In the wake of the revelations by Edward Snowden, the head of the NSA Keith Alexander has announced that he plans to reduce by 90% the number of system administrators (the job that Snowden had) that NSA employs, in an effort to limit the number of people with access to that kind of data. [Read more…]

One sign of how this whole Snowden business has got under president Obama’s skin is that he seems to be losing his celebrated cool and becoming more peevish, as demonstrated in the way he spoke about Russian president Vladimir Putin at yesterday’s press conference. [Read more…]

Phil Zimmerman, who is the creator of the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption algorithm and the head of Silent Circle, the other encrypted global communication company that shut down along with Lavabit, has explained in an open letter why he took this action. He says that unlike the other services that his company provides for phone, video, and text services, where his company retains no data that it can be forced to provide to third parties and is thus secure from end-to-end, the nature of email is such that he could not provide that level of guarantee. [Read more…]

Two email companies that used encrypted systems, one of which was used by Edward Snowden, have decided to shut down because they were clearly asked to do things by the government that compromised their clients’ confidentiality and they refused to do so.

The bizarre nature of the country we now live in demonstrated by the short letter that the head of one agency (Lavabit) released, of which I will highlight a small bit. [Read more…]

As one could have predicted, news is slowly emerging that the sweeping statements provided by the government about the limits of the information it was collecting are turning out to be false. They said that they only collect metadata and not the contents of the messages themselves. But a new report says that they do search through the data looking for certain keywords and if those are found, those emails are saved for later close analysis by humans. [Read more…]

Medea Benjamin takes a logical approach to this question. She identifies ten things that the US is doing that are inflaming tensions in the Middle East and suggests that not doing them might reverse the situation. As she says, “This 10-point plan would significantly reduce terrorist threats, save taxpayers billions of dollars and make Americans more loved and admired in the world. After a decade of wielding the military stick, it’s time for some carrots.” [Read more…]

Most of us are law abiding and not law fearing. By that I mean that people follow the law because they think it is reasonable to do so. This is why people stop at stop signs even in remote areas where there is no one around and they can clearly see that there is no cross traffic. This is also why people (mostly) are truthful about what they say on their tax returns and don’t steal their neighbor’s newspapers and potted plants when they are away. [Read more…]

I am still reading Jeremy Scahill’s long but engrossing book Dirty Wars that looks at how the US government now essentially views the entire world as a battlefield and feels that it is free to attack anyone anywhere that it decides is a threat. The book’s main focus is of course the wars in the Middle East but the three interweaving major threads that run through the book shift from events in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan to other countries, especially Yemen and Somalia. [Read more…]