The fifth day of Pfc. Bradley Manning’s trial began this morning with two witnesses taking the stand to address an Army intelligence report produced on the “threat” of WikiLeaks that Manning accessed and disclosed. Two stipulations were entered into the record and read in open court. Matthew Housburgh, a special intelligence system administrator for the Marine Corps, testified about attending a Chaos Computer Club conference in December 2009 and how he drafted a report after about the conference afterward. He attended to do research on potential security threats, and it also seemed he thought the military might benefit from hearing how hackers engage in information or operational security). He said it was an opportunity to attend a conference that might “show some security vulnerabilities we could apply to our command.” Civil liberties groups launch StopWatching.us to protest surveillance by Agence France-Presse A coalition of Internet and civil liberties groups launched a campaign Tuesday protesting the huge US online surveillance program revealed in the past week. Joining the effort were the Mozilla Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, Greenpeace USA, the World Wide Web Foundation and more than 80 other organizations or companies. The coalition launched a website, StopWatching.us, and called on Congress to launch a full probe and urging more disclosure from US officials about the National Security Agency’s vast program Internet surveillance program. An online petition was also launched on the website. “We don’t want an Internet where everything we do is secretly logged and tracked by government,” said Alex Fowler, head of privacy and public policy for Mozilla, which produces the Firefox browser. Fowler said the revelations “confirm many of our worst fears,” and “raise serious questions about individual privacy protections, checks on government power and court orders impacting some of the most popular Web services.” Randy Reitman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said the groups want legal reforms to halt this type of surveillance and a “full investigative congressional committee” on the matter. The organizations also called for reform of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a measure passed after the September 11 attacks, which authorize secret court orders used for some surveillance, and of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which has also been used.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:50:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015