We begin with cops, first with the Christian Science Monitor:
From Wisconsin to Georgia, police shooting investigations are changing
In the past three days, three unarmed black men in three cities were shot by police. In two out of three cases, the shootings will be examined by an outside investigator as jurisdictions try to instil greater accountability.
The decision by police in Dekalb County, Ga., to hand an investigation into the officer-related shooting of an unarmed, and naked, black man to the state bureau of investigation is part of a dramatic re-think, amid continuing street protests, of how to adjudicate cases where unarmed civilians die at the hands of US police officers.
Dekalb County Police Chief Cedric Alexander tied the decision to investigate the death of Air Force veteran and aspiring R&B singer Anthony Hill to a broader movement toward having independent investigators handle officer-involved shootings, especially in cases where unarmed black men are killed.
The killing of Mr. Hill became the third shooting of an unarmed black man in a span of three days across America. The shootings in Aurora, Colo., Madison, Wisc., and Chamblee, Ga., have put police on guard against another wave of public backlash like the one that swept the US last year in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.
More from the New York Times:
Georgia Investigators Look Into Police Shooting of Naked, Unarmed Man
A witness to the fatal police shooting of a naked, unarmed man here said Tuesday that the man had approached the officer with his hands in the air, prompting the frightened officer to shoot at close range with a handgun.
The witness, Pedro Castillo, 43, is a maintenance man at the Heights at Chamblee, the apartment complex northeast of Atlanta where Anthony Hill, 27, was shot and killed Monday afternoon. Mr. Castillo, speaking Spanish, said that Mr. Hill, a black man, had seemed out of sorts. He was naked and on all fours in the parking lot when the police officer, who is white, arrived in his squad car, parking a good distance away. Mr. Castillo said.
When Mr. Hill saw the officer, Mr. Castillo said, he stood up and moved toward him with his hands raised, and the officer, obviously frightened, yelled for him to stop. Mr. Castillo said that he had not seen a scuffle, but that he did see the officer pull out the handgun and shoot Mr. Hill.
Ted Rall of the Los Angeles Times ponders another police shooting of an unarmed map in his city:
And from Al Jazeera America, revenge by hacking:
Cyber attack hits Madison police department after shooting of unarmed teen
Anonymous, the loose network of hackers, has taken credit for the attack on the Madison PD’s computer systems
Cyber attackers have compromised computer systems at the Madison Police Department in retaliation for the police shooting death of a 19-year-old unarmed black man in the Wisconsin capital city, a police spokesman said Tuesday.
The cyber attack appears to be continuing and could be hitting other city and county websites beyond the police department, said police spokesman Joel DeSpain.
The attack, which began Monday afternoon, was thought to be initiated by Anonymous, an international network of activist computer hackers, in response to the fatal shooting of Tony Robinson by a white Madison police officer on Friday.
On to Ferguson with CNN and a resignation:
Judge resigns, Ferguson cases moved after scathing DOJ report
Ferguson’s municipal judge has resigned and the city’s court cases are getting moved after the U.S. Justice Department said the court discriminated against African-Americans.
“To help restore public trust and confidence in the Ferguson municipal court division, the Supreme Court of Missouri today transferred Judge Roy L. Richter of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, to the St. Louis County Circuit Court, where he will be assigned to hear all of Ferguson’s pending and future municipal division cases,” the Supreme Court said in a statement Monday.
“Extraordinary action is warranted in Ferguson, but the court also is examining reforms that are needed on a statewide basis,” Chief Justice Mary R. Russell said in the statement.
The announcement came the same day Municipal Court Judge Ronald Brockmeyer resigned as Ferguson’s judge.
More from the Guardian:
Ferguson judge behind aggressive fines policy resigns as city’s court system seized
Ronald J Brockmeyer, accused in a scathing report of aggressively using the municipal court to raise revenue for the city, has stepped down
A scathing report by the Department of Justice last week concluded that Ferguson’s police and court system was blighted by racial bias. Investigators accused Brockmeyer and his court officials of aggressively using the municipal court to raise revenue for the city. The policy is blamed by many for damaging relations between the city’s overwhelmingly white authorities and residents, two-thirds of whom are African American.
