Kevin Samson
Activist Post

Also known as "telepresence," the use of holograms is on the rise. Instead of Princess Leia, the last 5 years have ushered in real-world holograms that have been used to resurrect dead musicians, to create new musical stars in Japan, and and to transport political analysts into the studio of their choice.

Bloomberg Businessweek is reporting that the company which created a hologram for the successful campaign of India's prime minister is gearing up to do the same for the coming 2016 U.S. elections:

"Several months after Narendra Modi rode a hologram-enhanced wave to electoral success in India, the groundwork is being laid to create virtual versions of Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and anyone else who wants to campaign for office via hologram." ...

But the situation over in Spain just got even more ridiculous. Julio Alonso has the details, in which it appears that the lower house of the Spanish legislature has approved a very, very dangerous bill that creates a brand new inalienable right for news publishers to be paid for, via compulsory licenses, any "electronic news aggregation system," which is broadly defined as anyone who shares more than just anchor text with a link. A short summary? You'll have to pay up

IBM continues its epic push to entrench Watson in applications — including consumer-facing applications with customer USAA, which provides financial services to U.S. military personnel and their families. The new IBM Watson Engagement Advisor aims to help service people make the transition from military to civilian live, IBM said.

Seizing communications of American citizens can only be done with a warrant -- Snowden’s leaks continue to help build the EFF’s case against the NSA. Its lawsuit against the intelligence agency (filed on behalf of several plaintiffs, Carolyn Jewel being named first) was filed in 2008, but has gained significant traction over the past twelve months.

Three Israeli defense contractors responsible for building the “Iron Dome” missile shield currently protecting Israel from a barrage of rocket attacks were compromised by hackers and robbed of huge quantities of sensitive documents pertaining to the shield technology, KrebsOnSecurity has learned.

The never-before publicized intrusions, which occurred between 2011 and 2012, illustrate the continued challenges that defense contractors and other companies face in deterring organized cyber adversaries and preventing the theft of proprietary information.

According to Columbia, Md.-based threat intelligence firm Cyber Engineering Services Inc. (CyberESI), between Oct. 10, 2011 and August 13, 2012, attackers thought to be operating out of China hacked into the corporate networks of three top Israeli defense technology companies, including Elisra Group, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Dozens of journalists and attorneys surveyed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch for a new report say that the United States government’s surveillance operations are eroding their ability to work.

The results of the collaborative effort between the ACLU and HRW was published on Monday this week and contains a number of chilling accounts from Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and acclaimed attorneys alike who say the US government’s spy programs have put a damper on their professions.

FAN Site

SOPA and PIPA are dead, but the Obama administration is still determined to make illicit movie and streaming a felony.

Now, according to tax documents released this week, we learn that the Tor Project received over $1.8m from the US government in 2013. Of that, $256,900 came directly from the State Department, with an additional $555, 413 coming from Internews Network, which the documents confirm as a “pass-through” organization for State Department money.

Google continues to expand its use of legal-but-questionable tax shenanigans as a way to minimize its overseas tax burden.

According to Irish media reports Friday, in 2013 Google Ireland Limited paid an effective tax rate of just 0.16 percent on €17 billion ($22.8 billion) revenue, which came to a mere €27.7 million ($37.2 million). Google paid €11.7 billion in “administrative expenses,” which The Irish Times reports “largely refers to royalties paid to other Google entities, some of which are ultimately controlled from tax havens such as Bermuda.”

The power to “censor history” should not be left in Google’s hands, Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales warned, after the search engine giant revealed it had approved over 90,000 so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ requests. Wales said a European Court ruling allowing people to have links scrubbed from the search engine’s index was “open-ended.” He further slammed the law for being unclear.

Nicholas West
Activist Post

In loco parentis (in the place of a parent) - the legal charge given to educators when you hand over your children to school - might take on a strange new meaning. A 5-year, multi-university project is being led by Yale and includes researchers from MIT, Stanford and the University of Southern California; it is funded to the tune of $10 million by the National Science Foundation, which has fallen under the umbrella of the federal BRAIN neuroscience initiative...

With large segments of our Navy and some Air Force out to sea engaged in a never ending set of war games, designed to keep the ships and planes out of harm’s way of a presumed EMP attack, NOTHING is being done by this administration to protect against a cataclysmic EMP attack.

