01.22.14
Snowden’s Defence, Snowden Q & A, Privacy Advantage in Industry, The Coming End of Facebook
Summary: Bits of news about privacy (mostly from today but also slightly older)
Libel Against Snowden
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Snowden, in rare interview, denies all accusations of help from Moscow
Leaker tells The New Yorker: “The American public has a seat at the table now.”
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Snowden denies receiving assistance from Russian intelligence with NSA leaks
Former National Security Agency 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.”
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Before Snowden, Nixon Admin Pioneered Evidence-Free ‘Russian Spy’ Smears Against Daniel Ellsberg
Snowden Q & A
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5 questions for Snowden that aren’t exactly about the NSA
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to hold live chat on Thursday
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to hold Q&A Thursday
NSA
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Obama’s NSA smoke and mirrors
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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NSA Surveillance Program Still Unconstitutional Despite Proposed Changes
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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Ex-CIA Director And Current Surveillance Task Force Member Mike Morell Parrots Talking Points To Defend Bulk Collections
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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Gov’t used Surveillance of MLK in Bid to Destroy Him: Now they want us to just Trust Them
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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Some States Have a Sneaky Plan to Stop the NSA
So far, six states (Missouri, California, Oklahoma, Kansas, Washington, and Indiana) have introduced bills that target the NSA.
International
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One Planet, One Internet: A Call To the International Community to Fight Against Mass Surveillance
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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Germany’s Privacy Stance Boosts Berlin’s Tech Startups
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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TrustyCon vs. RSA and NSA: New conference pushes trustworthy agenda (but Microsoft-funded, i.e. NSA)
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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Davos Dispatch: Tech Titans On Life-Changing Gadgets And NSA Reform
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.”
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Facebook like an infectious disease, will lose 80 percent of users, says Princeton study
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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Facebook May Lose 80% of Its User Base by 2017
Social networks function like infectious diseases, according to Princeton researchers. They spread fast—and then disappear
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Facebook Will Lose 80 Percent of Users by 2017, According to an Infectious Disease Model
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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The Google Clones That Power NSA Surveillance
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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Facebook, Twitter followers a multi million-dollar business
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Is BP ‘trolling’ its Facebook critics?
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France Wants To Tax YouTube And Facebook Videos
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Italy Approves ‘Google Tax’ on Internet Companies
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.
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Facebook Forces Video Ads on You Because Marketers Told It To
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Facebook to launch autoplay video ads
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Independent commission to investigate future of internet after NSA revelations
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