National Security Agency (NSA)

See the following -

Brazil's Internet Gets Groundbreaking Bill Of Rights

Aviva Rutkin | New Scientist | April 25, 2014

Brazil's internet now has its own bill of rights. On 23 April, the country's president, Dilma Rousseff, signed the Marco Civil da Internet, a bill that sets out new guidelines for freedom of expression, net neutrality and data privacy for the country's 100 million internet users.  

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British Spies Said To Intercept Yahoo Webcam Images

Nicole Perlroth and Vindu Goel | New York Times | February 27, 2014

A British intelligence agency collected video webcam images — many of them sexually explicit — from millions of Yahoo users, regardless of whether they were suspected of illegal activity, according to accounts of documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden. Read More »

Campaign To End NSA Warrantless Surveillance Surges Past 500,000 Signers

Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | June 27, 2013

Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web, Joins Half Million Users in Opposing NSA Dragnet Surveillance Read More »

Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What's More Dangerous?

Michael Meurer | Truthout | September 15, 2013

[An important revelation] is the exposure of a nearly lunatic disproportion in threat assessment and spending by the US government. This disproportion has been spawned by a fear-based politics of terror that mandates unlimited money and media attention for even the most tendentious terrorism threats, while lethal domestic risks such as contaminated food from our industrialized agribusiness system are all but ignored Read More »

Cisco’s Disastrous Quarter Shows How NSA Spying Could Freeze US Companies Out Of a Trillion-Dollar Opportunity

Christopher Mims | Quartz | November 14, 2013

Cisco announced two important things in today’s earnings report: The first is that the company is aggressively moving into the Internet of Things [...]. The second is that Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets [...]. Read More »

CISPA Zombie Bill Is Back, With Fewer Privacy Concerns…Maybe?

Dana Liebelson | Mother Jones | October 21, 2013

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says the new version of the controversial cybersecurity bill will include "tight limitation on what kind of information is shared." Read More »

Commentary: The NSA Leaker And Highly Skilled But Academically Ordinary Workers

Brian Fung | Nextgov | June 11, 2013

Booz Allen Hamilton has released a new statement on Edward Snowden, its now-former employee and National Security Agency surveillance leaker. Read More »

Congress Tries To Curtail NSA Spying, Sort Of

Aliya Sternstein | Nextgov | January 16, 2014

Buried in a soon-to-pass government spending bill is a ban on the monitoring of any specific U.S. citizen's phone calls and online activities. The small, vague passage, however, leaves wiggle room for the National Security Agency to continue sweeping up Americans' call and Internet data en masse. Read More »

Court Rejects 'State Secrets' Excuse For Why Feds Want Out Of Lawsuit Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | July 8, 2013

While there have been a number of new revelations lately about the NSA's surveillance efforts, there have been some long-running on-going legal disputes about it as well. One of the biggest is Jewel vs. the NSA. Read More »

Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out?

Bruce Schneier | CNN | March 1, 2016

Thefts of personal information aren't unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it's information that's needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it's stolen for purposes of embarrassment or coercion, as in the 2015 cases of Ashley Madison and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The latter exposed highly sensitive personal data that affects security of millions of government employees, probably to the Chinese...

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Data Protection Responses To PRISM "A Smokescreen"

Simon Phipps | Computerworld | June 17, 2013

An online privacy expert has denounced European responses to US Internet surveillance and called for legal immunity in Europe for those that report its effects. [...] Read More »

Distributing Encryption Software May Break the Law

Developers, distributors, and users of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) often face a host of legal issues which they need to keep in mind. Although areas of law such as copyright, trademark, and patents are frequently discussed, these are not the only legal concerns for FOSS. One area that often escapes notice is export controls. It may come as a surprise that sharing software that performs or uses cryptographic functions on a public website could be a violation of U.S. export control law...

Do You Want The Government Buying Your Data From Corporations?

Bruce Schneier | The Atlantic | April 30, 2013

A new bill moving through Congress would give the authorities unprecedented access to citizens' information. Read More »

Does Windows 8 Help The Government To Spy On Us?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | Computerworld | September 9, 2013

The Microsoft fan club is up in arms. Those reports about Windows 8 allowing the government to spy on us? Nonsense, they fuss. It's simply not true that Windows 8 combines with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to create a built-in back door for surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA). Read More »

DOJ Helped AT&T, Others Avoid Wiretap Act, Promised Not To Charge Them If They Helped Spy On People

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | April 25, 2013

Want to know one reason why the feds are so interested in giving blanket immunity to anyone who helps them spy on people? Perhaps because they're already telling companies that they have immunity if they help them spy on people. Specifically, they've issued special letters of immunity, more or less helping companies like AT&T ignore the Wiretap Act. Read More »