Edward Snowden

See the following -

NSA's Crypto Betrayal: Good News For Open Source?

Glyn Moody | Computerworld | September 10, 2013

Revelations from documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that GCHQ essentially downloads the entire Internet as it enters and leaves the UK, and stores big chunks of it, was bad enough. But last week we learned that the NSA has intentionally weakened just about every aspect of online encryption [...]. Read More »

Obama Administration Cites 'National Security' More Than Ever To Censor, Deny Records

Jack Gillium and Ted Bridis | Huffington Post | March 17, 2014

The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

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Obama’s Efforts to Control Media Are ‘Most Aggressive’ Since Nixon, Report Says

David Kravets | Wired | October 10, 2013

The President Barack Obama administration has “chilled the flow of information on issues of great public interest,” according to a Thursday report that amounts to an indictment of the president’s campaign pledge of a more open government. Read More »

Patriot Act Architect: No More Spying Unless My NSA Reform Bill Passes

Dustin Volz | Nextgov | February 4, 2014

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner sent another warning shot Tuesday to members of the intelligence community that they risk losing all congressional authority for the National Security Agency's collection of bulk telephone records if his bill restricting the program is not passed. Read More »

Polish NGO To Obama: Mass Surveillance Is Not Freedom

Katitza Rodriguez | Electronic Frontier Foundation | June 3, 2014

...Since October 2013, the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish NGO, has tried to understand the relationship between the Polish and United States’ secret service organizations. Panoptykon believes that the Polish government, by accepting mass and pre-emptive surveillance, is reverting back to the much contested practices of the former, authoritarian regime—practices that triggered the revolution 25 years ago...

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PRISM Could Put The Kibosh On US Trade Abroad

Richard Adhikari | E-Commerce Times | July 26, 2013

Europeans are not taking revelations about the U.S. government's PRISM surveillance program in stride, and that could be exceedingly bad for U.S. businesses. One sector that's already seeing cause for alarm is cloud services. Read More »

Pursuing Adoption of Free and Open Source Software in Governments

Free and open source software creates a natural — and even necessary — fit with government. I joined a panel this past weekend at the Free Software Foundation conference LibrePlanet on this topic and have covered it previously in a journal article and talk. Our panel focused on barriers to its adoption and steps that free software advocates could take to reach out to government agencies. Read More »

Q&A: Why Was The VA Hacked?

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | June 25, 2013

In early June, a former Department of Veterans Affairs IT manager told members of the House Veterans Affairs Committee that the VA’s databases have been hacked by at least eight foreign organizations — notably by organizations linked with the Chinese military, which may have viewed (or taken) veterans’ personal identifying data, like Social Security numbers. Read More »

Researcher Argues For Open Hardware To Defend Against NSA Spying

Antone Gonsalves | CSO | October 10, 2013

While there is no foolproof defense against government spying, snooping by entities like the National Security Agency could be made far more difficult through the use of Internet infrastructure built on open-source hardware, an academic researcher says. Read More »

Snowden Saw What I Saw: Surveillance Criminally Subverting The Constitution

Thomas Drake | The Guardian | June 12, 2013

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience. Read More »

Stallman: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

Richard Stallman | Wired | October 14, 2013

The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use. Read More »

The Biggest Cyberthreat To Companies Could Come From The Inside

Seth Rosenblatt | CNET | January 8, 2015

A recent attack against Morgan Stanley that exposed hundreds of thousands of customer accounts was an inside job, a threat experts say is nearly impossible to stop...

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The Day We Fought Back

Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | February 11, 2014

[...] The groups that organized this action have long been pushing hard for real surveillance reform. But we knew that the time was ripe—that the Snowden leaks, unrelenting media pressure, grassroots activism, and even pressure from within Congress—were creating a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give the public—worldwide—the chance to voice its opposition to mass spying. [...] Read More »

The Google File System Makes NSA’s Hack Blatantly Illegal And They Know It

Robert X. Cringely | I, Cringely | November 2, 2013

The latest Edward Snowden bombshell that the National Security Agency has been hacking foreign Google and Yahoo data centers is particularly disturbing. Plenty has been written about it so I normally wouldn’t comment except that the general press has, I think, too shallow an understanding of the technology involved. The hack is even more insidious than they know. Read More »

The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating To NSA Defenders

Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic | July 7, 2014

The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americans—and secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will...

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