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Surveillance: India Admits Happily Being Other Countries Bitch Against You
by grarpamp 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/19/india-intercept-monitor-citizen-computers/ The Indian government said on Tuesday that it is "empowered" to intercept, monitor, or decrypt any digital communication "generated, transmitted, received, or stored" on a citizen's device in the country in the interest of national security or to maintain friendly relations with foreign states. From a report: Citing section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and section 5 of the Telegraph Act, 1885, Minister of State for Home Affairs G. Kishan Reddy said local law empowers federal and state government to "intercept, monitor or decrypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or decrypted any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence." Reddy's remarks were in response to the parliament, where a lawmaker had asked if the government had snooped on citizens' WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, and Google calls and messages.

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TheIntercept NYT: Writes on Iran Iraq Spy Cables
by grarpamp 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/18/iran-iraq-spy-cables/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/18/world/middleeast/iran-iraq-s… A Spy Complex Revealed Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Tehran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq Now leaked Iranian documents offer a detailed portrait of just how aggressively Tehran has worked to embed itself into Iraqi affairs, and of the unique role of Suleimani. The documents are contained in an archive of secret Iranian intelligence cables obtained by The Intercept and shared with the New York Times for this article, which is being published simultaneously by both news organizations. The unprecedented leak exposes Tehran’s vast influence in Iraq, detailing years of painstaking work by Iranian spies to co-opt the country’s leaders, pay Iraqi agents working for the Americans to switch sides, and infiltrate every aspect of Iraq’s political, economic, and religious life. Many of the cables describe real-life espionage capers that feel torn from the pages of a spy thriller. Meetings are arranged in dark alleyways and shopping malls or under the cover of a hunting excursion or a birthday party. Informants lurk at the Baghdad airport, snapping pictures of American soldiers and keeping tabs on coalition military flights. Agents drive meandering routes to meetings to evade surveillance. Sources are plied with gifts of pistachios, cologne, and saffron. Iraqi officials, if necessary, are offered bribes. The archive even contains expense reports from intelligence ministry officers in Iraq, including one totaling 87.5 euros spent on gifts for a Kurdish commander. https://publications.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/3667.pdf In a sense, the leaked Iranian cables provide a final accounting of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The notion that the Americans handed control of Iraq to Iran when they invaded now enjoys broad support, even within the U.S. military. A recent two-volume history of the Iraq War, published by the U.S. Army, details the campaign’s many missteps and its “staggering cost” in lives and money. Nearly 4,500 American troops were killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, and American taxpayers spent up to $2 trillion on the war. The study, which totals hundreds of pages and draws on declassified documents, concludes: “An emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”

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Sherwood Torrent
by John Young 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

ICYMI, 2 TB Cayman bank hack https://cryptome.org/Sherwood.torrent Two samples: https://unicornriot.ninja/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/cayman-banking_custome… https://unicornriot.ninja/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/CNCIOM-PEP-Register-20…

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US FBI Drops FHOTI Bomb on Interpol to Ban E2E Crypto ASAP
by grarpamp 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/11/think-of-the-children-fbi-sough… https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-interpol-plans-condemn-encryption-20321871… https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/the-broken-record-why-barrs-cal… Justice Department officials have long pushed for some sort of backdoor to permit warranted surveillance and searches of encrypted communications. Recently, that push has been taken international with Attorney General William Barr and his counterparts from the United Kingdom and Australia making an open plea to Facebook to delay plans to use end-to-end encryption across all the company's messaging tools. Now, the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigations are attempting to get an even larger international consensus on banning end-to-end encryption by way of a draft resolution authored by officials at the FBI for the International Criminal Police Organization's 37th Meeting of the INTERPOL Specialists Group on Crimes against Children. The event took place from November 12 to November 15 at the INTERPOL headquarters in Lyon, France. A draft of the resolution viewed by Ars Technica stated that INTERPOL would "strongly urge providers of technology services to allow for lawful access to encrypted data enabled or facilitated by their systems" in the interest of fighting child sexual exploitation. Currently, it is not clear whether Interpol will issue a statement. The draft resolution went on to lay responsibility for child exploitation upon the tech industry: "The current path towards default end-to-end encryption, with no provision for lawful access, does not allow for the protection of the world's children from sexual exploitation. Technology providers must act and design their services in a way that protects user privacy, on the one hand, while providing user safety, on the other hand. Failure to allow for Lawful Access on their platforms and products, provides a safe haven to offenders utilizing these to sexually exploit children, and inhibits our global law enforcement efforts to protect children." In a statement that flies in the face of the consensus of cryptographers and other technical experts, the draft resolution asserted that "technologists agree" that designing systems to "[allow] for lawful access to data, while maintaining customer privacy…can be implemented in a way that would enhance privacy while maintaining strong cyber security."

