion globally.

The news comes in the wake of the UK government’s announcement that it will conduct a review of Huawei’s Cyber Security Evaluation Centre in Oxfordshire, in accordance with the recommendations of a report by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC).

The ISC’s report noted that Huawei’s links to the Chinese state are perceived and did not offer evidence to substantiate these allegations. It also noted Huawei’s denial of links with the Chinese state, and the fact that it is owned by its employees.

However, it did criticise the government’s processes of considering national security issues at the time that BT and Huawei started working together nearly ten years ago, describing them as “insufficiently robust”.

It's understood that is precisely what Facebook, Google, et al do. Since there's no expectation of privacy, can a corporate entity or private individual also legally access all of this data?

Meanwhile, 19 organisations represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a suit against the NSA for violating their right of association by illegally collecting their call records.

The coalition includes Unitarian church group, gun ownership advocates, and a broad coalition of membership and political advocacy groups.

Interesting coalition, eh? Could it be that the far right and the left might find some common ground on this one????

What about say Verizon selling your phone and email metadata to private entities?

Meanwhile, 19 organisations represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a suit against the NSA for violating their right of association by illegally collecting their call records.

One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.
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The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism -- and remain in jail.
[...]

Fringe kook bloogers

But on December 4, 2012, the U.S. filed a new indictment of the protestors. Count one was the promised new charge of sabotage. Defendants were charged with intending to injure, interfere with, or obstruct the national defense of the United States and willful damage of national security premises in violation of 18 US Code 2155, punishable with up to 20 years in prison. Counts two and three were the previous felony property damage charges, with potential prison terms of up to fifteen more years in prison.

"The question is not 'do you have something to hide?' The question is whether we control government or the government controls us." - Oliver Stone

History tells us that change will happen—that we can reclaim control of our government and our privacy—if ordinary citizens act on the stunning information that Edward Snowden has exposed.

And since Snowden exposed the NSA’s massive internet and telephone spying programs, tens of thousands of ACLU supporters have indeed taken a stand—calling on President Obama to end them. But he has refused to respond, offering up bland defenses of the program and stepping up the international witch-hunt for Snowden instead.

So now we need to turn to Congress, which blindly gave the NSA too much spying power in the first place.

In a sign of building momentum, new legislation is popping up every week to curtail or undo the secret surveillance state, but we’ll only get a good law if we send our representatives a crystal clear message: Americans stand opposed to this blatant abuse of power.

Tell Congress to get in gear to end the secret surveillance state—sign the petition demanding they repeal section 215 of the Patriot Act and section 702 of FISA immediately.

While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing.

Manning trial sets execution precedent for future whistleblowers