All your emails are belong to us.

At least that’s what the latest court order from a judge in New York says. The warrant, granted on June 11, states that the government can access all the content and files contained in a Gmail account.

Yes, this is a significant blow to privacy.

The shadowy hacker collective known as Anonymous has announced it will launch a round of cyber-attacks this Friday against the Israeli government, in retaliation for Israel’s ongoing military intervention in Gaza.

A federal judge has denied Google Inc’s attempt to dismiss a privacy lawsuit brought against the technology giant for commingling user data across its different products and offering that data to advertisers without permission.

US District Judge Paul Grewal ruled Monday evening that Google has to face the breach of contract and fraud claims brought by users of Android devices who downloaded at least one Android application through Google Play.

The “growing cryptocurrency ecosystem” is often described as “disruptive.” It is widely feared as a threat by banking authorities in the United States, Europe and Australia.

The New York Department of Financial Services, for instance, released a series of proposed regulations last week that may result in the shutdown of bitcoin in that state.

The British government has decriminalised online video game, music and movie piracy, scrapping fuller punishment plans after branding them unworkable.

Share buttons on websites may be revealing more about us than we realise, after a study uncovered a covert tracking tool.

Researchers found one in 18 of the world’s top 100,000 websites track users without their consent using a technique known as ‘canvas fingerprinting.’

Apple has issued a statement in response to the allegations saying that the company’s “diagnostic functions do not compromise user privacy and security,” but Zdziarski has responded by noting that these services “dish out data” regardless of whether the user has agreed to diagnostics.

“There is no way to disable these mechanisms,” Zdziarski writes on his personal blog. “This makes it much harder to believe that Apple is actually telling the truth here.”

The British government has decriminalized the act of online video game, music and film piracy, after branding harsher punishment plans as “unworkable.”

Beginning in 2015, internet users who persistently file-share will be sent a series of warning letters explaining that their actions are illegal. However, authorities will take no further action if the user continues downloading the material.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden doesn't yet know whether he'll be spending the next year in a U.S. prison or an undisclosed location in Russia. Nevertheless, Snowden hopes to work on anti-surveillance technologies in the future.

A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month.

The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference’s website.

It’s rare but not unprecedented for Black Hat presentations to be cancelled. It was not clear why lawyers felt Volynkin’s presentation should not proceed.

Volynkin, a research scientist with the university’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was due to give a talk entitled “You Don’t Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget” at the conference, which take places Aug. 6-7 in Last Vegas.

Forensic scientist and author Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides(PDF) from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE/X) conference in New York called Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden says the analysts who monitored the texts and e-mails of millions of Americans would sometimes share intercepted nude photos and sex texts with colleagues.

The program, called Smart Rewards, offers gift cards and travel deals to subscribers who surrender their web surfing, app usage and location data in exchange for targeted advertisements based on that personal information through the Verizon Selects tracking program.

This is not the first time there has been a downing of a commercial flight, and, as in most such cases, there is more to the story of Malaysian Airlines MH17 than the first impression suggests. One particular case from the past gives us clues as to what this “more” might be.

Scammers are using the MH17 disaster in east Ukraine to spread objectionable links, online security experts have warned.

A link to a pornographic website disguised as a video of the Malaysia Airlines crash was posted on a Facebook page dedicated to one victim.

Many tweets have been posted that appeared to report the disaster, but actually included spam links.

NSA spying revelations have left the world shocked about the fact that we no longer have any form of privacy. The government is able to look into all of our online activities and data. People have found themselves not just shocked but truly outraged. Done with fighting governments but not being able to get anywhere, they have opted for a different tactic: moving to Switzerland.

This week, the House of Representatives approved legislation from Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that would make it harder for cities to build publicly-owned broadband networks.

The UK’s new Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (Drip) law that went from announcement to enactment in eight days, is a complete abomination. Everything about the process – and here, process is critical – is an affront to democracy, to the rule of law, to the rights of British and global citizens, and even to the erstwhile ends of national security.

The completely unsatisfactory process involved the announcement last Thursday that the three main party leaders had been working in private towards supporting a bill that wasn’t yet public, followed by a three day fast-track process through the Commons and Lords, an overnight afterthought on human rights compliance, vague and uncoordinated attempts at amendment, and a government reshuffle and countless other matters to distract and detract.