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LibertyBits Conference
by grarpamp 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

https://libertybits.org/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8H5ZUjWQmgNP-6dyODWA4A/videos LibertyBits: The First Freedom & Tech Conference, dedicated to our freedom in today's digital age. It took place on April 24th, 2018 at Sofia Tech Park in Sofia, Bulgaria. Main topics were Blockchain, Privacy, Free Software & Life off-the-grid.

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Leffest19 - You Must Infiltrate and Defect To Humanity, Govt did Tibet vis Tor, Tools, Quantum vs Old Data, PRISM, Etc
by grarpamp 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

Leffest 2019 https://www.leffest.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUoaS0yqTwl-KxSKP197x0g/videos Ciclos Temáticos Simpósio Internacional: Resistências Debate – Virtualidade da Resistência, Resistência na Virtualidade, com Jacob Appelbaum e Juan Branco 20191116 (parts missing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvV5pFG0nqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9qkNzlzSQM Ciclos Temáticos Simpósio Internacional: Resistências Palestra com Rafael Correa 20191117 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0tPQW457Ok Ciclos Temáticos Simpósio Internacional: Resistências Palestra – Resistir contra Plataformas e Sistemas Informáticos Injustos com Richard Stallman 20191117 Mass Surveillance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXi1emH7xsY (Substituted Stallman's LibertyBits 2019 since Stallman's Leffest 2019 might not exist online anywhere yet.)

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Can The Net Be Censored? The Ernst Zundel Affair by Charles Gimon and Nizkor Shofar
by grarpamp 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

