Tor 0.2.8.8 is released, with important fixes

> My problem is that I would not be able to comment anymore. I would rather remain properly anonymous, but moving to being properly pseudonymous isn't viable. I still cannot find a trustably pseudonymous e-mail solution.

Exactly! You said it much better than I did, and my voice also would be silenced if Shari decides to require email/registration to post. That would be a loss, I think, to the community.

> I suppose I thought of her because she's so gutsy!

To repeat something I've said before: if Tor Project ever receives a NSL accompanied by a gag order, someone *must* assume the risk of flying to Germany (or somewhere else outside USA, where good extradition defense lawyers can be found) and giving a press conference revealing and publishing the NSL with gag order. I think Alison has sufficient courage. The problem is that as I've said before, in all likelihood the only persons who would know about the NSL are Shari and her lawyer.

Reuters has just revealed that Yahoo was served with an NSL (or something similar) accompanied by an eternal gag order which demanded that Yahoo scan *all* incoming emails for text dictated by NSA, and cc emails containing the keywords to a Yahoo server set up just so NSA could freely access whatever it wanted without Yahoo employees knowing. The CEO of Yahoo approved the secret system, but never told the security team about it. Later the security guys discovered that some emails were being mysteriously cc'd to a mystery server which unknown entities were accessing, and only then were they told about the NSA/Yahoo dragnet surveillance collaboration. I suspect this is typical of what happens when a company decides to give in to USG pressure: they bypass their own security people and hire an NSA/TAO person to design the secret exfiltration system without any company employees other than the CEO and GC knowing about it.

http://www.reuters.com
Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources
Joseph Menn
4 Oct 2016

|> Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events. Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

> this latest US Presidential election campaign is throwing up strange things

Don't forget that both candidates are calling for preventative detention and lifelong surveillance of "problem children" as part of CVE (Trump openly, Clinton in private, although her "surveillance surge" comment reveals that like Obama her first impulse in confronting a problem is to ramp up a vast new dragnet surveillance and population control program).

And don't forget that the coming collapse of the global economy is not just a right-wing "conspiracy theory", but something even the liberal magazine Salon is worrying about.

https://www.salon.com/2016/10/04/election-blindness-its-the-end-of-the-…
Election blindness: It’s the end of the world economy as we know it — and we feel fine
Our myopic focus on Trump and Clinton has blinded us to a looming debt crisis and a global economy on the precipice
Bob Hennelly
4 Oct 2016

|> As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund convene this week in Washington for their annual meeting, there is growing evidence that the post-World War II global consensus that created them is unraveling, right at the time when the global economy is facing major economic headwinds that have been decades in the making.
|> ...
|> For decades now the received neo-liberal wisdom from the elite institutions of the World Bank and the IMF was that only open markets and unfettered global trade could deliver a broad-based prosperity and advance the well-being of our species on the planet. Yet, what we have is massive misery for millions caught up in the cross fire of conflict and increasing wealth concentration, thanks to tax evasion and rampant political corruption both here and around the world.

And don't forget that global warming is likely to ultimately kill most humans even if the depression or the USG don't do it first.

Open Whisper Systems (maker of Signal) has just revealed FBI demanded information on all customers and added an eternal gag order. ACLU fought and WON which is why we know about the FBI's unconstitutional data grab. As ACLU points out, the ease with which FBI abandoned its gag order shows that it is *always* worthwhile fighting such gag orders, because FBI knows they are outrageously unconstitutional and is apparently reluctant to risk a serious court fight unless they feel very strongly that the spying must be kept secret.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/fbi-demands-signal-user-data…
FBI demands Signal user data, but there’s not much to hand over
Signal parent company Open Whisper Systems hired ACLU, which helped fight gag order.
Cyrus Farivar
4 Oct 2016

|> The American Civil Liberties Union announced Tuesday that Open Whisper Systems (OWS), the company behind popular encrypted messaging app Signal, was subpoenaed earlier this year by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia to hand over a slew of information—"subscriber name, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, method of payment"—on two of its users. Further, OWS was prevented for at least several months from publicly disclosing that it had received such an order until the ACLU successfully challenged it.

Sadly, it seems that far from pardoning Snowden, Obama's last act in office will be to pardon the CIA agents who did this:

https://www.salon.com/2016/10/04/hell-in-dark-prison-new-forms-of-tortu…
Hell in “Dark Prison”: New forms of torture at CIA black site revealed
Interviews conducted by Human Rights Watch detail the extreme abuse detainees endured at the CIA black site Cobalt
Ben Norton
4 Oct 2016

|> Previously undisclosed methods of torture used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have been revealed in a new report by Human Rights Watch. Two Tunisian men detained without charge or trial in a CIA black site in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2015 independently described to the rights group several excruciating forms of abuse they endured at the hands of the CIA.

The scope and scale of USG abuses of all peoples everywhere is truly abhorrent.

It will end only when the US political leadership is put on trial for war crimes at the ICC. This is far more likely than they realize, because a global depression will cripple USG's ability to bully EU and other nations, and will cause so much anger around the world that if the current US regime collapses, the leadership may well be handed over the Hague to face justice. So the cloud currently hanging of the global economy has a silver lining.