What Drip represents is the absence of true political leadership and an utter failure to engage in an open, mature, public debate about the clash between privacy and security online.

Australian daily deals website Catch of the Day announced a three-year-old data breach compromising credit cards and passwords to its customers on Friday evening.

MOSCOW (INTELLIHUB) — In a 17-minute interview with the London Guardian, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the fringe benefits of working surveillance detail for the NSA.

But the Edward Snowden who materialises in our hotel room shortly after noon on the appointed day seems none of those things. A year into his exile in Moscow, he feels less, not more, isolated. If he is depressed, he doesn’t show it. And, at the end of seven hours of conversation, he refuses a beer. “I actually don’t drink.” He smiles when repeating Hayden’s jibe. “I was like, wow, their intelligence is worse than I thought.”

**Video at source

Government told internet surveillance tribunal that gathering material 'may be permissible', say human rights groups

Verizon’s Accidental Mea Culpa

Emergency legislation on data retention and investigatory powers rushed through the UK parliament breach the right to privacy enshrined in human rights law, claim activists pursuing court action against the British government.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) is taking the UK government to court in an attempt to block the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers (DRIP) bill on the grounds it violates a European Court ruling that blanket data retention is unlawful and violates the right to privacy.

A new cybersecurity bill poses serious threats to our privacy, gives the government extraordinary powers to silence potential whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new powers from transparency laws.

Monday, July 7, 2014

Alina Virani, KingCast and Mortgage Movies Watch Homeowners' Super Pac, Seattle's Rolling Rebellion, Attorneys, Politicians and Citizens Square off Against the Banksters' Uniform Law "Reform" Conference.

Yessir, Karen Pooley, Yours Truly and several other dedicated people actually participated and were acknowledged by ULC's William Breetz as he stated that the conference welcomed homeowner and protestors' concerns. I am hear to help assure that his words amount to something more than mere promises. Video forthcoming.

The short (local) version of this video is here.
Deadly Clear website link is here.
HuffPo's Joel Sucher's coverage is here.

A report released Wednesday by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) Navi Pillay, entitled “The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age”, finds that surveillance practices carried out by the major powers, the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, violate basic principles of international law and are destructive of democratic rights.

Qihoo 360 Technology Co. has found ways to remotely control the Tesla car’s locks, horn, headlights and skylight while the car is in motion, the Beijing-based Internet security company said in a posting on its Sina Weibo account.

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

"What last year's revelations showed us was irrefutable evidence that unencrypted communications on the internet are no longer safe. Any communications should be encrypted by default," he said.

The response of professional bodies has so far been patchy.

A minister at the Home Office in London, James Brokenshire, said during a Commons debate about a new surveillance bill on Tuesday that a code of practice to protect legal professional privilege and others requiring professional secrecy was under review.

NSA Spies On Americans, Then Passes Around Their Nude Pictures and Videos

Edward Snowden just told the Guardian:

Snowden …. Made a startling claim that a culture exists within the NSA in which,during surveillance, nude photographs picked up of people in “sexually compromising” situations are routinely passed around.

NSA employees have also been caught using their mass surveillance powers to spy on love interests, such as girlfriends, obsessions or former wives … and to eavesdrop on American soldiers’ intimate conversations with their wives back home.

Stepping into a fierce debate over digital privacy rights, the U.N. human rights office says it has strong evidence of a growing complicity among private companies in government spying. It says governments around the world are using both legal and covert methods to access private content and metadata, amounting to "de facto coercion" of companies.

Nicholas West
Activist Post

The UK is probably the only place that surpasses New York's "Ring of Steel" for bringing a full-spectrum Big Brother surveillance state to reality. As far back as 2006, even the BBC reported that fears of a "surveillance society" already had taken effect as, at the time, there was 1 CCTV camera for every 14 people. It's now 1 for every 11, which is 5.9 million total cameras.

As the pace of facial recognition technology increases, as well as advances in artificial intelligence algorithms, the two are merging to provide police with easier and quicker access to matching all of the images from those millions of cameras, which are now stored in databases.

British police are ready to roll-out the latest technology called NeoFace which claims the ability to positively identify criminals in a matter of seconds. And it's not just Britain that is putting such systems into effect...

Israel’s Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer received fierce backlash on Thursday as he defended his country’s Operation Protective Edge offensive on Gaza during a Twitter Q&A.

