News Digest (16.10.15)
16 October 2015
TTIP: I didn’t think TTIP could get any scarier, but then I spoke to the EU official in charge of it (Independent, link)
"With just eight words she exposed everything that's wrong with the deal, and why it needs to be defeated" by John Hilary (War on Want)
EUROPOL-INTERPOL forum targets migrant smuggling networks (press release, pdf)
FRANCE:
Burqa ban five years on - 'We created a monster' (The Local, link)
REVEALED: The boom and bust of the CIA’s secret torture sites (TBIJ, link)
The Life and Death of Objective Peckham - Stripped of British citizenship and killed by an American drone (The Intercept, link)
UK: GCHQ can monitor MPs' communications, court rules (The Guardian, link)
UK: Grayling's court charge forces magistrates to punish the poor - it's time for reform (politics.co.uk, link)
UK: Large retailers must prepare to publish first Modern Slavery Act compliance statement, says expert (Out-Law.com, link)
UK: University of Sussex to pay student protester £20,000 in damages (The Guardian, link)
UK: University refuse to reveal their links with The Arms Trade (The Tab, link)
USA: Say welcome to the special anti-drone shoulder 'rifle' (CNet, link)
How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (freedom-to-tinker.com, link):
"James Bamford published an article quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand. However, the documents do not explain how these breakthroughs work, and speculation about possible backdoors or broken algorithms has been rampant in the technical community. Yesterday at ACM CCS, one of the leading security research venues, we and twelve coauthors presented a paper that we think solves this technical mystery."
EU:
What Schrems, Delvigne and Celaj tell us about the state of fundamental rights in the EU (link)
EU doesn’t need a CIA - but better intelligence would help (euractiv, link)
IEMed Mediterranean Yearbook 2015 (link)
Hidden cameras and human rights: the ECHR clarifies the position (EU Law Analysis, link)
Germany: German parliament votes for new data retention law (DW, link):
"Germany's lower house of parliament has voted to resume collecting and retaining metadata about phone calls and internet use. Berlin says the new legislation is a balanced compromise."