Federal authorities in the United States have unsealed their fourth set of charges in nine months against Lauri Love, a 29-year-old British man accused of hacking US government and private sector websites.

On Thursday this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia has indicted Love on new charges of conspiracy, causing damage to a protected computer, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft; he faces a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison if found guilty of the latest counts.

Capitol computers have been barred from modifying Wikipedia for 10 days, due to “persistent disruptive editing.” The legislative body was told by Wikipedia administrators that it is welcome to make “useful contributions” once the ban expires.

“You have been blocked from editing for a period of 10 days for persistent disruptive editing, as you did at Mediaite. Once the block has expired, you are welcome to make useful contributions,” a Wikipedia message said.

The power to “censor history” should not be left in Google’s hands, Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales warned, after the search engine giant revealed it had approved over 90,000 so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ requests.
Wales said a European Court ruling allowing people to have links scrubbed from the search engine’s index was “open-ended.” He further slammed the law for being unclear.

John Carlin, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, U.S. Dept. of Justice, announced Thursday that Al Qaeda terrorists may be planning an attack on infrastructure within the U.S. to 9/11 proportions and that targets may include banking systems and power grids.

EFF's position on net neutrality simply calls for all data that travels over the Internet to be treated equally. This means that we oppose ISPs blocking content based on its source or destination, or discriminating against certain applications (such as BitTorrent), or imposing special access fees that would make it harder for small websites to reach their users. We havecalled for the FCC to assume firm legal authority to protect the neutrality of the net from these sorts of abuses, while explicitly forbearing from going any further to regulate the Internet.

IN OUR EMERGENT TECHNOCRACY WE ARE SUBMERGED IN A SEA OF KNOWLEDGE
Modern wonders reach their apex in the readily available stores of knowledge at anyone’s fingertips.

In the latest revelation of unconstitutional spying on US citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA), former State Department employee John Napier Tye published his account of ongoing violations of privacy under cover of a legal fig leaf known as Executive Order 12333.

Last week the Washington Post published Tye’s lengthy criticism of the Obama administration under the title “Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans.” The editorial underscores both the immense scope of illegal spying by an unaccountable military-intelligence apparatus and the sham character of the official “reform.”

Kevin Samson
Activist Post

Our Internet-driven world filled with interconnected smart gadgets and computing applications is making us vulnerable to potentially life-changing hacks and tracking. Not only are modern cars open to being hacked, but also boats, planes, and GPS-driven munitions and unmanned vehicles.

So, perhaps you think you'll ditch the modern car, get rid of the smartphone, limit travel and hunker down safe and cozy in your home? Well, unfortunately, if your house is filled with modern appliances and electronics, it could potentially open you up for a nightmare experience. This is the subject of a new European study that will be presented at the ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks in Oxford...

In July 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron announced the major UK internet service providers (ISPs) had agreed to offer "unavoidable choice" parental control filters, which block legal pornography and other adult subjects "by default".

New subscribers are offered the filter at the point of sign-up, and must actively choose to disable the parental control service.

However, the Ofcom report found users had overwhelmingly opted-out of the filter.

Of the four main ISPs, all of whom now offer a filter at the point of sign-up, TalkTalk was the only company to persuade more than 10% of people to subscribe.

Wikipedia administrators have imposed a ban on page edits from computers at the US House of Representatives, following "persistent disruptive editing".

The 10-day block comes after anonymous changes were made to entries on politicians and businesses, as well as events like the Kennedy assassination.

The biography of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was edited to say that he was an "alien lizard".

One staffer said they were being banned for the "actions of two or three".

Edits from computers using the IP address belonging to the House of Representatives have been banned before, following similar acts of vandalism.

Activist Post

In a referendum that could ultimately have national implications, Missouri voters will go to the polls Aug. 5 with the opportunity to add protection for electronic data and communications to their state constitution.

Amendment 9 would give “electronic data and communications” the same state constitutional protections as “persons, homes, papers and effects.” This would eliminate any constitutional ambiguity surrounding electronic data and specifically bar state agencies from accessing it without a warrant in most cases...

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Big retailers, including Amazon, have been lobbying long and hard for it, and now the Internet sales tax is back after being quietly reintroduced in the US Senate last week.

The Marketplace and Internet Tax Fairness Act would force customers to pay sales taxes for online purchases from out-of-state online merchants, and it forces online retailers to collect and remit separately sales taxes to all US territories...