According to the latest Pew Research polling on the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Americans still heavily lean toward sympathizing with Israel. Yet Dermer urged those who oppose Israel's military actions to ask him any questions so he could clarify his government's position. So they did, but the result was probably not the one that Dermer expected.

Nicholas West
Activist Post

The massive investment in neuroscience undertaken by the U.S. BRAIN project and its sister initiative the Human Brain Project is increasingly taking a turn toward the examination of mental health. In fact, hundreds of European scientists working on the project are threatening a boycott because of this direction. In their view, the initial directive was to be more focused on repairing organic injuries and disorders such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and physical brain damage sustained in accidents. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder would be one area that might involve the military.

However, there is a disturbing trend developing in law enforcement and medicine to use what has been learned about the human brain in order to adopt pre-crime systems and predictive behavior technology.

But could a brain scan become standard procedure to see which troops might be inclined to commit insider attacks?..

But then there's the propaganda machine.

Microsoft is cutting 18,000 jobs, including 12,500 associated with the Nokia handset and services business it acquired earlier this year.

The German Chaos Computer Club said Wednesday that it has added to its legal complaint about U.S. spying on German citizens evidence that the NSA allegedly snooped on at least one of its Tor servers.

The CCC filed a complaint with Germany’s federal prosecutor, Harald Range, in February, demanding an investigation into the German government’s alleged involvement in the U.S. National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of German citizens.

However, while Range started an investigation into the alleged tapping of Merkel’s phone by the NSA in June, he said there wasn’t enough evidence to start a similar investigation into the widely reported mass surveillance of German citizens.

The CCC hopes that new publications exposing data collection explicitly targeting servers that are used to connect to The Onion Router (Tor) network, a network that encrypts data traffic through random servers in order to obscure users’ identities, will change Range’s mind.

A subversive website has been launched to keep track of news and other webpages Google has “censored” from the search engine’s index, following the European Court of Justice’s controversial Right to be Forgotten ruling.

The tech giant has reportedly been inundated with 70,000 requests to remove sensitive information from its search results in the aftermath of the ECJ’s decision. While this data may be accurate, it is considered “irrelevant” and possibly defamatory under the EU policy shift.

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) is using data analysis to identify children and families most at risk, and thus inform how time and money is allocated. When the DCF started this project two years ago, the goal was to see fewer dead children -- and that's what the department says is happening while spying on children & families.

A subversive website has been launched to keep track of news and other webpages Google has “censored” from the search engine’s index, following the European Court of Justice’s controversial Right to be Forgotten ruling.

The tech giant has reportedly been inundated with 70,000 requests to remove sensitive information from its search results in the aftermath of the ECJ’s decision. While this data may be accurate, it is considered “irrelevant” and possibly defamatory under the EU policy shift.

Would you like to have a digital identity card that is automatically issued to you at birth? In one European nation, residents use such a card when they go to the hospital, when they do their banking, when they go shopping and even when they vote. This card has become so popular that this particular European country actually plans to start issuing them to millions of non-citizens all over the planet who request them. Never heard about this? Neither had I before this week. The Economist, a well-known mouthpiece for the global elite, is calling for the entire planet to adopt this “national identification system” that the little nation of Estonia has adopted. The Economist is touting all of the “benefits” of a “national identification card”, but are there dangers as well? Could adopting such a system potentially open the door for greater government tyranny than we have ever known before?

The new documentary film Mobilize warns of the health dangers from cell phone radiation. Now a new study in the journal Pediatrics shows that there are less-predictable health risks from using smartphones, tablets and laptops, including rashes from the frequently used metal, nickel.

Who, or what, is NightHunter? And what do they — or it — want? Security researchers discovered last week that for the past five years, a mysterious group has been stealing user credentials from Facebook, Dropbox, Skype, Amazon, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, the Indian Web portal Rediff and several banks. Dubbed NightHunter, the campaign appears to have amassed an enormous database of stolen information.

...

NightHunter's preferred method of infecting target computers appears to be via phishing emails, Navaraj says. These emails are sent to personnel in the finance, sales or HR departments of all sorts of large companies and organizations, and bear .doc, .zip or .rar attachments, sometimes with fake IDM or 7zip installers bundled in.