Brockmeyer, 70, was singled out by investigators as a driving force behind Ferguson’s strategy of using its municipal court to generate revenues aggressively. Investigators found that Brockmeyer had boasted of creating a range of new court fines, “many of which are widely considered abusive and may be unlawful”.
Ferguson is accused in a class-action federal lawsuit, brought by public defenders and legal non-profits, of imprisoning impoverished residents in the city jail for being unable to pay fines of a few hundred dollars for minor offences. While jailing residents, Brockmeyer owes more than $172,000 in unpaid taxes to the US government, the Guardian disclosed last week. A staff member at Brockmeyer’s law offices in St Charles County did not return a call seeking comment.
And the New York Times covers another quitter:
Ferguson City Manager Cited in Justice Department Report Resigns
The city manager of Ferguson, whom a Department of Justice report blamed for overseeing the financially driven policies that led to widespread discrimination and questionable conduct by the police and the courts here, has agreed to resign. The announcement came during a City Council meeting on Tuesday, about a week after the scathing Justice Department report was released.
The manager, John Shaw, 39, had held the post since 2007. As Ferguson’s chief executive, he was the city’s most powerful official.
Mr. Shaw, who has not spoken publicly since the report was issued, offered a staunch defense in a page-long letter to the community that city officials distributed during the Council meeting.
From the Thomson Reuters Foundation, tackling gender-based murder:
Brazil passes femicide law to tackle rise in gender killings
Brazil, where a woman is killed every two hours, is imposing tougher punishments on those who murder women and girls, as part of a government bid to stem a rise in gender killings.
President Dilma Rousseff said the new law gave a legal definition to the crime of femicide – the killing of a woman by a man because of her gender – and set out jail sentences of 12 to 30 years for convicted offenders.
The law also includes longer jail terms for crimes committed against pregnant women, girls under 14, women over 60 and people with disabilities.
From Der Spiegel, Berlin sounds an alarm over Washington war-mongering:
Breedlove’s Bellicosity: Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO Stance on Ukraine
US President Obama supports Chancellor Merkel’s efforts at finding a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis. But hawks in Washington seem determined to torpedo Berlin’s approach. And NATO’s top commander in Europe hasn’t been helping either.
It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.
On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
A response to other Washington war-mongering, via the Los Angeles Times:
Iran leader says GOP senators’ letter implies U.S. ‘not trustworthy’
Iran’s foreign minister on Tuesday said that a letter from 47 Republican senators warning that any agreement on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program must receive congressional approval suggests that the U.S. is “not trustworthy.”
The open letter released Monday also warned Iran’s leaders that the next U.S. president could revoke a deal reached with President Obama.
“This kind of communication is unprecedented and undiplomatic,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said, according to a state-run television website. “In fact it implies that the United States is not trustworthy.”
More from the Guardian:
Senate Democrats denounce Republican letter to Iran as call for war
Republicans’ attempt to ‘sabotage’ negotiations between western nations and Iran could escalate into military response, senators say
Prominent Senate Democrats have accused their Republican rivals of wanting to start a war with Iran on Tuesday, a day after conservative senators penned an open letter to Tehran.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Barbara Boxer said that the 47 signatories to the letter are trying to “sabotage” talks between western powers and Iran. Boxer described the Republicans’ letter as “bizarre, inappropriate” and a “desperate ploy to scuttle a comprehensive agreement” that she said is “in the best interests of the United States, Israel and the world”.
“It appears that for most of my Republican colleagues in the Senate, a war in Afghanistan and a war in Iraq were not enough,” said Sanders, who is an independent but caucuses with the Democratic Party, in a statement. “They now apparently want a war in Iran as well.” The Vermont senator called the letter “an outrage”.