The Federal Communications Commission received more than 1 million public comments on the issue of net neutrality during a five-month commenting period that ended Friday.

It's the biggest public response the FCC has ever gotten on a policy matter in such a short period, and the second most commented-upon FCC issue, period. It ranks just behind the 1.4 million complaints received after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, which isn't a direct comparison because those were spontaneous comments unrelated to a rule-making matter.

Students at the IDC Herzliya “war room,” seen here in a screenshot, focus on posting propaganda justifying Israel’s attack on Gaza on Facebook.

As the death toll from Israel’s savage bombardment of Gaza continues to climb, Israel has once again turned to students to sell the slaughter online.

“Although they haven’t been called up to the army yet, they’ve decided to enlist in a civilian mission that is no less important – Israeli propaganda [hasbara],” Ynet’s Hebrew edition reported about a massive initiative organized by the Israeli student union branch at theInterdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC Herzliya), a prestigious private university.

A talk elaborating on how to break Tor will not be pushing through at the Black Hat security conference scheduled next month.

Based on a study done by Carnegie Mellon University researchers Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, the talk was supposed to discuss how the Tor network can be broken without breaking the bank. According to the abstract that was published on the Black Hat website prior to the cancellation, it was possible for a "determined adversary" to unlock the identities of thousands of Tor users and services within the network for less than $3,000.

The White House is tracking visitors to its website, despite proudly promising that WhiteHouse.gov complies with federal privacy laws and does not use cookies. The AddThis tracker is present on every page on the site, according to EFF.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) studied the White House site for the new type of online tracking system after a new report byProPublica found that the website contained the secretive spyware.

It seems we expect our politicians to be more loyal to Israel than Israel’s own prime ministers.

David Ward, a member of the British parliament for the Lib Dem party, which is part of the ruling coalition, has upset his bosses with a tweet.

In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online.

Apple has been accused of intentionally installing security backdoors in some 600 million iOS devices that offer surveillance-level access to data including photos, browsing history and GPS locations.

The vulnerabilities were uncovered by security expert Jonathan Zdziarski, who presented an academic paper on the subject at a hacker conference in New York last Friday.

Net Neutrality supporters have filed a record-breaking number of comments on FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan to allow discrimination online.

The vast majority of the 1,067,779 comments slam that proposal — and urge the agency to protect real Net Neutrality.

But does Wheeler care what the public thinks?

All it took yesterday was a single article to trigger off a tidal wave of copycat reports across dozens of sites including the mainstream RT.com. Just to be absolutely clear - Britain HAS NOT decriminalized file-sharing and to suggest otherwise only puts people at unnecessary risk. File-sharing remains ILLEGAL in the UK, guaranteed.

In a sign of the information war taking place alongside the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, the biographical information on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wikipedia page was briefly replaced with a large image of a Palestinian flag Tuesday afternoon.

AP wasn't hacked this time, but the following tweet shows why when constrained by 140 characters, one should be particularly careful with word order.

BREAKING: Dutch military plane carrying bodies from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crash lands in Eindhoven.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 23, 2014

Leading promptly to this:

CLARIFIES: Dutch military plane carrying Malaysia Airlines bodies lands in Eindhoven.

— The Associated Press (@AP) July 23, 2014

As we find ourselves being hurled into this strange future, technology has proven to be a rather fickle beast. Any given technology will serve anyone, good or evil, and without any discrimination. Fortunately, the latest advances in technology have had a very decentralizing effect. Powerful tech is no longer just in the hands of the elite, but is rushing head long into the hands of every day enterprising individuals. Though it may not look like it if you read today's headlines, the power of the individual is growing a little more over the machinations of central control (governments, corporations, etc) every day, and our inventions are leading the way towards a more liberated future. Below are 5 new technologies that are (or soon will be) making the elites cringe.

There might be more to the iPhone than consumers know and these features could be leaking out personal information without permission.

This is according to a presentation done by forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski at New York's Hackers On Planet Earth conference, one of the most creative and diverse hacker events in the globe. Titled "Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices," Zdziarski's talk highlights that a number of undocumented forensic services are installed and running on every iOS device out there and that design omissions on the part of Apple are making the unsolicited collection of data easier.

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.

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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.”

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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.