Snowden's Defence, Snowden Q & A, Privacy Advantage in Industry, The Coming End of Facebook
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-22 21:12:32 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-22 22:01:32 UTC
Summary: Bits of news about privacy (mostly from today but also slightly older)
Libel Against Snowden
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Leaker tells The New Yorker: "The American public has a seat at the table now."
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Former National Security Agen€€cy contractor Edward Snowden denied accusations that he was working for a foreign government when he stole countless classified documents detailing U.S. surveillance programs and efforts to gather information on world leaders.
In an interview with the New Yorker, published Tuesday evening on the magazine’s Web site, Snowden said claims that he may have been working for the Russians as a spy were “absurd.”
Snowden Q & A
NSA
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He is quite blatantly playing to public ignorance when he says that he is doing these essentially unnecessary things, as Wittes points out, to “maintain the trust of the American people, and people around the world.” It is an odd way to build trust when you find public concerns unfounded but try to sound like you’re all for reform. Conservatives are hoping all of this is atmospheric nonsense to calm his base, while the intelligence community goes along its way and all that follow-up — like the Trayvon Martin civil rights investigation by the Justice Department — goes nowhere.
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Freedom is the great deity of the west, the goddess central to American identity; the idea being that individuals have autonomy—good or bad, wise or foolish, controversial or conventional—to live their lives with minimal interference from the government.
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Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
This "theory" that the NSA was hamstrung by its lack of access to millions of irrelevant call records practically debunks itself at this point. The defenders of these programs can't seem to find a better rhetorical device than this one, which has been completely eviscerated by dozens of intelligence experts and the 9/11 Commission itself.
Morell's position on the surveillance review task force seems to be as a "devil's advocate" -- someone placed on the board by the president to ensure no one gets too carried away trying to protect Americans' rights or limit the NSA's power.
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Among the ironies of Barack Obama trying to sell us the gargantuan NSA domestic spying program is that such techniques of telephone surveillance were used against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to destroy him and stop the Civil Rights movement. Had the republic’s most notorious peeping tom, J. Edgar Hoover, succeeded in that quest, Obama might never have been president, or even been served in Virginia restaurants.
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So far, six states (Missouri, California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Indiana) have introduced bills that target the NSA.
International
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The Snowden revelations have confirmed our worst fears about online spying. They show that the NSA and its allies have been building a global surveillance infrastructure to “master the internet” and spy on the world’s communications. These shady groups have undermined basic encryption standards, and riddled the Internet’s backbone with surveillance equipment. They have collected the phone records of hundreds of millions of people none of whom are suspected of any crime. They have swept up the electronic communications of millions of people at home and overseas indiscriminately, exploiting the digital technologies we use to connect and inform. They spy on the population of allies, and share that data with other organizations, all outside the rule of law.
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CEO Felix Langhof insists that corporations formed during the internet era have a systemic blind spot towards this new market, simply because the practice of attaching their ID to their customers’ actions is now so deeply engrained.
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Who do you trust? That's a question asked increasingly by a security industry with a growing sense that the National Security Agency (NSA) has sought to weaken encryption or get backdoors into computers, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the media. Now, trust is also the theme of a new conference called TrustyCon that will vie for attention on Feb. 27 in San Francisco while the big RSA Conference for security pros is also taking place in that city.
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Benioff said the discussion about the NSA and data privacy over the last 6 months is “way overdue… Only through transparency will we get back to trust… Trust will drive customer choice because the customer has to have the choice about exactly where they want their data and how to manage it and see it and it cannot be anonymous. I think our model is closest to where we need to go: customers can choose what country their data is run out of. They can go into the data center, see it and monitor it. Tech vendors have to provide this kind of transparency and can’t pin it on the government.”
Facebook
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Don't worry, like a viral outbreak, Facebook use will explode before plummeting down to Myspace levels of obscurity, says a new study from Princeton University.
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Social networks function like infectious diseases, according to Princeton researchers. They spread fast—and then disappear
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We'll all be cured of Facebook soon. At least, that's the conclusion of a new Princeton paper published this month on the Arxiv server that modeled the social network's popularity over time as if it were an infectious illness. The conclusions may sound hard to believe—the scientists predict Facebook will lose 80 percent of its user base by the end of the year—but they sound a lot more probable if you know how they calculated that number.
The following are a bit older:
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Google. Amazon. Facebook. These giants of the web have a knack for juggling enormous amounts of data across tens of thousands of computer servers. And they’ve been kind enough to share their “big data” methods with the world at large. Many open source software projects now let anyone build similarly enormous operations capable of juggling similarly enormous amounts of data — including the National Security Agency.
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Italy’s Parliament today passed a new measure on web advertising, the so-called “Google tax,” which will require Italian companies to purchase their Internet ads from locally registered companies, instead of from units based in havens such as Ireland, Luxembourg and Bermuda.
