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The best way to read Glenn Greenwald's 'No Place to Hide' - 0 views

www.dailydot.com/...enn-greenwald-no-place-to-hide surveillance state NSA Obama Greenwald book doc-download book-citations
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • Journalist Glenn Greenwald just dropped a pile of new secret National Security Agency documents onto the Internet. But this isn’t just some haphazard WikiLeaks-style dump. These documents, leaked to Greenwald last year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, are key supplemental reading material for his new book, No Place to Hide, which went on sale Tuesday. Now, you could just go buy the book in hardcover and read it like you would any other nonfiction tome. Thanks to all the additional source material, however, if any work should be read on an e-reader or computer, this is it. Here are all the links and instructions for getting the most out of No Place to Hide.
  • Greenwald has released two versions of the accompanying NSA docs: a compressed version and an uncompressed version. The only difference between these two is the quality of the PDFs. The uncompressed version clocks in at over 91MB, while the compressed version is just under 13MB. For simple reading purposes, just go with the compressed version and save yourself some storage space. Greenwald also released additional “notes” for the book, which are just citations. Unless you’re doing some scholarly research, you can skip this download.
  • No Place to Hide is, of course, available on a wide variety of ebook formats—all of which are a few dollars cheaper than the hardcover version, I might add. Pick your e-poison: Amazon, Nook, Kobo, iBooks. Flipping back and forth Each page of the documents includes a corresponding page number for the book, to allow readers to easily flip between the book text and the supporting documents. If you use the Amazon Kindle version, you also have the option of reading Greenwald’s book directly on your computer using the Kindle for PC app or directly in your browser. Yes, that may be the worst way to read a book. In this case, however, it may be the easiest way to flip back and forth between the book text and the notes and supporting documents. Of course, you can do the same on your e-reader—though it can be a bit of a pain. Those of you who own a tablet are in luck, as they provide the best way to read both ebooks and PDF files. Simply download the book using the e-reader app of your choice, download the PDFs from Greenwald’s website, and dig in. If you own a Kindle, Nook, or other ereader, you may have to convert the PDFs into a format that works well with your device. The Internet is full of tools and how-to guides for how to do this. Here’s one:
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  • Kindle users also have the option of using Amazon’s Whispernet service, which converts PDFs into a format that functions best on the company’s e-reader. That will cost you a small fee, however—$0.15 per megabyte, which means the compressed Greenwald docs will cost you a whopping $1.95.
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XML Production Workflows? Start with the Web and XHTML - 0 views