After the jump, a Wikimedia suit targets the NSA, the curious case of the rich Spanish cop, old school terror thwarted in the Emerald Isle, neo-nazis busted in an Austrian xenophobic protest, anger follows a German mayor’s resignation under neo-nazi pressure, Sweden ends a lucrative Saudi arms trade, more French arrests of men linked to a slain terrorist, Spain claims a win over an Islamist attack cell, Iraq pushes ISIS back in Tikrit, The ten-year-old soldiers of ISIS, and an ISIS play in Libya facilitated by chaos, an ISIS announcement of more gay men executed, and a child executes an alleged spy, Chinese ISIS recruits head home to Xinjiang, the curious state of that ISIS/Boko Haram hookup, the Boko Haram campaign heats up with stronger foes and a new Nigeria raid, the CIA’s stealthy spookery to crack the iPhone, the man who makes Edward Snowden’s encryption tool, new software enables capture of Facebook login sites, cell phone records track and keep your every move, Spain’s ubiquitous downloading pirates, a rape documentary banned in India gets a gilded U.S. debut, a free speech protest meets a brutal Myanmar crackdown, China prepares a foreign NGO crackdown, Beijing decries Japanese media Nanjing Massacre revisionism, On to Tokyo and a Shinzo Abe advisor’s plea for a prime ministerial acknowledgment of Japanese WWII aggression, Japan’s military popularity hits an all-time high, and Angela Merkel tells Abe to get straight with South Korea on Comfort Women. . .
From the Guardian, spooky litigation:
Wikimedia joins civil rights groups in lawsuit against NSA internet spying
Lawsuit against spy agency and Justice Department challenges ‘suspicionless seizure and searching of internet traffic’ uncovered by Edward Snowden
The Wikimedia Foundation, Amnesty International and a host of civil rights groups sued the National Security Agency and the US Department of Justice on Tuesday challenging the mass surveillance programme uncovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“We’re filing suit today on behalf of our readers and editors everywhere,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in a statement on Wikimedia’s blog. “Surveillance erodes the original promise of the internet: an open space for collaboration and experimentation, and a place free from fear.”
According to the lawsuit, the NSA’s mass surveillance of internet traffic in the United States violates the US constitution’s first amendment, which protects freedom of speech and association, and the fourth amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
From El País, the curious case of the rich Spanish cop:
Police chief’s business activities probed
José Manuel Villarejo, an “undercover agent,” has been linked to several high-profile cases
He will now be investigated by the Interior Ministry due to his stake in a number of firms
A Spanish police inspector who has been involved in several high-profile political and legal inquiries is also a successful entrepreneur, holding a stake in 12 businesses with combined capital of €16 million, according to an analysis carried out by EL PAÍS of information available at Spain’s Business Registry.
The combined police work and entrepreneurial activity of José Manuel Villarejo Pérez is, he claims, above board and was sanctioned by his superiors. But since the revelations were published by EL PAÍS on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry has announced it will launch an investigation into Villarejo to determine whether his police work and his business activities are compatible.
The police chief recently made the news over his alleged involvement in an investigation into a luxury property owned by current Madrid regional premier Ignacio González, of the center-right Popular Party (PP).
From News Corp Australia, old school terror thwarted in the Emerald Isle:
Northern Ireland police foil plot to bomb the set of HBO’s Game of Thrones
POLICE in Northern Ireland say they have foiled a terrorist attack on the set of HBO’s hit TV drama, Game of Thrones.
Republican terrorists were targeting ex-Northern Ireland security force members who were working as extras on the Game of Thrones set at The Paint Hall (Titanic Studios) in Belfast, Belfast Telegraph reported.
“The dissidents initially got word that a number of ex-RUC and army personnel worked at the studios,” a police source told the Belfast Telegraph: .
“They were even told the exact job in which most of them were employed and the catering unit where they took their lunch and tea at the same time every day.”
The Associated Press covers neo-nazis busted in an Austrian xenophobic protest:
Austria: 8 charged with neo-Nazi crimes at anti-Islam demo
Austrian police have charged eight participants in the country’s first protest against perceived “Islamization” with yelling “Heil Hitler!” and other actions that contravene Austria’s anti-Nazi laws.
Beyond shouting slogans, police spokesman Roman Hahslinger said Tuesday that some suspects flashed the Hitler salute or other gestures associated with the Nazis during last month’s demonstration, which was modeled after Germany’s PEGIDA movement.
As many as 25,000 supporters of PEGIDA, or Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West, turned out in German cities last year. In Vienna, the demonstration attracted about 200 people.