Governments on every continent are hiding an increasing reliance on private companies to snoop on citizens’ digital lives, the U.N. human rights office said Wednesday.

Stepping into a fierce debate over digital privacy rights, the U.N. office says it has strong evidence of a growing complicity among private companies in government spying. It says governments around the world are using both the law and covert methods to access private content and metadata.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the lack of transparency and tactics extend to governments’ ”de facto coercion of companies to gain broad access to information and data on citizens without them knowing.”

LAWYERS VOW TO APPEAL CASE AGAINST WIKILEAKS FOUNDER

Every day the boundaries of government manipulation of social media are being redrawn as new revelations come to light on the Internet.

Michael Rivero has been saying this for years, now here's more proof:

In a campaign to improve its image abroad, the Israeli government plans to provide scholarships to hundreds of students at its seven universities in exchange for their making pro-Israel Facebook posts and tweets to foreign audiences.

Newly-released documents from Edward Snowden show that the British spy agency GCHQ has developed numerous offensive digital tools.

But what exactly are they doing with these dirty tricks?

We think it’s important to think through the specific possibilities, in order to gain an understanding of how pernicious these manipulations can be.

Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old American who allegedly created the online black marketplace Silk Road, was unsuccessful last week in convincing a federal judge that he is not the notorious hacker Dread Pirate Roberts and did not conspire to deal illegal narcotics and launder money, sparking concern among privacy advocates that Internet freedoms may be nearing an end.

Digital rights advocates argue that Ulbricht failing to fight charges such as narcotics trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering, and criminal enterprise engagement for his alleged role in setting up Silk Road, will be used by lawmakers and intelligence officials as evidence that there is a need to create legislation to eliminate the “dark side” of the Internet, which has become a breeding ground for illegal activity.

Waking Times

A woman was trying to apply for a job at a major retailer. She had to fill out an online form that prompted her to create a username and password, and then enter personal information down to the last four digits of her Social Security number.“How do you know if it’s real?” she asked me, already agitated because her computer session was about to time out. The last time she tried to do something like this, she ended up on some sort of scam website.As a librarian, I talk with people all the time who are uncertain about who and what to trust online. Teaching information literacy, whether in a classroom or one-on-one, is a big part of what we do, and knowing how to use the Internet safely is an ever more important skill given the extent to which online platforms are part of our lives.

Comcast didn’t earn its reputation as America’s Worst Company overnight — it took years and years of hard work. From offering customers ridiculously overpriced bundle packages, to having the highest fees among any of its competitors, to offering some of the absolute worst customer service of any company in the United States, Comcast has toiled away tirelessly to perfect its craft of angering its own customers, who have little choice but to stick with the cable giant due to the sorry state of America’s home broadband market.

In an open letter to the full House of Commons, 15 experts in technology law express concern at the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers bill (Drip) which, they say, will increase government access to communications data and content and are being unnecessarily rushed through Parliament.

"The legislation goes far beyond simply authorising data retention in the UK," the letter states. "In fact, Drip attempts to extend the territorial reach of the British interception powers, expanding the UK’s ability to mandate the interception of communications content across the globe. It introduces powers that are not only completely novel in the United Kingdom, they are some of the first of their kind globally."

The academics, who include Professor Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute, Professor Lilian Edwards of the University of Strathclyde, Dr Subhajit Basu of the University of Leeds and legal expert Julia Powles of Cambridge University.

We have all run into them. All over the Internet, there are horrible trolls that seem to delight in making life miserable for other people. But the worst trolls of all are the government trolls. And thanks to Edward Snowden, we now have some startling new evidence of what really goes on behind the scenes. According to newly revealed documents, British spy agency GCHQ is manipulating online discussions, infiltrating the computers of specific targets, purposely destroying reputations, altering the results of online polls, and using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for propaganda and espionage purposes. If people don’t start getting outraged about this now, the governments of the western world are going to see it as a green light to do even more. Eventually, it might get so bad that we won’t be able to trust much of anything that we see on the Internet.

With Fire TV, Amazon may have already displaced Google as the internet company that knows more about your psyche than anyone else. And Amazon is the company that's now building the CIA's new cloud computing center.

Gives you something to ponder, doesn't it?

