Cybersecurity & Privacy

Retired US General James Cartwright is the target of a Justice Department investigation into the leaking of secret information about the Stuxnet virus attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010.

The US Army confirmed that access to The Guardian newspaper’s website has been filtered and restricted for its personnel. The policy is due to classified documents about surveillance of Americans and millions worldwide described in detail in the stories. The Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks" and said the procedure was routine part of "network hygiene" measures to prevent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information.

The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents. The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.

Many organizations fail to make cybersecurity a strategic priority, but experts say it’s time for that philosophy to change.

New legislation aims to reform the Patriot and FISA Amendments Acts to apply greater oversight and control to the U.S. government's surveillance programs. The bill, the FISA Accountability and Privacy Protection Act of 2013, comes following dramatic revelations about how the National Security Agency collects certain types of data about U.S. residents. One surveillance program of concern is Prism, an NSA data collection program that supposedly accesses the servers at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and other tech companies to mine people's personal data like emails and photos. Another is a phone call metadata collection program.

The exposure of the Obama regime’s use of the National Security Agency to secretly spy on the communications of hundreds of millions of US and overseas citizens has provoked world-wide denunciations. Despite widespread mass media coverage and the opposition of civil liberties organizations in the United States, there has not been any mass protest by the Americans. The writer ponders when the Americans will wake up and recognize that ending the police state is essential to dismantling the costly empire and creating a safe, secure and prosperous nation.

Today's “public relations” is now a euphemism for state propaganda. It is in popular culture that the fraudulent “ideal” of America as morally superior, a “leader of the free world”, has been most effective. The power of truth-tellers is that they dispel a whole mythology carefully constructed by the corporate cinema and the corporate media. Snowden’s revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone is further evidence of a modern form of fascism. The only enduring threat to the invisible government is the truth-teller and an enlightened public. Now that we are witnesses to unveiling of the illusion and American Fascist agenda, the rest is up to us says a renowned investigative Australian journalist and international academy award winning documentary film-maker.

Washington criticises China for allowing NSA whistleblower to leave but Snowden's whereabouts remain a source of confusion.

"United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age," China said.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has stayed overnight at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. The former CIA contractor, who left Hong Kong in a bid to elude extradition to the US on espionage charges, is on his way to a ‘third country’ via Russia.

The "Obamamania" or the Obama phenomenon, the result of a confluence of media manipulation, political inexperience and self-delusion, and the false conception that Obama’s African-American ethnicity which made the world assume that he would be more sympathetic to the plight of working people and would change the nature of American imperialism, is now gone. The world found out that the installation of Obama further consolidated the military/intelligence establishment’s control over the United States. In his speech in Berlin on Wednesday, President Barack Obama made much of the fact that he was the first American president to speak from the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate, in what was once Stalinist-controlled East Berlin. This was meant to symbolize the triumph of what Obama called “open societies that respect the sanctity of the individual” over oppressive political systems. Once again, Obama resorted to lies as he defended the NSA surveillance to Germans and Europeans in a speech where the most glaring contradictions riddled with banalities and lies. Obama invoked the ideals of “peace” and “tolerance,” having just approved the direct arming of Islamist militias that are carrying out sectarian atrocities in Syria. He spoke of “justice” in one breath and his drone assassination program in the next, according to an American writer.

As the aftershocks of leaked NSA surveillance programs that has been going on for many years continues, China says it’s time for the U.S. government to make more self-examination instead of pointing fingers at other nations.