From RT, anger follows a German mayor’s resignation under neo-nazi pressure:
Outrage in Germany after neo-Nazi rally forces mayor’s resignation
Senior politicians in Germany have expressed outrage that the mayor of the eastern German town of Troeglitz was forced to resign after local authorities failed to stop a protest by the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) outside his house.
Markus Nierth, the elected mayor of Troeglitz, said Monday that he had resigned because he feared for his family’s safety after the NPD was allowed to hold a rally outside his home to protest against his plans to house asylum seekers in the town.
It comes as the far-right continues to gain support across Germany amid an increase in asylum seekers. The number of asylum seekers in the country jumped 60 percent last year, according to the Federal Statistics Office.
Sweden ends a lucrative Saudi arms trade, via TheLocal.se:
Controversial Saudi arms deal scrapped by Sweden
Sweden’s government will not extend a controversial military cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven has confirmed. The announcement comes after the Arab League slammed comments by Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström about human rights violations in the oil rich state.
“It is true that the deal will be ended,” Löfven said to reporters on Tuesday evening during an official visit to Kiev, Ukraine. “This has been agreed for some time now. It has nothing to do with what has happened in recent days,” he added.
Sweden has been selling arms to Saudi Arabia for decades but the policy has been strongly debated in the Nordic nation and caused divisions within the Social Democrat-Green coalition government.
More French arrests of men linked to a slain terrorist, via BBC News:
Paris attacks: Four arrests linked to gunman Coulibaly
French police have detained four people over the Islamist attacks in Paris on a satirical magazine and a Jewish supermarket in which 17 people died.
A woman police officer and three others are believed to have had connections with Amedy Coulibaly, who was killed by police during the supermarket siege.
A suspect named as Amar has been in custody since January on drugs charges. But investigators have used his phone data to place him not far from the supermarket just before the attack.
From the Associated Press, Spain claims a win over an Islamist attack cell:
Spain neutralizes jihadi cell planning attacks, police say
Police neutralized a jihadi terror cell Tuesday with the arrests of two people who were part of a larger group allegedly planning to carry out attacks in Spain and other European countries, the Interior Ministry said.
The latest suspects are Spaniards of Moroccan origin, arrested in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta. The operation was connected to the detention of four other suspected cell members Jan. 24, authorities said.
“The group broken up was fully operative and made up of individuals already radicalized and ready for possibly carrying out of attacks in our country or those around us,” the ministry statement said.
It gave no concrete details as to how the group was prepared to attack, but said it had access to the weapons black market, adding that a handgun had been confiscated in the January raids.
From the New York Times, Iraq pushes ISIS back in Tikrit:
Iraqi Forces Seize Large Parts of Tikrit From Islamic State Militants
Iraqi security forces and allied Shiite militias seized large parts of Tikrit on Tuesday, amid reports that most of the Islamic State militants battling to hold the city had begun retreating, security officials said.
The progress came after more than a week of heavy fighting to retake Tikrit, a city in the so-called Sunni Triangle that holds both strategic and emotional importance in the effort to roll back the Islamic State’s lightning advance toward Baghdad in June.
The offensive is the largest pro-goverment military operation yet, involving a combined force of more than 30,000. And if it succeeds, it would be a significant step in the march north to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and an early conquest for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
The ten-year-old soldiers of ISIS, via the Guardian:
‘Raising tomorrow’s mujahideen’: the horrific world of Isis’s child soldiers
Children as young as 10 have been filmed executing prisoners for Isis, which has approached their training and indoctrination with characteristic ruthlessness
A UN report on war crimes in Syria pointed to the indoctrination of children as a “vehicle for ensuring long-term loyalty” and creating a “cadre of fighters that will see violence as a way of life”.
While children have often been victims of such manipulation in war zones, Isis approached their “education” as it did almost everything else – systematically.
Isis actively recruits children to send them to training camps and then to use them in combat and suicide missions. It has used children as human shields, suicide bombers, snipers and blood donors. The UN secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict reports that Isis “has tasked boys as young as 13 to carry weapons, guard strategic locations or arrest civilians”. Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that hundreds of “non-civilian” male children had died in the fighting.
