Chisel News
Censorship, humanity, injustice, surveillance, encryption and legislation.
A log of events.
"The NSA wants to help stop the next cyber attack on Wall Street, Facebook, or Twitter, and the agency's director thinks information sharing between the feds and private companies is a good place to start."
by Jason | Apr 16th, 2013 | Tags : NSA surveillance
"A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that 'it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture' and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it."
Nearly 200 senior IBM executives are flying into Washington to press for the passage of a controversial cybersecurity bill that will come up for a vote in the House this week. The IBM executives will pound the pavement on Capitol Hill Monday and Tuesday, holding nearly 300 meetings with lawmakers and staff. Over the course of those two days, their mission is to convince lawmakers to back a bill that’s intended to make it easier for industry and government to share information about cyber threats with each other in real time.
by Jason | Apr 15th, 2013 | Tags : IBM surveillance CISPA
One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.
I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.
I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said the reason prosecution ended up with defense emails at all was likely because a security officer “miscommunicated the search parameters.” As soon as one prosecutor “realized the search results included privileged material, the searches completely ceased, and, upon agreement of defense counsel … the IT department deleted all the search results from the two searches,” Breasseale said.
by Jason | Apr 15th, 2013 | Tags : injustice military justice
The ACLU has warned the D.C. Council in a statement sent April 10, 2013, that a small change in wording proposed in a bill pending before them (Bill Number B20-13) would dramatically expand powers of the D.C. Attorney General, allowing him to summon both people and documents to his offices for any purpose merely relevant to any investigation under way there. This would be a power, the ACLU analysis showed (drawing on research offered by the executive branch itself), much greater than state laws typically give attorneys general elsewhere and would be more authority even than that of the U.S. Attorney who prosecutes District felonies.
by Jason | Apr 14th, 2013 | Tags : corruption tyranny
Around 400 B.C., Socrates was brought to trial on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and “impiety.” Presumably, however, people believed then as we do now, that Socrates’ real crime was being too clever and, not insignificantly, a royal pain to those in power or, as Plato put it, a gadfly. Just as a gadfly is an insect that could sting a horse and prod it into action, so too could Socrates sting the state. He challenged the moral values of his contemporaries and refused to go along with unjust demands of tyrants, often obstructing their plans when he could. Socrates thought his service to Athens should have earned him free dinners for life. He was given a cup of hemlock instead.
The escalating cyber attacks on corporate and government computers have provided a rare opportunity for bipartisan legislation to address the problem. But rather than sailing through Congress, the latest cyber security legislation is exposing a fault line in the tech industry.
by Jason | Apr 14th, 2013 | Tags : CISPA surveillance
CISPA's sponsors are doing the same thing they did last year when confronted with serious opposition to a terrible bill: they start lying about it. First, they released a "fact vs. myth" sheet about the bill that was so ridiculously misleading that the EFF had to pick apart nearly every dubious claim. A big part of this is trying to hide the fact that the bill has very broad definitions that will make it much easier for the NSA to get access to private data. No one has claimed that this automatically allows the NSA to do full "surveillance" via CISPA, but that's what CISPA's supporters pretend critics have said, so they can fight back against the strawman.
by Jason | Apr 14th, 2013 | Tags : CISPA surveillance
Described as "misguided" and "fatally flawed" by the two largest US privacy groups, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) threatens the online privacy of ordinary US residents more so than any other Bill since Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008.
by Jason | Apr 14th, 2013 | Tags : surveillance