Re: [liberationtech] Hey, does the NSA own Germany? Because that would be bad.

[Alberto Cammozzo]

Thank you Kate,
this is an important resource for UE citizens.
A quite extensive and documented coverage on the NSA-BND issue has 
appeared in English on the Electrospaces blog following the hearings.

You may be interested in connecting with them and link their articles.







Bests,

Alberto

On 17/09/2015 03:59, Kate Krauss wrote:

Hi Liberation Tech,

I visited a German hacker conference recently, and it gradually became 
clear to me in talking to privacy advocates that the NSA has a very 
unhealthy relationship with German intelligence.


​
​It seems that the NSA is colluding with German intelligence agencies 
(the BND and others) to spy on German politicians, journalists, and 
citizens.


An inquiry committee of the German Parliament is in the midst of a 
major investigation to

​ get to the bottom of this​
. It’s also trying to learn whether the US is planning illegal drone 
strikes
​from German soil. And tapping the Internet directly in Munich to send 
data about Germans directly to the NSA.
There are even allegations that German intelligence agencies are 
exchanging citizens’ personal data for expensive surveillance 
equipment paid for by the NSA
​. And the roof of the US embassy in Berlin seems to be an NSA 
listening post (I guess that's not unusual). Then there's the undersea 
cable.


The Germans working on this investigation in Parliament are frustrated 
that news about it isn’t really reaching the international community.  ​



Spy agencies for the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia may also 
be involved (FVEY). But the NSA is by far the best funded and most 
powerful among them—Edward Snowden revealed that the US intelligence 
budget was $52 billion in 2013.


The central issue, however, is whether Germany, in bowing to the 
requests of the NSA, could be gradually turning over its independence 
to the United States. This is an outrageous claim—but if you let a 
foreign government spy on your head of government, Chancellor Merkel, 
and members of

​your ​
Parliament, and you intimidate German journalists who try to cover the 
story (two were recently investigated for treason)—at what point does 
that cross a bright line? And if the US has co-opted Germany, one of 
the most powerful countries in Europe—which other less powerful 
countries does it own, right now, in secret?


A tiny group of interested Germans and Americans has launched a web 
site (GermanTransparency.org) and a
​Twitter account (@GermanInq) to track this investigation and share 
information about it with English-speaking journalists, activists, and 
technologists.


Please read the blog post and news reports on the web site, and follow 
us on Twitter. The next hearings of this inquiry committee will be 
held in Berlin on September 2
​4, so you have a few days to get up to speed. Berlin is six hours 
ahead of New York. The hashtag for the inquiry is #GermanInq.


Thanks,

Kate Krauss
​for GermanTransparency.org
@GermanInq​






--
-
TagMeNot
http://tagMeNot.info
@dontTag

--
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of 
list guidelines will get you moderated: 
https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change 
to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.

[liberationtech] Sahel Spring

[Richard Brooks]

As a recap, about 1 year ago a popular uprising called Balai Citoyen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Balai_Citoyen

started by rappers and tech activists in Ouagadougou got
a lot of the population in the street to protest moves
by the President to prolong his 27 years in office.

Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso.

The military eventually asked the President to leave, and
a transition government was put in place. Elections were
planned for mid-October.

Yesterday, the presidential guard held the interim government
hostage and called off the elections. People close to the
ex-President are leading this action by part of the military.
Latest news:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/09/17/uk-burkina-army-idUKKCN0RG28S20150917

The studio of one of Balai Citoyen's founders was under attack.
There is a curfew. Some dead protesters. Dozens wounded.

Calls for more protests.

Note that the Sahel Spring in Burkina Faso lead to a number of
protest movements in Subsaharan Africa. Their actions lead to
hope of democratic change.

The question is whether the combination of rappers and tech
activists can mobilize a large enough response to repel
this attack.
-- 
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of 
list guidelines will get you moderated: 
https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, 
change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at 
compa...@stanford.edu.