Like more than a billion other people on the planet, Eric Aldaz had a Facebook profile. What made Aldaz’s profile different from most is that he was unable to post to it himself: he didn’t hold the login credentials or even have any kind of access to the Internet. He is an inmate of the New Mexico Corrections Department (NMCD) and his family maintained the page on his behalf.

Is there anybody...out there?

I promise I'm a real person asking this question and typing this article...but beyond that, I can't promise much else about anything you or I see on the Internet.

This article on ZDNet, "GCHQ's dark arts: Leaked documents reveal online manipulation, Facebook, YouTube snooping," confirms — beyond a shadow of any possible doubt — that a barrage of government propaganda, fakery and lies are being foisted on the online public.

In other words, in case you weren't entirely sure before, it has been confirmed that governments are actively manipulating everything you see/do online. Or, at least they can if they feel like it, at any moment and for any reason.

The word “historic” gets tossed around a lot, but let’s face it: Not everything is worthy of the term. But this has been a truly historic week in the fight to save the Internet. And it’s barely begun.

Ever since a federal court struck down the FCC’s old Internet rules in January, millions of people have spoken out about the importance of preserving Net Neutrality. Chairman Tom Wheeler’s pay-to-play plan, which would allow rampant discrimination online, has generated a bigger public response than any other proposal in the agency’s history.

The Department of Homeland Security’s militarized invasion of a small town in Illinois was not in response to a gang of dangerous drug dealers or an armed assailant, but in order to bust a single man accused of downloading indecent images to his home computer.

German politicians are considering a return to using manual typewriters for sensitive documents in the wake of the US surveillance scandal.
The head of the Bundestag's parliamentary inquiry into NSA activity in Germany said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV programme that he and his colleagues were seriously thinking of ditching email completely.

A couple months ago, a New York judge ruled that US search warrants applied to digital information even if they were stored overseas. The decision came about as part of an effort to dig up a Microsoft user's account information stored on a server in Dublin, Ireland.

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted 12-3 last week in favor of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) of 2014, new legislation that massively expands the data-gathering powers of the US security, intelligence and military bureaucracies, by allowing “voluntary” information sharing between private companies and the government.

The Intelligence Committee “marked up” the bill in two secret sessions closed to the public. The bill, which was drafted by Senators Saxby Chambliss (Republican, Georgia) and Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California), is now set to go before the chamber as a whole.

As a matter of faith, some people believe that God can see and hear everything. But as a matter of fact, the U.S. government now has the kind of surveillance powers formerly attributed only to a supreme being.

Top “national security” officials in Washington now have the determination and tech prowess to keep tabs on billions of people. No one elected Uncle Sam to play God. But a dire shortage of democratic constraints has enabled the U.S. surveillance state to keep expanding with steely resolve.

But nonetheless, a close, careful examination of the Drip bill's various clauses and sub-clauses reveals alarming consequences for the average Joe, namely these:

? You'll have to shout all your Google searches aloud while you type them.

Under the bill, any citizen conducting a Google search will be required to simultaneously bellow every word they type at the top of their voice, loud enough for the neighbours to hear. Any neighbour who supplies the authorities with information leading to a conviction automatically wins an iPad Air. It's the cheapest, most comprehensive mass surveillance system ever designed.

? Every child born after August 2014 will, at birth, have one of its parents replaced by an undercover police officer.

The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has developed sophisticated tools to manipulate online polls, spam targets with SMS messages, track people by impersonating spammers and monitor social media postings, according to newly-published documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents – which were published on First Look Media with accompanying analysis from Glenn Greenwald – disclose a range of GCHQ "effects" programs aimed at tracking targets, spreading information, and manipulating online debates and statistics.

The disclosure comes the day before the UK parliament is due to begin up to three days' debate on emergency legislation governing British surveillance capabilities. With cross-party support the bill is expected to be voted through this week.

The UK's spy agency has developed a number of crafty tools to monitor and comb the web, planting false information when necessary, Glenn Greenwald said while disclosing a fresh batch of Snowden's files.

...

Some of the tools use the same methods that the US and UK have prosecuted online activists for, including “distributed denial of service” attacks and “call bombing.”

...

The tools give the Cheltenham spies the ability to actively monitor Skype calls and messaging in real time, raising the same old questions about the reliability of Skype’s encryption or whether Microsoft is in fact cooperating with spy agencies.