http://www.skypoint.com/members/gimonca/censor.html http://nizkor.org/ftp.cgi?people/z/zundel.ernst Can the Net be Censored? by Charles A. Gimon for INFO NATION InfoLogo This year is shaping up to be the year of Internet censorship. Yet as the pro- and anti-censorship sides of the argument do battle in the United States and other countries, a third view is being tested. Is it even possible to censor the Net? It's been assumed that the Internet is immune from censorship, that its architecture makes it impossible for any one organization to control. That assumption is now on the line, as some governments around the world are learning just how difficult the Internet can be to control, while others continue to make plans for a clampdown on Internet freedoms. The most aggressive moves against the Internet have been coming from the new Germany. The San Jose Mercury News of January 27th, 1996 reported that Deutsche Telekom, the national phone company in Germany, had blocked its customers' access to Web Communications of Santa Cruz, California. One of Webcom's customers, a Canadian citizen from Toronto named Ernst Zundel, had put up a web page on Webcom's server to speak for a controversial point of view called "Holocaust revisionism". In a nutshell, a "Holocaust revisionist" is someone who believes that the Nazis didn't actually kill millions of Jews during the 1930s and 1940s--or at least not very many. Most people file Holocaust revisionists in the same category with people who still believe the earth is flat. Nevertheless, in countries that do not have the constitutional guarantee of free speech that Americans have, expressing such views can be illegal. (Zundel had already been brought up on "hate speech" charges in Canada.) (pic) Ernst Zundel In Germany, Zundel would be guilty of "Volksverhetzung": roughly, instigating the public to hatred. German authorities couldn't touch Zundel on the other side of the Atlantic, but they did start an investigation into whether Internet providers who made his page available could be charged with the same crime. Deutsche Telekom, which provides Internet access through its subsidiary T-Online, several German universities and other sites fell into line and blocked access from their sites to webcom.com, even though no court order had been served. The threat of charges had been enough. For free-speech activists, the challenge had been made. If the German government could block Internet access to sites it didn't like, other governments were sure to try the same thing--even the United States, where President Clinton was on the verge of signing the "Communications Decency Act" into law as part of a huge telecommunications reform bill. It was impossible for the Germans to censor only one page--blocking webcom.com meant stopping a range of IP addresses. Free-speech supporters figured that if Zundel's site was copied to the best sites on the Internet, the German government would be forced to cut Germany off from the Net completely, slice by slice. The first Zundel mirror site was put up by Rich Graves at Stanford University. With an address including the line "Not_By_Me_Not_My_Views", Graves put up a complete copy of Zundel's web site on one of Stanford's servers: if the German government wanted to censor, they would have to do without the Internet resources at Stanford as well. Soon mirror sites popped up at major universities all across North America. Declan McCullagh, a tireless Internet and free-speech activist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, put up a mirror site of his own. McCullagh was already known for opposing CMU's own attempt to limit Usenet access, for helping to expose the bad research in Marty Rimm's "Cyberporn" study, and for working with the Justice on Campus project to counter "politically-correct" campus speech codes. Most of the University sites were supportive of the spontaneous free-speech movement. Only one mirror site, the one put up by Lewis McCarthy at the University of Massachusetts, was forced to close down. UMass administrators stated that they didn't want "political material" on their servers. None of the original sites were supportive of Zundel's views, only of his right (and everyone's) to freedom of speech. Within a few days, though, the wild fringe was heard from, and other Zundel mirror sites were put on the Net bywhite supremacists at the University of Texas, Georgia State and America On-Line. The culture-clash between the free-speech activists and the "white nationalists" was very real. At least one page lied about Declan McCullagh, saying that he was in full support of Zundel's views on the Holocaust (he wasn't at all). Notorious white supremacist Tom Metzger claimed that Zundel staged the whole thing as a publicity stunt. Yet as the statements from the far-far-right got wackier, the basic rationale of the free-speech activists was proven correct: good information will drown out bad information. Expose the views of Zundel and others to the light of day, and they can be cross-examined into oblivion, maybe even laughed into it. By the early morning of February 2nd, a traceroute from gatekeeper.rhein.de to webcom.com showed that the blocking had been lifted. The battle appeared to have been won. However, it was announced that the investigation had been broadened to include AOL, which had only been offering access in Germany for a few weeks. CompuServe, which had already been forced to block access to several Usenet newsgroups by a prosecutor in Bavaria in January, was placed on notice that it was part of the investigation as well. (As of this writing, the investigation had not come to any conclusion.) The freedom of speech message in the campaign had not gotten through to everyone in the United States, either: the Simon Wiesenthal Center faxed university higher-up at all the sites stating their disapproval of college sites hosting the Zundel pages, and ignoring the "Not_My_Views" disclaimers. At exactly the same time as all this was going on, the French goverment was learning a similar lesson. In France, Dr. Claude Gubler, who had been the personal physician to the late President Mitterand, published a book, "Le Grand Secret", about his career with the President. It included personal details of Mitterand's suffering with prostate cancer, which the two of them had kept secret from the public for years. Forty thousand copies of the book were issued before a French court could issue a ban on it on January 17th. One of those copies fell into the hands of Pascal Barbraud, owner of an Internet cafe in Paris. Barbraud took the book, scanned it, and put scanned images of each page of the book on the Internet. French citizens who couldn't get a rare paper copy of the book could now read it on the Net--as could anyone else in the world. The French government wasn't pleased: Barbraud was soon apprehended on "unrelated charges". Barbraud wasn't the most techno-savvy person on the Internet, either: the scanned images in his site were huge, and took an agonizingly long time to view. Stephane Etienne, a grad student at the University of Glasgow in the U.K., wrote a script that tried to connect to Barbraud's server again and again until a full copy of the book could be reassembled in Glasgow on January 27th. Over that weekend, Sebastien Blondeel and Declan McCullagh (who was putting up a Zundel mirror site at the same time) converted the images of the pages into ASCII text, which reduced them to small files, easy to read and fast to download. The full text of "Le Grand Secret" was put into McCullagh's web pages at Carnegie Mellon, where they can still be read today. The French attempt at censorship had failed. (Grand Secret Logo) In spite of these developments, other governments continue to try to control the Internet. The most vocal government in favor of Internet censorship (with the possible exception of the United States) is the People's Republic of China. Beijing has been making efforts in two different directions: funding and expanding Internet access on one hand while threatening to prosecute Net hooligans on the other. Internet service providers are kept on a tight leash by the Chinese government. Only about 1000 or so Usenet groups are allowed into the country. China was brash enough to congratulate German prosecutors when CompuServe blocked access to certain Usenet newsgroups under pressure. Whether the Chinese government is technically capable of censoring the Internet is another question. Identifying and following every packet of information within their borders would be just about mathematically impossible. If the Chinese government lives up to its press releases and prosecutes people for transmitting "pornographic and detrimental information", it will have to do so by singling out individuals; there is no way to stop traffic of any kind, good or bad, in a world with anonymous remailers, strong encryption, and distributed networks. As Australia and New Zealand consider legislation comparable to the recently enacted--and immediately enjoined by court order--"Communications Decency Act" in the United States, the question that remains is not whether the Internet should be censored, but whether it's even possible to censor it. You can find the original Ernst Zundel site at: http://www.webcom.com/~ezundel/english/ Rich Graves' homepage is at: http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~llurch/ Declan McCullagh has the full text of "Le Grand Secret" at: http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~declan/ The fight-censorship mailing list, where much of this was discussed, is archived at: http://fight-censorship.dementia.org And for a well-researched critical response to Zundel, you can browse the Nizkor Project's pages at: http://nizkor.almanac.bc.ca Charles A. Gimon teaches an Intro to the PC class at the English Learning Center in South Minneapolis. He can be reached at gimonca(a)skypoint.com or ay778(a)freenet.carleton.ca. Back to my net writings. Back to my home page.

