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If you thought warrantless wiretapping by our own intelligence community was bad enough, Reuters reports that documents released by NSA whistleblower and GAP client Edward Snowden show Canada has “its own globe-spanning Internet surveillance”...
Laura Poitras' critically-acclaimed documentary about the CIA whistleblower is up for the Best Documentary award.
Following revelations about the government’s role in collecting telephone metadata last year, new documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal intimate details about which Internet communications the NSA can – and can’t – monitor.
Anonymity is deeply tied to the European values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Concealing one’s identity can enable freedom (as in the anonymity of speech), support equality (e.g. in anonymous application procedures), and provide the basis for non-reciprocal relationships as expressed in the value of brotherhood (e.g. asking a stranger for directions). It is capable of traversing cultural differences and is essential for many contemporary forms of sharing, communality and collaboration (e.g. commons based peer production such as Wikipedia entries and open-source software). However, it is also contested and, indeed, under threat: networked databases, biometric identification and surveillance technologies such as CCTV are matched by discourses that condemn anonymity and celebrate transparency and openness. Legal, technological and moral imperatives towards transparency contribute to a process in which anonymity is increasingly under attack. As a consequence, the ‘end of anonymity’ has been declared in public discourses, not only since the revelations of Edward Snowden. However, this claim deserves to be scrutinised a bit further.
These books are crucial background to the debate over Edward Snowden.
DRIVING THE DAY: THE FTC TAKES ON BIG DATA — The Federal Trade Commission kicks off a workshop on Big Data and discrimination this morning at 9 a.m. The daylong event is aimed at taking a deeper dive into how giant data sets can affect low-income and underserved consumers, especially in light of the White House's report on the subject, which raised concerns that the technology could be used to "digitally redefine unwanted groups" and "enable new forms of discrimination." Chairwoman Edith Ramirez will give the first keynote, and look for her to once again emphasize her concerns with Big Data. "As businesses segment consumers for the purpose of marketing products, setting prices, and tailoring customer service, the worry is that existing disparities will be exacerbated," she'll say, per prepared remarks.
A report in the Swiss weekend paper Sonntagszeitung states that Snowden would not be extradited to the USA for "politically motivated" reasons if he were to attend hearings on illegal NSA spying.
Earlier this morning, Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of freshly leaked classified documents in his publication The Intercept which have furthered indicted the NSA in a series of scandals fueled by illegal domestic surveillance on U.S citizens.
In his latest interview, this time with the Guardian, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden stressed again that his continued stay in Russia is no indication of allegiance nor subterfuge with the Kremlin. Rather, he said, Russia is a place of greater safety while the US refuses to let him bring a public interest defense to court against the Espionage Act charges he faces in America.
Edward Snowden, as we all now know, was another kind of NSA technical wizard, whose job entailed teaching agents how to shield their digital devices from surveillance and designing systems to thwart other countries cyberspying on the United States. Though he was in his twenties and without traditional educational credentials, having neither a college nor a standard high school degree, Snowden’s computer abilities gained him ever-increasing security clearances, even when he was not an employee of the United States government but, rather, a contract worker. This, we’ve learned, was not unusual. As Greenwald reports, the NSA employs twice as many civilian contractors—60,000—as it does agency employees—30,000—many of whom hold “confidential” and “top secret” security clearances.1
Trevor Timm: Encrypted Gmail. Transparency from mobile providers. Maybe even a legal 'revolt' against 'Orwellian' surveillance. But until we get real reform, NSA and Co may survive in the shadows
The Snowden affair turned Greenwald from the humourless Occupy Wall Street version of Richard Littlejohn into that matinée idol of the modern era, the investigative journalist with a big story.
Two new communiqués from the surveillance state this week. Over the weekend, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, came up with another batch of documents released by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, who has told us in a year more truth about the world we live in than our media seem prepared to tell us in the next two decades.
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The US National Security Agency and its arch enemy, whistleblower Edward Snowden, shared a stage yesterday at Harvard University’s Science Center — though not at the same time.
Edward Snowden now accepts donations in Bitcoin for his legal defense fund.
An unhackable technology.
The eBay founder was a mild-mannered Obama supporter looking for a way to spend his time and fortune. The Snowden leaks gave him a cause — and an enemy.
Late on the evening of January 11, 2013, someone sent me an interesting email. It was encrypted, and sent from the sort of anonymous email service that smart people use when they want to hide their identity. Sitting at the kitchen table in the small cottage where I lived in Berkeley with my wife and two cats, I decrypted it.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key says his spy agency doesn't engage in mass surveillance. This is false. If you live in New Zealand, you are being watched.
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden says the NSA was responsible for a 2012 Syrian Internet outage, in a new profile published Wednesday by Wired:
That whole period was very carefully planned and orchestrated. There was no risk of compromise. I could have been screwed, but the fact that transmissions to journalists would be intercepted, that wasn’t possible at all, unless the journalist intentionally passed this to the government.
The other night, I saw George Orwell’s 1984 performed on the London stage. Although crying out for a contemporary interpretation, Orwell’s warning about the future was presented as a period piece: remote, unthreatening. It was as if Edward Snowden had revealed nothing, Big Brother was not now a digital eavesdropper and Orwell himself had never said, “To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.”
Just as the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) was commencing last year, news broke that a young ex-CIA analyst working under contract for the National Security Agency in Hawaii disclosed reams of classified documents to the media. The leak was blasted by the Obama administration as a massive detriment to America’s national security and applauded by civil libertarians as a whistle blown on a secret, statist, and suspicion-less surveillance program.
The concept of network effects, and the lock-in they produce, are both by now fairly well known. Most people understand why Microsoft retains its stranglehold on the desktop and word processing formats, despite the availability of equivalent free alternatives like GNU/Linux and LibreOffice, just as Facebook dominates the social networking sphere. A fascinating new paper by Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, uses the idea of network effects and related areas to explore some of the deeper implications of Snowden's revelations about the modern world of surveillance (pdf).
End Global Surveillance and Protect the Free Internet
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