Isis strictly controls the education of children in the territory it holds. According to a teacher from Raqqa, Isis considers philosophy, science, history, art and sport to be incompatible with Islam. “Those under 15 go to sharia camp to learn about their creed and religion,” an Isis press officer in Raqqa told Vice News. “Those over 16, they can attend the military camp … Those over 16 and who were previously enrolled in the camps can participate in military operations.” But in Isis propaganda videos, even younger children are shown being trained in the use of firearms.
As ISIS play in Libya, via the New York Times:
ISIS Seizes Opportunity in Libya’s Turmoil
Nearly four years after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Libya’s warring cities and towns have become so entangled in internal conflicts over money and power that they have opened a door for the Islamic State to expand into its oil-rich deserts and sprawling coastline. Libya has become a new frontier for the radical group as it comes under increasing pressure from American-led airstrikes on its original strongholds in Iraq and Syria.
While other extremists organizations may have only sought to capitalize on the Islamic State’s fearsome name, the contingent here in Surt has not only taken over a major Libyan city but also demonstrated clear coordination with the parent organization, also known as ISIS or ISIL and based in Syria.
At least one group of fighters from each of Libya’s three regions has joined a wave of militant forces in Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt and Nigeria that have publicly linked themselves with the Islamic State and its brutality.But while many of those affiliations may primarily be attempts by local extremists to capitalize on the Islamic State’s fearsome name, the contingent in Surt stands apart. In addition to dominating a city of more than 120,000 residents, the Islamic State militants here have demonstrated clear coordination with the original group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, based in Syria.
ISIS announces executions of more gay men, via Reuters:
Islamic State says it has killed two men for homosexuality
Islamic State militants said on Tuesday they had killed two men in northern Iraq for homosexuality and another for blasphemy.
The group controls a large, self-declared caliphate in parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria, where it enforces an ultra-purist vision of Islam that condemns all but the narrowest interpretation of centuries-old Sunni Muslim law as deviance.
In a report published online, Islamic State showed an elderly bearded man reading out, in front of a crowd of people, a death sentence for two men accused of homosexuality and a third accused of cursing God.
The accused were shown in three separate pictures kneeling, blindfolded with their arms tied behind their backs, and a black-clad man holding a large sword over their heads. Photo captions said they show the executions being performed.
And a child executes an alleged spy, via United Press International:
Child kills alleged spy in latest ISIS show of force
The video is the latest evidence of ISIS using children in their bloody campaign.
ISIS is turning to children to deliver its bloody message to the West — and the terror group’s latest execution video may be the one of the most most disturbing yet.
The video, the latest in a long string of garish footage, was posted online Tuesday via ISIS-connected social channels — and depicts a young child executing a man the group claims was an Israeli spy.
The victim was identified by ISIS as Mohamed Sa’id Ismail Musallam, a 19-year-old Israeli citizen of Arab descent — who the group claims was an intelligence agent. Musallam’s family has previously denied he was involved in the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, CNN reported.
From Global Times, Chinese ISIS recruits head home to Xinjiang:
Terrorists in Xinjiang ‘returned from IS’
Region ‘paid enormous price’ for stability
A Chinese official on Tuesday revealed that authorities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have broken up terror groups who had returned from fighting with the Islamic State (IS), a trend observers say poses a threat to the region’s stability with the terrorists’ increased combat capacity.
The comments made by Xinjiang’s Party chief, Zhang Chunxian, at a meeting at the annual session of the National People’s Congress was said to be the first time officials confirmed that Chinese citizens had joined the jihadist group.
Authorities have broken up terror groups who were plotting violent attacks on Chinese soil after fighting in battles in Syria with the IS, Zhang said.
From Agence France-Presse, the curious state of that ISIS/Boko Haram hookup:
Boko Haram and IS tie-up is just propaganda – for now
Short term, the pledge of allegiance by Nigeria’s Boko Haram to the Islamic State group may be no more than a propaganda gesture, experts say — but that could change.
The pledge, made in an audio recording released on Saturday by Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau, had been in the pipeline for some time.