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Losers in the Epstein System
by Ryan Carboni 18 Nov '19

18 Nov '19

Any system that mistreats the losers will be afraid when their winning streak ends. >From the documentary Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger Thirty years ago, my wife and I purchased a liquor license. Then we had the liquor store up and running by Christmas. We poured our heart and soul in it. And then, lo and behold, I get a knock on my door one night, I'm at the house, my wife's down at the liquor store working, and it was Kevin Weeks and Whitey Bulger at the door, and I didn't know, what the hell do they want? "You got a problem." I said, "I don't... what problem?" He says, "Listen, we were hired to kill you." I'm like, what? He said, you got to understand, the other liquor stores, they hired us to kill you. I just couldn't believe it, I didn't know what to even think, I was dumbfounded. Actually, I froze. He said, "But what we're going to do instead of that, we're just going to become your partners." I said, "No, you're not becoming my partners." And then, Bulger's right there. He's just staring at me, and just grinding his teeth like, "You don't understand, we're taking the f*cking liquor store." I was like, "It's not for sale." He said, "I'll f*cking kill you. I'll stab you, and then I'll kill you." I'm like, Holy Jesus. And then they pulled out a gun. I was like, "Oh, f*ck." They picked up my kid. Daughter was a year. He said, "It would be terrible for this kid to grow up without a father." I was like... and I melted. Nothing you can do. Ever since that day, I've never been the same. I couldn't protect my own children. As a man, that just took me away. And I'm not over it yet. I won't be over, and maybe I'll never get over it, but I surely can't wait to get in front of that court, on that stand and testify against that. 30 years ago, he scared me to death, he don't scare me to death no more.

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Assassination Drones
by jim bell 18 Nov '19

18 Nov '19

https://www.cityam.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Cityam-2019-11-12.pdf "One final warning, though, which isnot about ethics but practicalities.Cheap assassination drones alreadyexist on the battlefield, but as automated weapon technology develops,we may find them being used elsewhere. Are we really prepared forsmall drones with guns that can lookinto the windows of Downing Street,or Buckingham Palace?The history of military technologyshows that it cannot be kept out ofprivate hands, but we have to hopethat killer robots are an exception."

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Lee Camp on Bolivia Coup: "Don't we [USA] know how to launder money by now?!?" - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 18 Nov '19

18 Nov '19

Apparently USAID has been directly funding the salaries of Venezuelan Coup leaders, and Lee Camp asks the obvious question "don't we know how to launder money by now?!" Do we now topple governments to keep access to Instagram? Lee Camp digs into Bolivia coup https://www.rt.com/news/473663-bolivia-coup-lithium-resources/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lmr4Ax9KY68 ~28mins

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