In 1991, a neo-Nazi white supremacist gang was terrorizing the streets of Lynwood in Los Angeles County. The reason these violent thugs could run amok was because they were deputies at the Lynwood Sheriff’s station, having the power of blue privilege.

Saudi Arabia, which is responsible for most of the destruction with its relentless bombings, should be forced to pay for the terrible damage it has wrought. So should the United States.

His angry letter prompted close scrutiny of his political views and associations by the bureau that ran on into the early 1970s. The suspicion was that Seeger, who died in early 2014, was a security risk with close connections to the Communist party.

The FBI file on him has nearly 1,800 pages – 90 of them are still withheld for security reasons – and journalist David Corn has unearthed details within it of the elaborate efforts made by government agents to document Seeger’s activities, even back to his school days.

The country’s secret intelligence organisations made a string of stupid mistakes over the last year.

The domestic agency ASIO bugged the wrong phone, and handed out the wrong phone number to the targets of search warrants, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Canada’s Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan arrived in Erbil on Sunday, Kurdish news outlets reported.

An Air France flight from Mauritius to Paris has made an emergency landing in Mombasa, Kenya, after a suspected bomb was found in the toilet.

The obvious way to prevent future ISIS-style organizations from forming is to oppose Western militarism in all its dreadful forms: CIA coups, proxy wars, drone strikes, counterinsurgency campaigns, economic warfare, etc.

Armed clashes persisted on Sunday across Turkey‘s southeast, where an operation by Turkish forces intensified on the sixth day of a campaign that security sources said had resulted in the death of 110 Kurdish militants.

A few months ago, we noted that the EU was working on its new General Data Protection Regulation and Data Protective Directive — and warned that it was putting free speech and privacy on a crash course. We also had a podcast about this with Daphne Keller, from Stanford‘s Center for Internet and Society. While the intentions of the data protection efforts sound good, the actual impact could be quite devastating. The idea is that all these companies are collecting lots of data, and individuals should have more control over what‘s collected and how it‘s used (and abused). Conceptually, that sounds really valuable. But, in practice it can be a disaster — especially if the people who are focused on privacy/data protection don‘t think about or understand the consequences of what they‘re doing.

And now, the EU has announced that the new data protection rules have been finalized — and while there‘s plenty in there that may be useful, these new rules are almost certainly going to create some new dangerous consequences.

Not surprisingly, speculation is running rampant concerning how this happened. Since this isn‘t just using some sort of zero day exploit, but rather „unauthorized code“ — it‘s pretty clear this isn‘t just some random security folks having fun.

(18.12.2015) The bill passed by Congress also strips away many of the previous anonymization provisions included in previous versions of CISA, which has drawn significant criticism from the security community. In effect, the new language clears the way for an open channel between tech companies and the government, unaffected by existing privacy laws.

Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee (the Committee that has most strongly been pushing versions of cybersecurity bills that undermine privacy and provide more surveillance powers) apparently believes that as long as he says day is night and up is down, the world will believe him. In response to Speaker Paul Ryan‘s decision to shove CISA into the omnibus funding bill, Schiff insisted that this was necessary to protect our privacy:

I have to admit that I find Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign fascinating. Or, rather, I find its survival to this point fascinating.

We saw that this past week. As the Star’s Bruce Campion-Smith reports, Canadian advisers and CF-18s alike came to the aid of Kurdish forces, when jihadists threatened to overrun their lines. Airstrikes by CF-18s, plus support from our troops helped the Kurds prevail. That was combat, not training.

Syria‘s state media blamed „terrorist groups“ for the attack, but government loyalists said the explosions were an Israeli strike believed to have killed Qantar, who is reviled in Israel for a 1979 attack that killed four people.