[liberationtech] ICTD 2016 Ann Arbor, MI, USA | 3-6 June 2016

[Terry Winograd]

ICTD 2016 Ann Arbor, MI, USA | 3-6 June 2016 Call for Papers and Notes
Deadline for Submission of Full paper: November 20 2015

The Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication
Technologies and Development (ICTD2016), to be hosted at the
University of Michigan from June 3-6, 2016, cordially invites you to
submit Full Papers and Notes. Held in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI and
ACM SIGCAS, ICTD2016 will provide an international forum for scholarly
researchers to explore the role of information and communication
technologies (ICTs) in social, political, and economic development.
The ICTD conferences have been taking place approximately every 18
months since 2006; 2016 marks the first time that the conference will
go to an annual cycle.

Important dates
·  November 20, 2015: Deadline for submission of Full Papers
·  January 15, 2016: Notification of acceptances for Full Papers
·  January 29, 2016: Deadline for submission of Notes
·  February 26, 2016: Notification of acceptances for Notes
·  March 25, 2016:  Camera-ready Full Papers and Notes due

All submission are due 11:59 pm UTC.

Over the past several decades, as radio and television have been
joined by computers, the Internet, and mobile devices, information and
communication technologies (ICTs) have become more pervasive, more
accessible, and more relevant in the lives of people around the world.
Virtually no sphere of human activity remains apart from ICTs, from
markets to health care, education to governance, family life to
artistic expression. Diverse groups across the world interact with,
are affected by, and can shape the design of these technologies. The
ICTD conference is a place to understand these interactions, and to
examine, critique, and refine the persistent, pervasive hope that ICTs
can be enlisted by individuals and communities in the service of human
development. There are multidisciplinary challenges associated with
the engineering, application and adoption of ICTs in developing
regions and/or for development, with implications for design, policy,
and practice.

For the purposes of this conference, the term “ICT” comprises
electronic technologies for information processing and communication,
as well as systems, interventions, and platforms that are built on
such technologies. “Development” includes, but is not restricted to,
poverty alleviation, education, agriculture, healthcare, general
communication, gender equality, governance, infrastructure,
environment and sustainable livelihoods. The conference program will
reflect the multidisciplinary nature of ICTD research, with
anticipated contributions from fields including (but not limited to)
anthropology, computer science, communication, design, economics,
electrical engineering, geography, human-computer interaction,
information science, information systems, political science, public
health, and sociology.

Full Papers
An ICTD Full Paper, which is up to 10 pages in the ACM two-column
format (including references, figures and tables), must make a new
research contribution and provide complete and substantial support for
its results and conclusions. Accepted papers typically represent a
major advance for the field of ICTD. Full Papers will be evaluated via
double-blind peer review by a multidisciplinary panel of at least
three readers, one of whom will come from outside the paper’s
disciplinary domain in order to ensure broad readability. Accepted
Full Papers will be presented as oral presentations at the conference.

Full Papers will be evaluated according to their novel research
contribution, methodological soundness, theoretical framing and
reference to related work, quality of analysis, and quality of writing
and presentation. Manuscripts considering novel designs, new
technologies, project assessments, policy analyses, impact studies,
theoretical contributions, social issues around ICT and development,
and so forth will be considered. Well-analyzed negative results from
which generalizable conclusions can be drawn are also sought. Authors
are encouraged (but not required) to address the diversity of
approaches in ICTD research by providing context, implications, and
actionable guidance to researchers and practitioners beyond the
authors’ primary domains. Full Papers typically present mature work
whereas Notes (see below) are used for presenting preliminary research
that is still work-in-progress.

All accepted Full Papers will be archived in the ACM Digital Library.
A subset of the Full Papers will also appear in a special issue of the
Information Technologies & International Development journal.

See additional specifications under “All Submissions” below.

Notes
With a shorter 4-page limit, Notes are intended to introduce
work-in-progress that may be published later in a journal, as well as
to document shorter project write-ups. An ICTD Note is likely to have
a more focused and succinct research contribution to the ICTD field
than Full