quod.lib.umich.edu/...n-workflows-start-with-the-web OpenWeb XML XHTML-CSS HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript IDML
shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Challenges: Some Ugly Truths The challenges of building—and living with—an XML workflow are clear enough. The return on investment is a long-term proposition. Regardless of the benefits XML may provide, the starting reality is that it represents a very different way of doing things than the one we are familiar with. The Word Processing and Desktop Publishing paradigm, based on the promise of onscreen, WYSIWYG layout, is so dominant as to be practically inescapable. It has proven really hard to get from here to there, no matter how attractive XML might be on paper. A considerable amount of organizational effort and labour must be expended up front in order to realize the benefits. This is why XML is often referred to as an “investment”: you sink a bunch of time and money up front, and realize the benefits—greater flexibility, multiple output options, searching and indexing, and general futureproofing—later, over the long haul. It is not a short-term return proposition. And, of course, the returns you are able to realize from your XML investment are commensurate with what you put in up front: fine-grained, semantically rich tagging is going to give you more potential for searchability and recombination than a looser, more general-purpose approach, but it sure costs more. For instance, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is the grand example of pouring enormous amounts of energy into the up-front tagging, with a very open-ended set of possibilities down the line. TEI helpfully defines a level to which most of us do not have to aspire.[5] But understanding this on a theoretical level is only part of the challenge. There are many practical issues that must be addressed. Software and labour are two of the most critical. How do you get the content into XML in the first place? Unfortunately, despite two decades of people doing SGML and XML, this remains an ugly question.
  • Practical Challenges In 2009, there is still no truly likeable—let alone standard—editing and authoring software for XML. For many (myself included), the high-water mark here was Adobe’s FrameMaker, substantially developed by the late 1990s. With no substantial market for it, it is relegated today mostly to the tech writing industry, unavailable for the Mac, and just far enough afield from the kinds of tools we use today that its adoption represents a significant hurdle. And FrameMaker was the best of the breed; most of the other software in decent circulation are programmers’ tools—the sort of things that, as Michael Tamblyn pointed out, encourage editors to drink at their desks. The labour question represents a stumbling block as well. The skill-sets and mind-sets that effective XML editors need have limited overlap with those needed by literary and more traditional production editors. The need to think of documents as machine-readable databases is not something that comes naturally to folks steeped in literary culture. In combination with the sheer time and effort that rich tagging requires, many publishers simply outsource the tagging to India, drawing a division of labour that spans oceans, to put it mildly. Once you have XML content, then what do you do with it? How do you produce books from it? Presumably, you need to be able to produce print output as well as digital formats. But while the latter are new enough to be generally XML-friendly (e-book formats being largely XML based, for instance), there aren’t any straightforward, standard ways of moving XML content into the kind of print production environments we are used to seeing. This isn’t to say that there aren’t ways of getting print—even very high-quality print—output from XML, just that most of them involve replacing your prepress staff with Java programmers.
  • Why does this have to be so hard? It’s not that XML is new, or immature, or untested. Remember that the basics have been around, and in production, since the early 1980s at least. But we have to take account of a substantial and long-running cultural disconnect between traditional editorial and production processes (the ones most of us know intimately) and the ways computing people have approached things. Interestingly, this cultural divide looked rather different in the 1970s, when publishers were looking at how to move to digital typesetting. Back then, printers and software developers could speak the same language. But that was before the ascendancy of the Desktop Publishing paradigm, which computerized the publishing industry while at the same time isolating it culturally. Those of us who learned how to do things the Quark way or the Adobe way had little in common with people who programmed databases or document-management systems. Desktop publishing technology isolated us in a smooth, self-contained universe of toolbars, grid lines, and laser proofs. So, now that the reasons to get with this program, XML, loom large, how can we bridge this long-standing divide?
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform The answer, I think, is right in front of you. The bridge is the Web, a technology and platform that is fundamentally based on XML, and which many publishers are by now comfortably familiar with. Perhaps not entirely comfortably, but at least most publishers are already working with the Web; they already either know or have on staff people who understand it and can work with it. The foundation of our argument is this: rather than looking at jumping to XML in its full, industrial complexity, which seems to be what the O'Reilly-backed StartWithXML initiative[6] is suggesting, publishers instead leverage existing tools and technologies—starting with the Web—as a means of getting XML workflows in place. This means making small investments and working with known tools rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars on XML software and rarefied consultants. It means re-thinking how the existing pieces of the production toolchain fit together; re-thinking the existing roles of software components already in use. It means, fundamentally, taking the Web seriously as a content platform, rather than thinking of it as something you need to get content out to, somehow. If nothing else, the Web represents an opportunity to think about editorial and production from outside the shrink-wrapped Desktop Publishing paradigm.
  • Is the Web made of Real XML? At this point some predictable objections can be heard: wait a moment, the Web isn’t really made out of XML; the HTML that makes up most of the Web is at best the bastard child of SGML, and it is far too flaky/unstructured/underpowered to be taken seriously. We counter by arguing that although HTML on the Web exists in a staggering array of different incarnations, and that the majority of it is indeed an unstructured mess, this does not undermine the general principle that basic, ubiquitous Web technologies can make a solid platform for content management, editorial process, and production workflow.
  • With the advent of a published XML standard in the late 1990s came the W3C’s adoption of XHTML: the realization of the Web’s native content markup as a proper XML document type. Today, its acceptance is almost ubiquitous, even while the majority of actual content out there may not be strictly conforming. The more important point is that most contemporary Web software, from browsers to authoring tools to content management systems (from blogs to enterprise systems), are capable of working with clean, valid XHTML. Or, to put the argument the other way around, clean, valid XHTML content plays absolutely seamlessly with everything else on the Web.[7]