U.S. government standards for software may enable spying by the National Security Agency through widely used coding formulas that should be jettisoned, some of the country’s top independent experts concluded in papers released on Monday.

Such mathematical formulas, or curves, are an arcane but essential part of most technology that prevents interception and hacking, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been legally required to consult with the NSA’s defensive experts in approving them and other cryptography standards.

But NIST’s relationship with the spy agency came under fire in September after reports based on documents from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pointed to one formula in particular as a Trojan horse for the NSA.

US says global reach needed to gut "fraudsters," "hackers," and "drug dealers."

It is laughable that the NSA claims it cares about someone’s privacy considering that the spy agency shows absolutely no respect for the privacy of millions of Americans it monitors every day.

Is the internet turning into BIG BROTHER? Everything we read, watch and buy online will be controlled by government by 2025, claim expert

A day before Palestinian teenagerMuhammad Abu Khudair was kidnapped and burned alive allegedly by six Israeli Jewish youths, Israeli lawmaker Ayelet Shaked published on Facebook a call for genocide of the Palestinians.

On July 20, 2013, agents of the U.K. government entered The Guardian newsroom in London and compelled them to physically destroy the computers they were using to report on the Edward Snowden archive. The Guardian reported this a month later after my partner, David Miranda, was detained at Heathrow Airport for 11 hours under a British terrorism law and had all of his electronic equipment seized. At the time, the Obama administration — while admitting that it was told in advance of the Heathrow detention — pretended that it knew nothing about the forced laptop destruction and would never approve of such attacks on press freedom.

NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has denounced the UK’s emergency surveillance bill, criticizing its heightened powers of intrusion along with the distinct lack of public debate it encompassed.

During an exclusive interview in Moscow with the Guardian, the whistleblower suggested it was highly unusual for a state to process legislation so hastily other than at a time of acutely endangered national security.

About 16 months ago, a Florida-based biofuel company called Algenol noticed that its Internet service was slowing down. In checking that out, Jack Voth, Algenol’s information technology chief, stumbled on something odd: a telnet connection to its videoconference camera from an Internet Protocol address in China, a country where Algenol has never sought to do business.

The NSA whistleblower questions the need for emergency legislation in an exclusive Guardian interview, saying the move mirrors a hastily introduced US law in 2007, and asks whether it would 'really be so costly' to take time to debate the issue

Watch the full interview on Thursday 17 July 2014

The U.S. Secret Service is advising the hospitality industry to inspect computers made available to guests in hotel business centers, warning that crooks have been compromising hotel business center PCs with keystroke-logging malware in a bid to steal personal and financial data from guests.

The radical and violent anti-Palestinian climate in Israel is not divorced from reality.

The NSA whistleblower questions the need for emergency legislation in an exclusive Guardian interview,

In the 1990s and 2000s, the limitation was technical. The so-called "deep web" and "dark Internet" -- which sound shady and mysterious, but simply refer to web sites inaccessible by conventional means -- have always existed.

Many parts of the Internet are hard to index, or are blocked from being indexed by their owners.

Companies like Google have worked hard to surface and bring light to the "deep, dark" recesses of the global web on a technical level.

Nicholas West
Activist Post

The move to give everyone a global unique ID that can be verified across nearly all human activity has been in the works for some time. As you can see by the image at the right, defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, is now a global leader in biometric identification. Comforting.

Naturally, the fear of identity theft and cyber-banking crime of all stripes has been the sales pitch to accept identity tech such as facial recognition, iris scans, and fingerprinting, as well as their attendant databases...

Experts have warned that the only way to completely delete data is to "destroy your phone".

Most smartphones come with a "factory reset" option, which is designed to wipe and reset the device, returning it to its original system state.

However, Avast has discovered that some older smartphones only erase the indexing of the data and not the data itself, which means pictures, emails and text messages can be recovered relatively easily by using standard forensic tools that anyone can buy and download.

The company claims that of 40,000 stored photos extracted from 20 phones purchased from eBay, more than 750 were of women in various stages of undress, along with 250 selfies of "what appears to be the previous owner's manhood".

There was an additional 1,500 family photos of children, 1,000 Google searches, 750 emails and text messages and 250 contact names and email addresses.

A new cybersecurity bill poses serious threats to our privacy, gives the government extraordinary powers to silence potential whistleblowers, and exempts these dangerous new powers from transparency laws.