Just last week, the Nigerian jihadists released a video appearing to show the decapitation of two men. The method of the killings, but also the professional production value of the footage, eerily mirrored the work of the so-called Islamic State, often known as IS or Isis.
That, analysts worry, could presage tighter links.
From the Washington Post, the Boko Haram campaign heats up:
Nigeria war expands as Chad, Niger send troops to fight Boko Haram
The fight against Boko Haram is escalating, with troops from Niger and Chad crossing into northeastern Nigeria to fight the insurgency in a further sign that what began as a Nigerian problem has grown into a volatile regional one.
The troops began their push Sunday, a day after a series of suicide bombings in northeastern Nigeria killed as many as 100 civilians, and weeks before the country’s presidential election, which many worry could turn violent.
Boko Haram emerged in 2009 as a local insurgency, but it has increasingly become a regional threat, articulating wider ambitions. On Saturday, it declared its allegiance to the Islamic State fighters who have seized swaths of Iraq and Syria. Experts, however, described that pledge as little more than a rhetorical flourish.
Reuters covers the latest development:
Boko Haram raid town in Nigeria’s Borno state, at least 12 dead
Suspected Boko Haram militants attacked the town of Ngamdu in Nigeria’s northeast Borno state early on Tuesday, killing about a dozen people, witnesses and a security source said.
The town, which has been hit several times by militants, lies on the border of Borno and Yobe states. Borno is the heartland of Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency, which aims to carve out an Islamic state.
Ngamdu is about 100 km (60 miles) east of Borno state capital Maiduguri and about 40 km west from Yobe state capital Damaturu, and lies near a road that is a major transport artery between the two states.
From the Intercept, the CIA’s stealthy spookery to crack the iPhone:
iSpy: The CIA Campaign to Steal Apple’s Secrets
RESEARCHERS WORKING with the Central Intelligence Agency have conducted a multi-year, sustained effort to break the security of Apple’s iPhones and iPads, according to top-secret documents obtained by The Intercept.
The security researchers presented their latest tactics and achievements at a secret annual gathering, called the “Jamboree,” where attendees discussed strategies for exploiting security flaws in household and commercial electronics. The conferences have spanned nearly a decade, with the first CIA-sponsored meeting taking place a year before the first iPhone was released.
By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.
The CIA declined to comment for this story.
Süddeutsche Zeitung meets the maker:
Meet Edward Snowden’s Favorite Encryption Programmer
Everything Werner Koch needs to prevent the U.S. National Security Agency, NSA, from properly doing its job is right here in a 10-square-meter room in a basement in Erkrath, a small town outside of Düsseldorf.
Koch opens his front door and invites us into his home. The first thing we see are children’s drawings plastering the wall. Downstairs is his company “headquarters,” all 10 square meters of it. It’s a one-man show. And yet financially, things are looking good. “There is finally enough money in my account,” he says.
Until a few months ago, that wasn’t the case. Everything changed when Koch, 53, attended an event held late last year in Hamburg. He was one of over 3,000 people in a conference hall. Two experts on stage explained in detail how the NSA spies on ordinary citizens and which technological obstacles it can avoid while doing so. All of a sudden, the speaker asked: “Is Werner Koch in the audience? Could you please stand up?”
The audience applauded and cheered him as a stood up. The reason? Because there’s one program apparently that the NSA can’t decipher. And the person responsible for that program, an email encryption system called Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), is Koch.
GnuPG makes ordinary e-mails unintelligible, even to highly trained computer spies, who only see encrypted codes and word sequences. That’s precisely why Edward Snowden, the famous NSA whistleblower, used the program to communicate with journalists.
New software enables capture of Facebook login sites, via Network World:
Tool allows account hijacking on sites that use Facebook Login
A new tool allows hackers to generate URLs that can hijack accounts on sites that use Facebook Login, potentially enabling powerful phishing attacks.
The tool, dubbed Reconnect, was released last week by Egor Homakov, a researcher with security firm Sakurity. It takes advantage of a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) issue in Facebook Login, the service that allows users to log in on third-party sites using their Facebook accounts.
