War in Context

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• NSA chief’s demand for total information awareness
• FAIRVIEW: The NSA’s project to ‘own the Internet’
• How the NSA and others exploit software bugs at everyone else’s expense
• Salon interviews Glenn Greenwald
• Obama’s secret kill list — ‘the disposition matrix’
• Alfred W. McCoy: Obama’s expanding surveillance universe

NSA chief’s demand for total information awareness Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:35 AM PDT The Washington Post has a profile of NSA Director Keith Alexander: To some of Alexander’s most vociferous critics, Snowden’s disclosures confirm their image of an agency and a director so enamored of technological prowess that they have sacrificed privacy rights. “He is absolutely obsessed and completely driven to take it all, whenever possible,” said Thomas [...]

FAIRVIEW: The NSA’s project to ‘own the Internet’ Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:33 AM PDT The Daily Dot reports: According to Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive who blew the whistle on the agency’s reckless spending and spying in 2006, a previously unknown NSA surveillance program known as FAIRVIEW aims to “own the Internet.” Last month, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of PowerPoint slides [...]

How the NSA and others exploit software bugs at everyone else’s expense Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:31 AM PDT The New York Times reports: On the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs — not the island’s many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit. The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, [...]

Salon interviews Glenn Greenwald Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:29 AM PDT Salon: There was a Quinnipiac poll that came out two days ago reporting that over half of Americans regarded Edward Snowden as a whistleblower rather than a traitor, despite the fact that we’ve heard tons of calls for him to be arrested and tried for leaking state secrets. What do you think? How do you [...]

Obama’s secret kill list — ‘the disposition matrix’ Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:27 AM PDT The Guardian reports: When Bilal Berjawi spoke to his wife for the last time, he had no way of being certain that he was about to die. But he should have had his suspicions. A short, dumpy Londoner who was not, in the words of some who knew him, one of the world’s greatest thinkers, [...]

Alfred W. McCoy: Obama’s expanding surveillance universe Posted: 14 Jul 2013 04:37 PM PDT On the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services there is a list of rights belonging to all Americans. Chief among them: Freedom to express yourself. Abdiwali Warsame must have taken them literally. Two days after he became a U.S. citizen, he created a rollicking news and opinion website covering his native Somalia.  It [...]