One of the most underrated benefits of Edward Snowden's leaks was how they forced the US Congress to shelve the dangerous, privacy-destroying legislation– then known as Cispa – that so many politicians had been so eager to pass under the guise of "cybersecurity". Now a version of the bill is back, and apparently its authors want to keep you in the dark about it for as long as possible.

Now it's called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa), and it is a nightmare for civil liberties. Indeed, it's unclear how this kind of law would even improve cybersecurity. The bill was marked up and modified by the Senate intelligence committee in complete secrecy this week, and only afterward was the public allowed to see many of the provisions passed under its name.

Over half a million Americans have shared their feelings on net neutrality with the FCC as the commission ponders new rules that could drastically reshape the internet. Earlier this afternoon, Chairman Tom Wheeler reported that the FCC has so far received around 647,000 comments as the July 15th deadline for initial feedback approaches.

Jon Rappoport
Activist Post

Well, there are several wars inside the war in Afghanistan. Ensuring the flow of opium to the world. Having US bases close to Russia. Protecting and gobbling up vast mineral reserves. Keeping alive the proposed oil pipeline.

Still another war is quite different. It’s a test program, through which the US Armed Forces is trying to obtain a biometric record of every human living in Afghanistan.

It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots, to realize the program is applicable to other countries, including the US and its ubiquitous Surveillance State...

When Google released its web form on May 30, for instance, it received about 12,000 requests within the first 24 hours. Microsoft is thought to have received fewer than 20 requests that day.

Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the most law-abiding person would eventually protest this treatment. In fact—they have.

provides real-time tweets when anonymous edits of Wikipedia pages

After months of waiting, a Ninth Circuit panel has finally responded to Google's plea, supported by public interest groups (including EFF), journalists, librarians, other service providers, and law professors, to reconsider its disastrous opinion in the case of Garcia v. Google. The good news is that we managed to get the panel to revisit its opinion. The bad news is that it essentially doubled down.

Soundcloud caused controversy recently by letting Universal Records delete content and now it's becoming clear why

Journalists and historians argue the White House has been more secret than previous occupants -- Advancements in technology have fueled this White House’s obsession with controlling the message.

NEW DOCUMENTS SEEM TO BETRAY STATEMENTS ABOUT INCIDENT WHERE COMPUTERS WERE SMASHED BY INTELLIGENCE AGENTS

Facebook is spying on your mom, your relationships and your political views

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

General Keith Alexander, the then director of the NSA, was briefed that the Guardian was prepared to make a largely symbolic act of destroying documents from Edward Snowden last July, new documents reveal.

The revelation that Alexander and Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, were advised on the Guardian's destruction of several hard disks and laptops contrasts markedly with public White House statements that distanced the US from the decision.

White House and NSA emails obtained by Associated Press under freedom of information legislation demonstrate how pleased Alexander and his colleagues were with the developments. At times the correspondence takes a celebratory tone, with one official describing the anticipated destruction as "good news".

It is for the children

Last week, Microsoft completed a legal attack on two large and quite nasty botnets by obtaining a court order transferring 23 domain names to Microsoft’s control. The botnets went down and the Internet was a better place for it. But in doing so, Microsoft also took out the world’s largest dynamic DNS provider using a dangerous legal theory and without any prior notice to Vitalwerks Internet Solutions—the company that runs No-IP.com—or to the millions of innocent users who rely on No-IP.com every day.

A week ago, the US government body on which I sit, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), issued its latest report. President Obama appointed us, subject to Senate confirmation, but we are a completely independent body. As someone who has spent the past 19 years advocating for civil liberties, I accepted a part-time seat on the board, hoping to meld my outsider perspective with the insights afforded by access to classified details about the intelligence community’s actions.

A week ago, the US government body on which I sit, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), issued its latest report. President Obama appointed us, subject to Senate confirmation, but we are a completely independent body. As someone who has spent the past 19 years advocating for civil liberties, I accepted a part-time seat on the board, hoping to meld my outsider perspective with the insights afforded by access to classified details about the intelligence community's actions.

Over 65 tech companies, open Internet advocates and other organizations released two open letters to negotiators of the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) on Wednesday, expressing their concern that the trade deal's approval will force websites to censor content and block Internet users.