  • The objection which follows, then, will be that even if we grant that XHTML is a real XML document type, that it is underpowered for “serious” content because it is almost entirely presentation (formatting) oriented; it lacks any semantic depth. In XHTML, a paragraph is a paragraph is a paragraph, as opposed to a section or an epigraph or a summary.
  • n contrast, more “serious” XML document types like DocBook[8] or DITA-derived schemas[9] are capable of making semantic distinctions about content chunks at a fine level of granularity and with a high degree of specificity.
  • So there is an argument for recalling the 80:20 rule here. If XHTML can provide 80% of the value with just 20% of the investment, then what exactly is the business case for spending the other 80% to achieve that last 20% of value? We suspect the ratio is actually quite a bit steeper than 80:20 for most publishers.
  • Furthermore, just to get technical for a moment, XHTML is extensible in a fairly straightforward way, through the common “class” attribute on each element. Web developers have long leveraged this kind of extensibility in the elaboration of “microformats” for semantic-web applications.[10] There is no reason why publishers shouldn’t think to use XHTML’s simple extensibility in a similar way for their own ends.
  • XHTML, on the other hand, is supported by a vast array of quotidian software, starting with the ubiquitous Web browser. For this very reason, XHTML is in fact employed as a component part of several more specialized document types (ONIX and ePub among them).
  • Why re-invent a general-purpose prose representation when XHTML already does the job?
  • It is worth pausing for a moment to consider the role of XHTML in the ePub standard for ebook content. An ePub file is, anatomically, a simply disguised zip archive. Inside the zip archive are a few standard component parts: there are specialized files that declare metadata about the book, and about the format of the book. And then there is the book’s content, represented in XHTML. An ePub book is a Web page in a wrapper.
  • To sum up the general argument: the Web as it already exists presents incredible value to publishers, as a platform for doing XML content management with existing (and often free) tools, and without having to go blindly into the unknown. At this point, we can offer a few design guidelines: prefer existing and/or ubiquitous tools over specialized ones wherever possible; prefer free software over proprietary systems where possible; prefer simple tools controlled and coordinated by human beings over fully automated (and therefore complex) systems; play to our strengths: use Web software for storing and managing content, use layout software for layout, and keep editors and production people in charge of their own domains.
  • Putting the Pieces Together: A Prototype
  • At the SFU Master of Publishing Program, we have been chipping away at this general line of thinking for a few years. Over that time, Web content management systems have been getting more and more sophisticated, all the while getting more streamlined and easier to use. (NB: if you have a blog, you have a Web content management system.) The Web is beginning to be recognized as a writing and editing environment used by millions of people. And the ways in which content is represented, stored, and exchanged online have become increasingly robust and standardized.
  • The missing piece of the puzzle has been print production: how can we move content from its malleable, fluid form on line into the kind of high-quality print production environments we’ve come to expect after two decades of Desktop Publishing?
  • Anyone who has tried to print Web content knows that the existing methods leave much to be desired (hyphenation and justification, for starters). In the absence of decent tools for this, most publishers quite naturally think of producing the print content first, and then think about how to get material onto the Web for various purposes. So we tend to export from Word, or from Adobe, as something of an afterthought.
  • While this sort of works, it isn’t elegant, and it completely ignores the considerable advantages of Web-based content management.
  • Content managed online is stored in one central location, accessible simultaneously to everyone in your firm, available anywhere you have an Internet connection, and usually exists in a much more fluid format than Word files. If only we could manage the editorial flow online, and then go to print formats at the end, instead of the other way around. At SFU, we made several attempts to make this work by way of the supposed “XML import” capabilities of various Desktop Publishing tools, without much success.[12]
  • In the winter of 2009, Adobe solved this part of the problem for us with the introduction of its Creative Suite 4. What CS4 offers is the option of a complete XML representation of an InDesign document: what Adobe calls IDML (InDesign Markup Language).
  • The IDML file format is—like ePub—a simply disguised zip archive that, when unpacked, reveals a cluster of XML files that represent all the different facets of an InDesign document: layout spreads, master pages, defined styles, colours, and of course, the content.
  • IDML is a well thought-out XML standard that achieves two very different goals simultaneously: it preserves all of the information that InDesign needs to do what it does; and it is broken up in a way that makes it possible for mere mortals (or at least our Master of Publishing students) to work with it.
  • What this represented to us in concrete terms was the ability to take Web-based content and move it into InDesign in a straightforward way, thus bridging Web and print production environments using existing tools and skillsets, with a little added help from free software.
  • We would take clean XHTML content, transform it to IDML-marked content, and merge that with nicely designed templates in InDesign.
  • The result is an almost push-button publication workflow, which results in a nice, familiar InDesign document that fits straight into the way publishers actually do production.
  • Tracing the steps To begin with, we worked backwards, moving the book content back to clean XHTML.
  • The simplest method for this conversion—and if you want to create Web content, this is an excellent route—was to use Adobe’s “Export to Digital Editions” option, which creates an ePub file.
  • Recall that ePub is just XHTML in a wrapper, so within the ePub file was a relatively clean XHTML document. It was somewhat cleaner (that is, the XHTML tagging was simpler and less cluttered) than InDesign’s other Web-oriented exports, possibly because Digital Editions is a well understood target, compared with somebody’s website.
  • In order to achieve our target of clean XHTML, we needed to do some editing; the XHTML produced by InDesign’s “Digital Editions” export was presentation-oriented. For instance, bulleted list items were tagged as paragraphs, with a class attribute identifying them as list items. Using the search-and-replace function, we converted such structures to proper XHTML list and list-item elements. Our guiding principle was to make the XHTML as straightforward as possible, not dependent on any particular software to interpret it.
  • We broke the book’s content into individual chapter files; each chapter could then carry its own basic metadata, and the pages conveniently fit our Web content management system (which is actually just a wiki). We assembled a dynamically generated table of contents for the 12 chapters, and created a cover page. Essentially, the book was entirely Web-based at this point.