Homakov disclosed the issue publicly on his personal blog in January 2014, after Facebook declined to fix it because doing so would have broken compatibility with a large number of sites that used the service.
From the American Civil Liberties Union’s Blog of Rights, cell phone records track and keep your every move:
Cell Phone Records Can Show Where You Sleep and Where You Pray
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has become the latest federal appeals court to consider the question of whether law enforcement needs a warrant before it obtains cell phone location data. We have (with allies) filed an amicus brief in this case, as we did in cases now pending in the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits. Clearly this is an issue that is headed toward the Supreme Court (especially if the circuit courts come to different conclusions).
In this case, United States v. Carpenter, police obtained four months of historical cell phone location records for one suspect, Timothy Carpenter, and nearly three months of records for another suspect, Timothy Sanders. They did so without getting a warrant. For Mr. Carpenter, the records contain 12,898 separate points of location data, and for Mr. Sanders, 23,034 location points—an average of one every six minutes.
In this case as in the others, the data acquired by police provides a stark demonstration of how location data can reveal extraordinarily private details about our lives. For example here we found that:
In the early afternoon on a number of Sundays, Mr. Carpenter made or received calls from the cell tower sectors nearest to his church. His cell phone records do not routinely show him in that area on other days of the week, leading to the inference that he was worshipping at those times.
Mr. Carpenter’s call records reveal that over the course of four months, his phone was located in more than 200 separate cell tower sectors. On one day, he made and received 141 calls while located in 40 different sectors. These records provide a granular accounting of Mr. Carpenter’s locations and movements over time.
From December 23 to December 27, 2010, Mr. Carpenter’s last call of the night and first call of the next morning were either or both placed from the sector nearest to his home, suggesting that he slept at home on those evenings. But on the night of December 22, 2010, his last call of the night and first call of the next morning were placed from a Detroit neighborhood several miles away from his home. Although we have no reason to believe it to be the case here, Carpenter’s data shows how such information could easily reveal private details about who a person is sleeping with.
Spain’s ubiquitous downloading pirates, via El País:
88% of cultural content consumed online in Spain illegal, says industry
Film remains most affected sector, followed by television and music
4.455 billion items, with a market value of €23.265 billion, were illegally accessed last year
Spain’s arts and entertainment industry has had the identity of its public enemy number one clear for a long time now: the crisis may by lethal, the government’s 21-percent VAT rate may have left many casualties, but the biggest danger? Piracy.
New data released by the sector on Tuesday could not serve to back its theory more strongly: 87.94 percent of cultural content consumed online last year was illegal, it finds.
The Observatorio de la piratería y hábitos de consumo de contenidos digitales 2014 (or, Observatory on piracy and digital content consumption habits 2014) report, carried out by consultancy GfK and presented by sector pressure group Creators Coalition, shows piracy reached record levels in 2014, rising nearly four percentage points from last year’s 84 percent, and highlights how in the last 12 months consumers of illegal content have risen from 51 percent to 58 percent of all Spanish internet users.
A rape documentary banned in India gets a gilded U.S. debut, via the Guardian:
India’s Daughter documentary receives star-studded premiere in US
Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto pay tribute to the young medical student whose brutal death is the subject of the film
A rape documentary banned from airing in India received its US premiere at a star-studded event that included actresses Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto.
The screening of “India’s Daughter” at Baruch College began Monday with a vigil as Oscar-winner Streep lit about a dozen candles honouring the Indian medical student who died after being gang-raped on a bus in 2012. Organizers said about 650 people attended the event.
“Tonight we light these candles to honour the value and the work of Jyoti Singh’s short, promising life,” Streep said. “She was India’s daughter. Tonight she’s our daughter too.”
From Deutsche Welle, a free speech protest meets a brutal Myanmar crackdown:
Myanmar police clash with protesting students
Myanmar police have clashed with students protesting against an education bill they say stifles academic independence. Several demonstrators have been beaten by baton-wielding police or detained.
Police in the central town of Letpadan attempted to disperse the group of about 200 protesters on Monday following a standoff with security forces for more than a week.
The students have been rallying sporadically since November 2014 against an education law. They are demanding changes to legislation to decentralize the school system, to teach in ethnic languages, and to allow the formation of student unions.