NEW EDWARD SNOWDEN DOCUMENTS SHOW RIDICULOUS DATA COLLECTING OBSESSION

FOLLOWING INTERCEPT REPORT, RIGHTS GROUPS AND MUSLIM-AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS SLAM NSA TARGETING

As David Cameron secured backing from all three major political parties today to introduce emergency legislation next week that will allow Internet and phone companies to continue keeping of customer metadata, privacy experts have branded the move as illegal.

The new law comes as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled existing powers were unlawful.

What has the government got to hide? The latest attempt to bring in new surveillance powers, bypassing proper debate and consultation, cannot help but arouse suspicion, in a field where trust is already at a low.

But the message is horribly muddled: the new legislation is apparently in response to a European Court of Justice ruling which found Britain’s current data retention powers illegal, yet Mrs May promises that somehow the status quo will be maintained.

Mike Harris, campaign director for the Don’t Spy On Us coalition of civil liberties group, told me: “The ECJ has said the status quo is illegal, so for Theresa May to claim the government is maintaining the status quo is to say it is maintaining laws that breach human rights. That’s not good enough.”

Harris pointed out that such a muddle would mean any incoming government in 2015 would likely be forced to deal with challenges to the law both at the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.

U.S.-based mobile phone carrier T-Mobile is the subject of a new federal lawsuit alleging fraudulent charges on customers' bills. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says T-Mobile unlawfully charged wireless subscribers bogus fees for services they never signed up for, and then deceptively tried to hide these charges on their bills, pocketing millions of dollars in the process.

According to the Associated Press, federal regulators had been unsuccessful in negotiating with T-Mobile prior to filing the suit, which accuses the nation's third-largest wireless carrier of scamming customers. Recurrent charges for so-called "premium" services like horoscope texts and funky ringtones were quietly embedded within customers' bills, alleges the agency, with no clear indication of their presence.

Who is the true patriot, Hillary Clinton or Edward Snowden? The question comes up because Clinton has gone all out in attacking Snowden as a means of burnishing her hawkish credentials, eliciting Glenn Greenwald’s comment that she is “like a neocon, practically.”

On Friday in England, Clinton boasted that two years ago she had favored a proposal by a top British general to train 100,000 “moderate” rebels to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria, but President Obama had turned her down. The American Thatcher? In that same interview with The Guardian she also managed to get in yet another shot against Snowden for taking refuge in Russia “apparently under Putin’s protection,” unless, she taunted, “he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable.”

The emergency Data Retention and Investigation Powers Bill will be rushed onto the statute book next week, after cross-party talks between Mr Cameron, his Lib Dem deputy Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband.

But critics condemned the 'stitch-up' which will see the laws 'railroaded' through Parliament with little scrutiny.

...

Senior Labour MP Tom Watson condemned the way the laws were being rushed without giving Parliament chance to scrutinise it properly.

‘The government were aware of this European Court of Justice ruling six weeks ago and what we are seeing now is they are railroading through legislation,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

‘No-one in civic society has got a chance to form a view on this. It’s a stitch-up.

‘It is a secret deal between the three parties and it will go through next week as they have done this deal.’

The government will announce that it is rushing through emergency legislation underpinning the state's right to keep personal data held by internet and phone companies.

Labour is expected to accept the bill on the basis that it will simply restore what the government believed to be the law before the European Court of Justice ruled in April that an EU directive on privacy retention had over-reached its powers and amounted to an invasion of privacy.

But, as part of the deal, the opposition has won agreement that ministers will launch a review of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act passed in 2000. The act is seen as the source of excessive surveillance by the security services.

It is likely that the legislation will be passed through the Commons next week, but the Labour backbench MP Tom Watson said it would be an outrage for such a fundamental potential threat to civil liberties to be announced to the Commons on Thursday when few MPs are likely to be present.

Emergency legislation to allow surveillance of phone calls, text messages and internet usage is a "stitch-up" that is going ahead without proper scrutiny, civil liberties campaigners have said.

The government claims the laws are needed to catch terrorists but the Open Rights Group condemned the plans that would require internet service providers and telecoms companies to retain communications records.

Jim Killock, its executive director, said there was "no legal basis for making internet service providers retain our data so it is using the threat of terrorism as an excuse for getting this law passed".

Ministers say the legislation is necessary because the European court of justice struck down the data retention directive for breaching the rights to privacy and protection of personal data.