  • When the book chapters are viewed online, they are formatted via a CSS2 stylesheet that defines a main column for content as well as dedicating screen real estate for navigational elements. We then created a second template to render the content for exporting; this was essentially a bare-bones version of the book with no navigation and minimal styling. Pages (or even the entire book) can be exported (via the “Save As...” function in a Web browser) for use in either print production or ebook conversion. At this point, we required no skills beyond those of any decent Web designer.
  • Integrating with CS4 for Print Adobe’s IDML language defines elements specific to InDesign; there is nothing in the language that looks remotely like XHTML. So a mechanical transformation step is needed to convert the XHTML content into something InDesign can use. This is not as hard as it might seem.
  • Both XHTML and IDML are composed of straightforward, well-documented structures, and so transformation from one to the other is, as they say, “trivial.” We chose to use XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transforms) to do the work. XSLT is part of the overall XML specification, and thus is very well supported in a wide variety of tools. Our prototype used a scripting engine called xsltproc, a nearly ubiquitous piece of software that we found already installed as part of Mac OS X (contemporary Linux distributions also have this as a standard tool), though any XSLT processor would work.
  • In other words, we don’t need to buy InCopy, because we just replaced it with the Web. Our wiki is now plugged directly into our InDesign layout. It even automatically updates the InDesign document when the content changes. Credit is due at this point to Adobe: this integration is possible because of the open file format in the Creative Suite 4.
  • We wrote an XSLT transformation script[18] that converted the XHTML content from the Web into an InCopy ICML file. The script itself is less than 500 lines long, and was written and debugged over a period of about a week by amateurs (again, the people named at the start of this article). The script runs in a couple of seconds, and the resulting .icml file can then be “placed” directly into an InDesign template. The ICML file references an InDesign stylesheet, so the template file can be set up with a house-styled layout, master pages, and stylesheet definitions for paragraphs and character ranges.
  • The result is very simple and easy to use. Our demonstration requires that a production editor run the XSLT transformation script manually, but there is no reason why this couldn’t be built directly into the Web content management system so that exporting the content to print ran the transformation automatically. The resulting file would then be “placed” in InDesign and proofed.
  • It should be noted that the Book Publishing 1 proof-of-concept was artificially complex; we began with a book laid out in InDesign and ended up with a look-alike book laid out in InDesign. But next time—for instance, when we publish Book Publishing 2—we can begin the process with the content on the Web, and keep it there throughout the editorial process. The book’s content could potentially be written and edited entirely online, as Web content, and then automatically poured into an InDesign template at proof time. “Just in time,” as they say. This represents an entirely new way of thinking of book production. With a Web-first orientation, it makes little sense to think of the book as “in print” or “out of print”—the book is simply available, in the first place online; in the second place in derivative digital formats; and third, but really not much more difficult, in print-ready format, via the usual InDesign CS print production system publishers are already familiar with.
  • Creating Ebook Files Creating electronic versions from XHTML source is vastly simpler than trying to generate these out of the existing print process. The ePub version is extremely easy to generate; so is online marketing copy or excerpts for the Web, since the content begins life Web-native.
  • Since an ePub file is essentially XHTML content in a special wrapper, all that is required is that we properly “wrap” our XHTML content. Ideally, the content in an ePub file is broken into chapters (as ours was) and a table of contents file is generated in order to allow easy navigation within an ebook reader. We used Julian Smart’s free tool eCub[19] to simply and automatically generate the ePub wrapper and the table of contents. The only custom development we did was to create a CSS stylesheet for the ebook so that headings and paragraph indents looked the way we wanted. Starting with XHTML content, creating ePub is almost too easy.
  • Such a workflow—beginning with the Web and exporting to print—is surely more in line with the way we will do business in the 21st century, where the Web is the default platform for reaching audiences, developing content, and putting the pieces together. It is time, we suggest, for publishers to re-orient their operations and start with the Web.
  • Our project demonstrates that Web technologies are indeed good enough to use in an XML-oriented workflow; more specialized and expensive options are not necessarily required. For massive-scale enterprise publishing, this approach may not offer enough flexibility, and the challenge of adding and extracting extra semantic richness may prove more trouble than it's worth.
  • But for smaller firms who are looking at the straightforward benefits of XML-based processes—single source publishing, online content and workflow management, open and accessible archive formats, greater online discoverability—here is a way forward.
  • Rather than a public-facing website, our system relies on the Web as a content management platform—of course a public face could easily be added.
  • The final piece of our puzzle, the ability to integrate print production, was made possible by Adobe's release of InDesign with an open XML file format. Since the Web's XHTML is also XML, is can be easily and confidently transformed to the InDesign format.
  • today, we are able to put the process together using nothing but standard, relatively ubiquitous Web tools: the Web itself as an editing and content management environment, standard Web scripting tools for the conversion process, and the well-documented IDML file format to integrate the layout tool.
  • Using the Web as a Production Platform
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. The important point though is that XHTML is a browser specific version of XML, and compatible with the Web Kit layout engine Miro wants to move NCP to. The concept of encoding an existing application-specific format in XML has been around since 1998, when XML was first introduced as a W3C standard, a "structured" subset of SGML. (HTML is also a subset of SGML). The multiplatform StarOffice productivity suite became "OpenOffice" when Sun purchased the company in 1998, and open sourced the code base. The OpenOffice developer team came out with a XML encoding of their existing document formats in 2000. The application specific encoding became an OASIS document format standard proposal in 2002 - also known as ODF. Microsoft followed OpenOffice with a XML encoding of their application-specific binary document formats, known as OOXML. Encoding the existing NCP format in XML, specifically targeting XHTML as a "universal pivot point", would put the NCP Outliner in the Web editor category, without breaking backwards compatibility. The trick is in the XSLT conversion process. But I think that is something much easier to handle then trying to
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Nov 13
     