A group of young activists set out on foot from the central city of Mandalay more than a month ago in a symbolic protest.
China prepares a foreign NGO crackdown, via the Christian Science Monitor:
National security? China ready to slam door on foreign NGOs.
New law would allow Beijing to filter out foreign funding of groups that support free expression and civil society.
After years of operating in a precarious legal limbo, foreign non-governmental organizations in China are facing a moment of truth that could force many of them to close their doors.
The Chinese government is drafting a new foreign NGO law that is widely expected to make work more difficult, if not impossible, for many of the 6,000 overseas non-profits that operate here in a broad range of fields from education and the environment to HIV-Aids and legal education.
Under the new law, foreign non-profits would not be allowed to open more than one office, or to raise funds locally, or be allowed to fund projects deemed counter to what is being called “Chinese society’s moral customs,” according to excerpts seen by The Christian Science Monitor of the still unpublished bill.
From People’s Daily, Beijing decries Japanese media Nanjing Massacre revisionism:
Why Nanjing Massacre at the core of Japanese rightists’ war crime whitewashing?
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s remark on persuading the Japanese government to face its wartime crimes during her visit to Japan on Monday sent a good warning to the Japanese public that they are influenced by political bias.
Merkel said on Monday that her country was lucky to be reintroduced and accepted by the international community after the horrible days during the Nazi rule and the Holocaust. “I think it was possible first because Germany did face its past squarely.”
Unlike German, Japan has never fully admitted its aggression history.
The Sankei Shimbun, a Japanese nationwide daily, has run a series of reports since February on whitewashing the Nanjing Massacre quoting several war veterans who allegedly “recalled” that the city of Nanjing was an “empty city” when Japanese troops entered it in 1939, and it was “so peaceful” that no bloodshed ever happened.
The reports run by the newspaper with nationwide influence are meant to raise doubts about one of the three world-recognized massacres that happened during World War II.
On to Tokyo and a Shinzo Abe adviser’s plea for a prime ministerial acknowledgment of Japanese aggression in WWII, via the Japan Times:
Statement adviser to Abe: Acknowledge Japan waged ‘war of aggression’
A noted political and diplomatic scholar who has been widely considered a close adviser to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken a surprising stance.
Shinichi Kitaoka, president of International University of Japan and an expert on Japanese diplomatic and political history, wants Abe to acknowledge what the nationalist leader apparently does not want to clearly admit in public: that Japan fought “a war of aggression” against China in the 1930s and ‘40s.
“Japan fought a war of aggression. It did really dreadful things. It’s clear,” Kitaoka told a symposium in Tokyo on Monday, according to the Asahi Shimbun.
“I want Mr. Abe to say, ‘Japan committed aggression (against China),” he was quoted as saying.
Japan’s military popularity hits an all-time high, via the Wall Street Journal:
Japan’s Military Enjoys Record Public Support
More Japanese have come to appreciate the nation’s military during a territorial dispute with China and following a big natural disaster in northern Japan four years ago. That doesn’t necessarily mean people want a bigger and stronger military, a goal for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
That was the main finding of a survey on defense issues conducted by the Cabinet Office. The poll, released Saturday, showed 92% of the respondents expressing favorable views of the Self-Defense Forces, the highest number since the government started taking the survey in 1969. That compares with a recent low of 81% in 2009 and slightly higher than the result of the previous survey taken three years ago.
Asked whether the SDF should be strengthened, 59% said its current status is appropriate, compared with 60% three years ago and a recent high of 66% in 2006.
And a German call to set the record straight.via the Japan Times:
Merkel advises Japan to settle ‘comfort women’ dispute
German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Japan on Tuesday to resolve the “comfort women” issue in her second foray into the delicate issue of East Asian history following her comment Monday that settling the wartime past is a prerequisite for reconciliation.
Winding up a whirlwind visit to Japan, Merkel met Katsuya Okada, head of the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan, and said Tokyo should “go ahead with reconciliation” with South Korea over the comfort women issue.
“Japan and South Korea share values,” Merkel reportedly told Okada. “It’s better to resolve the . . . issue properly.”
