Saturday, February 15, 2014

Bing clung to pro-red search
despite Kristof's 2009 warning

Rebecca MacKinnon, commenting in the Guardian, writes that she found that searches in basic Chinese characters returned results conforming to Chinese government censorship, while results in traditional Chinese writing did not do so. She suspected that Microsoft engineers had neglected to correct the search algorithm for people outside mainland China, but was at a loss to explain why Microsoft had taken no action following a disclosure in 2009 by Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist.

Mackinnon comment
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/14/micorsoft-bing-china-censorship-transparency

Kristof blog
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/boycott-microsoft-bing/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

However, there is also the matter of Bing, which is owned by Microsoft, removing the FreeWeibo.com home page from its search engine and only restoring it after the censorship story exploded this week. FreeWeibo is deemed an enemy of the Red Chinese state.

Stefan Weitz, Bing's chief, blamed technical glitches and the possibility that Weibo's web site had been deemed "inappropriate" or said to have adult content.

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Friday, February 14, 2014

After stalling, Microsoft
denies red censorship
But its explanation is greeted with skepticism

From the Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/12/microsoft-bing-censor-chinese-search-results-system-error?CMP=ema_827
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Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Lawmakers see a serious flaw
in Holder aide's NSA testimony

Two Republicans and a liberal Democrat have upbraided a deputy attorney general, charging his congressional testimony regarding NSA surveillance of federal lawmakers was flawed.

From the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/12/nsa-james-cole-congress-testimony-surveillance-phone-records

Meanwhile, Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican, filed a class action lawsuit against the Executive Branch over the NSA's dragnetting of telephone metadata, and pledged to fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

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Microsoft's Bing found to conduct
communist censorship in America

From the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/11/bing-censors-chinese-language-search-results?CMP=ema_565
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Tuesday, February 11, 2014

U.S. rushed to get rid of proof
that Bin Laden had been killed
Admiral ordered death pix destroyed despite preservation rule
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/email-shows-effort-to-shield-bin-laden-photos/2014/02/10/92f9a6fc-92b2-11e3-b3f7-f5107432ca45_story.html

First, a corpse said to be that of Osama bin Laden was ordered ditched into the sea. No body, no autopsy.

Then Obama denied media requests to view photos of the body.

Not long after, a U.S. admiral ordered the destruction of all military photos of the body of the person said to be Bin Laden. Any other such photos were to be kept under lock and key by the CIA. So, no visual evidence. No possibility of a member of the public running a facial recognition program to determine whether the commandos had killed the right person.

Those identified as Bin Laden's wives and children were held in Pakistan for a while, then sent overseas -- but nowhere near a Congressional committee or members of the U.S. press.

Conclusion: The commandos killed somebody that night. But Obama and his underlings were very anxious that no one be able to see tangible evidence that it was actually Bin Laden who died.

Drone warriors are often guessing -- insider
Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill reporting...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/02/10/the-nsas-secret-role/

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Monday, January 27, 2014

Google clams up to Times query
on NSA's siphoning of map data
  
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/spy-agencies-scour-phone-apps-for-personal-data.html?hp&_r=0

Control f:
Google d
to reach relevant note in Times story.
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Sunday, January 19, 2014

Ex-NSA analyst: we spied
word for word on press,
justices and lawmakers

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/54101930#54101930

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