    I was looking for an answer to a problem Marbux had presented, and found this interesting article.  The issue was that of the upcoming conversion of the Note Case Pro (NCP) layout engine to the WebKit layout engine, and what to do about the NCP document format. My initial reaction was to encode the legacy NCP document format in XML, and run an XSLT to a universal pivot format like TEI-XML.  From there, the TEI-XML community would provide all the XSLT transformation routines for conversion to ODF, OOXML, XHTML, ePUB and HTML/CSS. Researching the problems one might encounter with this approach, I found this article.  Fascinating stuff. My take away is that TEI-XML would not be as effective a "universal pivot point" as XHTML.  Or perhaps, if NCP really wants to get aggressive; IDML - InDesign Markup Language. The important point though is that XHTML is a browser specific version of XML, and compatible with the Web Kit layout engine Miro wants to move NCP to. The concept of encoding an existing application-specific format in XML has been around since 1998, when XML was first introduced as a W3C standard, a "structured" subset of SGML. (HTML is also a subset of SGML). The multiplatform StarOffice productivity suite became "OpenOffice" when Sun purchased the company in 1998, and open sourced the code base. The OpenOffice developer team came out with a XML encoding of their existing document formats in 2000. The application specific encoding became an OASIS document format standard proposal in 2002 - also known as ODF. Microsoft followed OpenOffice with a XML encoding of their application-specific binary document formats, known as OOXML. Encoding the existing NCP format in XML, specifically targeting XHTML as a "universal pivot point", would put the NCP Outliner in the Web editor category, without breaking backwards compatibility. The trick is in the XSLT conversion process. But I think that is something much easier to handle then trying to
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In Hearing on Internet Surveillance, Nobody Knows How Many Americans Impacted in Data C... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...w-many-americans-impacted-data surveillance state NSA 702 FISA legislation backdoor-serches stats
shared by Paul Merrell on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • The Senate Judiciary Committee held an open hearing today on the FISA Amendments Act, the law that ostensibly authorizes the digital surveillance of hundreds of millions of people both in the United States and around the world. Section 702 of the law, scheduled to expire next year, is designed to allow U.S. intelligence services to collect signals intelligence on foreign targets related to our national security interests. However—thanks to the leaks of many whistleblowers including Edward Snowden, the work of investigative journalists, and statements by public officials—we now know that the FISA Amendments Act has been used to sweep up data on hundreds of millions of people who have no connection to a terrorist investigation, including countless Americans. What do we mean by “countless”? As became increasingly clear in the hearing today, the exact number of Americans impacted by this surveillance is unknown. Senator Franken asked the panel of witnesses, “Is it possible for the government to provide an exact count of how many United States persons have been swept up in Section 702 surveillance? And if not the exact count, then what about an estimate?”
  • The lack of information makes rigorous oversight of the programs all but impossible. As Senator Franken put it in the hearing today, “When the public lacks even a rough sense of the scope of the government’s surveillance program, they have no way of knowing if the government is striking the right balance, whether we are safeguarding our national security without trampling on our citizens’ fundamental privacy rights. But the public can’t know if we succeed in striking that balance if they don’t even have the most basic information about our major surveillance programs."  Senator Patrick Leahy also questioned the panel about the “minimization procedures” associated with this type of surveillance, the privacy safeguard that is intended to ensure that irrelevant data and data on American citizens is swiftly deleted. Senator Leahy asked the panel: “Do you believe the current minimization procedures ensure that data about innocent Americans is deleted? Is that enough?”  David Medine, who recently announced his pending retirement from the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, answered unequivocally:
  • Elizabeth Goitein, the Brennan Center director whose articulate and thought-provoking testimony was the highlight of the hearing, noted that at this time an exact number would be difficult to provide. However, she asserted that an estimate should be possible for most if not all of the government’s surveillance programs. None of the other panel participants—which included David Medine and Rachel Brand of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as well as Matthew Olsen of IronNet Cybersecurity and attorney Kenneth Wainstein—offered an estimate. Today’s hearing reaffirmed that it is not only the American people who are left in the dark about how many people or accounts are impacted by the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of the Internet. Even vital oversight committees in Congress like the Senate Judiciary Committee are left to speculate about just how far-reaching this surveillance is. It's part of the reason why we urged the House Judiciary Committee to demand that the Intelligence Community provide the public with a number. 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Senator Leahy, they don’t. The minimization procedures call for the deletion of innocent Americans’ information upon discovery to determine whether it has any foreign intelligence value. But what the board’s report found is that in fact information is never deleted. It sits in the databases for 5 years, or sometimes longer. And so the minimization doesn’t really address the privacy concerns of incidentally collected communications—again, where there’s been no warrant at all in the process… In the United States, we simply can’t read people’s emails and listen to their phone calls without court approval, and the same should be true when the government shifts its attention to Americans under this program. One of the most startling exchanges from the hearing today came toward the end of the session, when Senator Dianne Feinstein—who also sits on the Intelligence Committee—seemed taken aback by Ms. Goitein’s mention of “backdoor searches.” 
  • Feinstein: Wow, wow. What do you call it? What’s a backdoor search? Goitein: Backdoor search is when the FBI or any other agency targets a U.S. person for a search of data that was collected under Section 702, which is supposed to be targeted against foreigners overseas. Feinstein: Regardless of the minimization that was properly carried out. Goitein: Well the data is searched in its unminimized form. So the FBI gets raw data, the NSA, the CIA get raw data. And they search that raw data using U.S. person identifiers. That’s what I’m referring to as backdoor searches. It’s deeply concerning that any member of Congress, much less a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, might not be aware of the problem surrounding backdoor searches. In April 2014, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged the searches of this data, which Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall termed “the ‘back-door search’ loophole in section 702.” The public was so incensed that the House of Representatives passed an amendment to that year's defense appropriations bill effectively banning the warrantless backdoor searches. Nonetheless, in the hearing today it seemed like Senator Feinstein might not recognize or appreciate the serious implications of allowing U.S. law enforcement agencies to query the raw data collected through these Internet surveillance programs. Hopefully today’s testimony helped convince the Senator that there is more to this topic than what she’s hearing in jargon-filled classified security briefings.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 May 16
     
