CARTES & IDentification 2011. Mixergy – For ambitious upstarts and startups. The genuine news aggregator for the latest web buzz. Hacker News. Hand Picked Web Design and Development News. Techmeme. Smashing Magazine. NSA Gathers 4x the Amount of Info than the Library of Congress, Daily. The National Security Agency is the geekiest of the spy shops.
The NSA is responsible for gathering and parsing information from around the world, usually electronic data. At ReadWriteWeb, we're no strangers to big data, in fact we're fans. But sometimes you come face to face with facts and figures that bring home how big "big" is. According to an article from the Baltimore Sun, in six hours, the NSA intercepts and stores as much information as you find in the whole of the Library of Congress. Speaking of John Parachini, Director of the Intelligence Policy Center at The RAND Corporation the Sun wrote, "(He) said the rule of thumb has been that every six hours, NSA collects an amount of information equivalent to the store of knowledge housed at the Library of Congress.
" That's in six hours. But I just wanted to share an example of how much data we wrestle with as a society, an example that you can - just barely - get your head around. Other sources: Popsci. Md.-based intelligence agencies helped track bin Laden - baltimoresun.com. May 07, 2011|By Scott Calvert, The Baltimore Sun One day last year, a trusted courier for Osama bin Laden answered a phone call that might have been wholly unremarkable except for one thing — the National Security Agency was apparently listening in.
That intercepted call helped American intelligence officials track the courier all the way to the walled compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was hiding. The discovery eventually led to last week's midnight assault by Navy SEALs who killed the al-Qaida leader, ending a pursuit that began in the mid-1990s. A spokeswoman for the NSA said the agency would not offer more detail, and intelligence officials won't even confirm the account, which was reported by several news outlets quoting anonymous sources. And yet for the super-secret NSA, one of Maryland's largest employers with a work force of some 30,000 and a budget in the billions, this singular act of eavesdropping now stands as one of its most notable and conspicuous achievements. Rep. Wired.com. Revised ‘Net Censorship Bill Requires Search Engines To Block Sites, Too.
Surprise!
After months in the oven, the soon-to-be-released new version of a major U.S. Internet censorship bill didn’t shrink in scope — it got much broader. Under the new proposal, search engines, internet providers, credit card companies, and ad networks would all have cut off access to foreign “rogue sites”– and such court orders would not be limited to the government. Private rightsholders could go to court and target foreign domains, too. As for sites which simply change their domain name slightly after being targeted, the new bill will let the government and private parties bring quick action against each new variation.
Get ready for the “PROTECT IP Act.” [partner id="arstechnica"]A source in Washington provided Ars with a detailed summary of the PROTECT IP Act, which takes its acronym from “Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property.” The PROTECT IP Act makes a few major changes to last year’s COICA legislation. Continue reading … TechCrunch. Mark Suster.