“Disrupting Facebook would be like trying to disrupt telephone calls, it’s so ubiquitous,” says Paul Adams, former Facebook staffer.
If live video is Facebook’s phase four, then artificial intelligence and virtual reality look like being big parts of phase five. Both of these fit its strategy of monetizing as many of our social interactions as possible.
The problem is, the bill they’re laser-focused on is misguided, wouldn’t protect us — and is a huge gift to companies wanting legal cover if and when they choose to violate Americans’ privacy rights.
In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 14–1 in favor of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA). The bill, like its infamous predecessor CISPA, would allow companies to share vast amounts of users’ private and personally identifiable data with the government. That information would go straight to the Department of Homeland Security and then on to the NSA.
If CISA passes, companies would be permitted to monitor and then report to the government on vaguely defined “cyber-threat indicators” — a term so broad that it covers actual threats hackers pose to computer systems but also sweeps in information on crimes like carjacking and burglaries. Those are serious offenses to be sure, but they have nothing to do with cybersecurity.
While current law allows companies to monitor their own systems for cyber threats, CISA would take this to the next level. The bill would allow companies that hold huge swaths of our personal data — like health insurers and credit-card companies — to monitor and report online activity “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”
This means that CISA would undermine the strong protections embedded in laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1964 — laws designed to keep the government from spying on our communications.
While posing a serious threat to our privacy online, CISA wouldn’t even guard well against cyber attacks. The bill offers a bad trade-off, to put it mildly.
The flashpoints for activism are the many failures of the existing media system. Whether it’s the silencing of dissenting views, the attacks on online privacy, the throttling of Internet access or the monopolization of choice, the problems are often rooted in bad public policy.
“It appears possible that some people may have committed offences. We need to establish whether they have or haven’t. That involves scoping a huge amount of material,” Scotland Yard’s head of counter-terrorism, Cressida Dick, said Tuesday before the House of Commons.
The Guardian may yet face terrorism charges as police continue to investigate the newspaper’s secret surveillance coverage based on leaked documents. Cressida Dick, Scotland Yard’s head of counter-terrorism, said before the House of Commons Tuesday that some people may have committed offenses and establishing that would involve “scoping a huge amount of material.”
ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site:
The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica.
On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site’s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica’s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.
“Everyone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind,” says Mike Tigas, ProPublica’s developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. “We don’t want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read.”
The NSA has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times every year since 2008, according to an internal audit provided by Edward Snowden
Here is the entire NSA audit detailing the agency’s thousands of privacy violations.
Because more details are always good.
"Oh yeah, that surveillance stuff we do, don’t worry we got that shit under control and shit, you know FISA courts and all no worries we ain’t looking at your emails and tapping your phones, metadata terrorists!" — NSA spokesman
The Church of England has sold all of its shares in News Corp. because it fears Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has failed to learn lessons from the phone-hacking scandal.
Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they’ll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of “cybersecurity.” CISA won’t stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn’t understand modern technology. So this week we’re sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand.
Battle the Olympians: The Guardian readers a nostalgic, 8-bit glance at how their athletic capabilities stack up against previous winners of Olympic gold. Nothing too fancy, but sometimes you just need something fun after a day of heavy news. (ht AntDeRosa) source
Tell Congress: Keep the Internet WEIRD — and SAVE NET NEUTRALITY
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