    The 4th Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and *particularly describing the place to be searched, and the* persons or *things to be seized."* So much for the particularized description of the place to be searched and the thngs to be seized.  Fah! Who needs a Constitution, anyway .... 
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» 21 Facts About NSA Snooping That Every American Should Know Alex Jones' Inf... - 0 views

www.infowars.com/hat-every-american-should-know NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA NSA-Whistleblower PRISM Echelon-SIGINT
shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Jun 13
     
    NSA-PRISM-Echelon in a nutshell.  The list below is a short sample.  Each fact is documented, and well worth the time reading. "The following are 21 facts about NSA snooping that every American should know…" #1 According to CNET, the NSA told Congress during a recent classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls… #2 According to U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, members of Congress learned "significantly more than what is out in the media today" about NSA snooping during that classified briefing. #3 The content of all of our phone calls is being recorded and stored.  The following is a from a transcript of an exchange between Erin Burnett of CNN and former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente which took place just last month… #4 The chief technology officer at the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following statement back in March… "We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever." #5 During a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing in March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the intelligence community has the ability to access emails "as they come in"… #6 Back in 2007, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told Congress that the president has the "constitutional authority" to authorize domestic spying without warrants no matter when the law says. #7 The Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told Congress that the NSA was not collecting any information about American citizens.  When the media confronted him about his lie, he explained that he "responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner". #8 The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA has four primary data collection systems… MAINWAY, MARINA, METADATA, PRISM #9 The NSA knows pretty much everything that you are doing on the Internet.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent Yahoo article… #10 The NSA is suppose
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Online Schedule Maker: Top 4 Choices - Icecream Tech Digest - 1 views

icecreamapps.com/...e-schedule-maker-top-4-choices DayViewer free online calendar Google Calendar Localendar online calendar online calendar maker Online schedule maker ScheduleBuilder.org schedule maker
shared by Alexandra IcecreamApps on 12 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Alexandra IcecreamApps on 12 Aug 16
     
    Living in the modern world, we need to be in the right places at the right moments. A regular person has a lot of things going on, and it’s crucial to have everything scheduled for at least a week or … Continue reading →
  • Alexandra IcecreamApps on 12 Aug 16
     
    Living in the modern world, we need to be in the right places at the right moments. A regular person has a lot of things going on, and it’s crucial to have everything scheduled for at least a week or … Continue reading →
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Best Parental Control Software - Icecream Tech Digest - 0 views

icecreamapps.com/...best-parental-control-software best parental control software K9 Web Protection Kaspersky Safe Kids Norton Family parental control parental control software parental controls parental control software reviews Qustodio
shared by Alexandra IcecreamApps on 01 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Alexandra IcecreamApps on 01 Jul 16
     
    The Internet can be a dark place at times, and there can be content that is not safe for kids. Of course, the Internet offers plenty of educational and entertaining resources that are suitable for kids; however there’s a huge … Continue reading →
  • Alexandra IcecreamApps on 01 Jul 16
     
    The Internet can be a dark place at times, and there can be content that is not safe for kids. Of course, the Internet offers plenty of educational and entertaining resources that are suitable for kids; however there’s a huge … Continue reading →
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The story of Aaron Swartz and his fight for open | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...aaron-swartz-life-documentary documentary life Aaron Swartz fight open culture free knowledge source
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Sep 14
     
    "A new documentary about the life of Aaron Swartz was released in June this year. It recounts the story of one of the most impactful young talents of the Internet age, and the tragic saga of his quest to make the world a better place."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 26 Sep 14
     
    "A new documentary about the life of Aaron Swartz was released in June this year. It recounts the story of one of the most impactful young talents of the Internet age, and the tragic saga of his quest to make the world a better place."
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What is open government? | opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...open-government what is howto open goverrnment open government
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 May 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 May 14
     
    "In general terms, an open government is one with high levels of transparency and mechanisms for public scrutiny and oversight in place, with an emphasis on government accountability. Transparency is considered the traditional hallmark of an open government, meaning that the public should have access to government-held information and be informed of government proceedings. In recent years, however, the definition of open government has expanded to include expectations for increased citizen participation & collaboration in government proceedings through the use of modern, open technologies."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 May 14
     
    "In general terms, an open government is one with high levels of transparency and mechanisms for public scrutiny and oversight in place, with an emphasis on government accountability. Transparency is considered the traditional hallmark of an open government, meaning that the public should have access to government-held information and be informed of government proceedings. In recent years, however, the definition of open government has expanded to include expectations for increased citizen participation & collaboration in government proceedings through the use of modern, open technologies."
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Outernet Product Test Location - 0 views

outernetforall.polldaddy.com/...ould-we-test-outernet-in-first Outernet free satellite broadbavd Internet access for all @ll test Help
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Jun 14
     
    [https://www.outernet.is/] "Please tell us where you think Outernet should be switched on first. Remember, Outernet plans to eventually make service available everywhere and always for free. In addition to thinking about what might be a preference for your own local Outernet service, also consider the need to make Outernet as effective as possible from the outset. Think about the greatest impact Outernet could have in radical change as well as how many hypotheses about Outernet could be tested and what aspects of information freedom can be altered. The product test will take place over Ku band and come online in late summer 2014."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 27 Jun 14
     
    [https://www.outernet.is/] "Please tell us where you think Outernet should be switched on first. Remember, Outernet plans to eventually make service available everywhere and always for free. In addition to thinking about what might be a preference for your own local Outernet service, also consider the need to make Outernet as effective as possible from the outset. Think about the greatest impact Outernet could have in radical change as well as how many hypotheses about Outernet could be tested and what aspects of information freedom can be altered. The product test will take place over Ku band and come online in late summer 2014."
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Mass protest against TTIP and CETA to take place in Berlin | EurActiv - 0 views

www.euractiv.com/...-ceta-take-place-berlin-317066 Mass protest against TTIP CETA place Berlin EurActiv
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 06 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 06 Sep 15
     
    "More than 30 organisations are teaming up for a major demonstration against TTIP and CETA, with concerns ranging from the end of cultural diversity in Europe to devastating effects the deals could have in developing countries. EurActiv Germany reports."
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Open source as a tool of cultural change | Opensource.com - 0 views

opensource.com/...o-interview-kaitlin-devine-18f open source for cultural change shift culture change share
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Oct 15
     
    All Things Open interview with Kaitlin Devine, 18F "Keep an eye on govcode.org-it pulls GitHub issues from lots of government repos, and it's a great place to get started if you want to contribute. Also follow @newgovrepos if you want to see new government repos as they appear on GitHub. Don't forget that repos aren't just for code-you can file issues and give feedback on government services even if you don't code."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Oct 15
     
    All Things Open interview with Kaitlin Devine, 18F "Keep an eye on govcode.org-it pulls GitHub issues from lots of government repos, and it's a great place to get started if you want to contribute. Also follow @newgovrepos if you want to see new government repos as they appear on GitHub. Don't forget that repos aren't just for code-you can file issues and give feedback on government services even if you don't code."
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USA Freedom Act Passes: What We Celebrate, What We Mourn, and Where We Go Fro... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-we-mourn-and-where-we-go-here
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act. It’s no secret that we wanted more. In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough investigation, like it did with the Church Committee. Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other steps to rein in the NSA and FBI. This bill was the result of compromise and strong leadership by Sens. Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee and Reps. Robert Goodlatte, Jim Sensenbrenner, and John Conyers. It’s not the bill EFF would have written, and in light of the Second Circuit's thoughtful opinion, we withdrew our support from the bill in an effort to spur Congress to strengthen some of its privacy protections and out of concern about language added to the bill at the behest of the intelligence community. Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA.
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Jun 15
     
    [The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act today by 67-32, marking the first time in over thirty years that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight on the National Security Agency's surveillance powers. The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender Senate Majority Mitch McConnell were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama will sign USA Freedom into law. Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act. ...]
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The Importance of Music for Social Change in 2015 - 1 views

theproaudiofiles.com/artists-voice-2015 importance music social change
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 06 Jan 15
     
    "Questlove put up the challenge for artists to write more protest songs in the wake of the horrifying events that have been taking place."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 06 Jan 15
     
    "Questlove put up the challenge for artists to write more protest songs in the wake of the horrifying events that have been taking place."
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Get ready: The FCC says it will vote on net neutrality in February - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-on-net-neutrality-in-february fcc will vote net neutrality february let's help them clear vision freedom access balance democracy
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Jan 15
     
    "Federal regulators looking to place restrictions on Internet providers will introduce and vote on new proposed net neutrality rules in February, Federal Communications Commission officials said Friday."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Jan 15
     
    "Federal regulators looking to place restrictions on Internet providers will introduce and vote on new proposed net neutrality rules in February, Federal Communications Commission officials said Friday."
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Outernet | Discussions [Outernet is NOT The Internet...] - 1 views

discuss.outernet.is/...editors-corner Outernet discussion build information entertainment supply alternative one way broadcast interactive participative not tthe Internet
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Dec 14
     
    [# ! ... nor it pretends to be, # ! just an #alternative / #interactive #information #channel. # ! #stop #gratuitous #critics, by thxse [sic.] determined to keep on # ! #monopolizing #information, #opinion & #entertainment.] "Welcome to the official discussion forum for Outernet: Humanity's Public Library. If you are new to the forum, please look at the FAQ before poting questions. This forum is monitored regularly by Outernet staff and is a place to ask questions about the project or, even better, create discussion around various aspects of the project. "
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 20 Dec 14
     
    "Welcome to the official discussion forum for Outernet: Humanity's Public Library. If you are new to the forum, please look at the FAQ before poting questions. This forum is monitored regularly by Outernet staff and is a place to ask questions about the project or, even better, create discussion around various aspects of the project. "
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Beginners in Open Source announced, call for writers | Opensource.com | [Feb 6] - 0 views

opensource.com/...beginners-open-source open source beginners call for writer contribute write deadline February 6 February 6
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Jan 15
     
    "If you've been watching from the sidelines and finally want to get into an open source project, this series is the place to start. Or, maybe you know someone who"
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 19 Jan 15
     
    "If you've been watching from the sidelines and finally want to get into an open source project, this series is the place to start. Or, maybe you know someone who"
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In Memory Of The Liberties Lost In The War on Piracy | TorrentFreak - 0 views

torrentfreak.com/st-in-the-war-on-piracy-150202 memory liberties lost name fake war piracy copyright abuse politics democracy freedom society culture technology lock Falkvinge
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Feb 15
     
    " Rick Falkvinge on February 2, 2015 C: 0 Opinion In order to prevent us from discussing and sharing interesting things, the copyright industry has successfully eliminated civil liberties online. But it was all down to a wrong and stupid business assumption in the first place."
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 04 Feb 15
     
    " Rick Falkvinge on February 2, 2015 C: 0 Opinion In order to prevent us from discussing and sharing interesting things, the copyright industry has successfully eliminated civil liberties online. But it was all down to a wrong and stupid business assumption in the first place."
3More

Here's why patents are innovation's worst enemy | Vivek Wadhwa | LinkedIn - 1 views

www.linkedin.com/...tions-worst-enemy-vivek-wadhwa patents innovation worst enemy linkedin
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Mar 15
     
    "The Founding Fathers of the United States considered intellectual property so important that they gave it a special place in the Constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.""
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Mar 15
     
    "The Founding Fathers of the United States considered intellectual property so important that they gave it a special place in the Constitution: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.""
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 15
     
    The quote is somewhat misleading because it is out of context. The section is preceded by: "The Congress shall have Power ..." Those are words of discretion, not commandment. Nothing in the Constitution *requires* that patent and copyright systems be established. "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, *but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body."* VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson, at 180-181 (Washington ed.).
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CentOS / Redhat Iptables Firewall Configuration Tutorial - 0 views

www.cyberciti.biz/...irewall-configuration-tutorial iptables firewall security linux sysadmin tutorial configuration
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 18 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 18 Aug 14
     
    "How do I configure a host-based firewall called Netfilter (iptables) under CentOS / RHEL / Fedora / Redhat Enterprise Linux? Netfilter is a host-based firewall for Linux operating systems. It is included as part of the Linux distribution and it is activated by default. This firewall is controlled by the program called iptables. Netfilter filtering take place at the kernel level, before a program can even process the data from the network pack"
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 18 Aug 14
     
    "How do I configure a host-based firewall called Netfilter (iptables) under CentOS / RHEL / Fedora / Redhat Enterprise Linux? Netfilter is a host-based firewall for Linux operating systems. It is included as part of the Linux distribution and it is activated by default. This firewall is controlled by the program called iptables. Netfilter filtering take place at the kernel level, before a program can even process the data from the network pack"
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Germany Expels Top US Intelligence Official, Says It Will (Officially) Spy Back On US A... - 1 views

www.techdirt.com/...fficially-spy-back-us-uk.shtml germany intelligence official spy spying US UK EU all to @ll authority lost piracy blame excuse citizens people in crossfire caught
shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 Jul 14
     
    [# ! Welcome to The #NWO # ! ... and , The #Citizens', caught in '#Their' #Crossfire...] "from the no-more-no-spy dept Techdirt has been following the complicated German reaction to Edward Snowden's revelations about US and UK surveillance of people in that country, whether or not in high places, for some while now. "
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 11 Jul 14
     
    "from the no-more-no-spy dept Techdirt has been following the complicated German reaction to Edward Snowden's revelations about US and UK surveillance of people in that country, whether or not in high places, for some while now. "
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