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NSA stores metadata of millions of web users for up to a year, secret files show | The NSA files. The National Security Agency is storing the online metadata of millions of internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency, top secret documents reveal. Metadata provides a record of almost anything a user does online, from browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to account details, email activity, and even some account passwords.

This can be used to build a detailed picture of an individual's life. The Obama administration has repeatedly stated that the NSA keeps only the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally targeting – but internal documents reveal the agency retains vast amounts of metadata. An introductory guide to digital network intelligence for NSA field agents, included in documents disclosed by former contractor Edward Snowden, describes the agency's metadata repository, codenamed Marina. "NSA is a foreign intelligence agency," the statement said. What Can YouTubers See About Their Viewers (It’s More Than You Think)

As a YouTuber, you can see quite a lot of information about the people who watch your videos. Probably a lot more than many would think. What exactly can YouTubers see about their viewers, how visible is this information and why can YouTubers see some of this information in the first place? These are some of the questions I’m going to cover in this article.

If you’re a viewer and you’re not sure what exactly it is that the channels you watch can see about your information, then this will hopefully shed some light. In general, YouTubers can see quite a lot of information about their viewers. There are some ways that a YouTuber can see exactly who a viewer is. Can YouTubers see who viewed their video? YouTubers cannot see exactly who has viewed their video, but they can see the percentage of how many viewers are a certain age or what gender they are. Can YouTubers see your location? Creators on YouTube cannot see your specific location. But that’s as specific as you can get. Why we need to seriously reconsider COVID-19 vaccination passports - Raw Story - Celebrating 17 Years of Independent Journalism. In 2003, Canada's immigration and citizenship minister, Denis Coderre, declared that “the biometrics train has left the station," making reference to new technologies like facial recognition and retina scans.

Coderre's statement demonstrated the perceived inevitability, along with the innocent embrace, of new biometric technologies. Denis Coderre at a news conference in Ottawa in 2002. (CP PHOTO/Fred Chartrand) It's eerily similar to contemporary statements about vaccine passports. And, much like the rollout of biometrics, the solutions promised by these technologies outweigh the public's appetite for debate. So what's changed in the past 20 years, and why should we care? Proposed vaccine passports are moving forward with little scrutiny due to their promise to solve many travel-related challenges during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, vaccine passports are presented as a relatively simple technological solution to our current travel woes. 'Function creep' Personal privacy.

Edward Snowden warns world to stay way from Google Allo; Tweets "Don't use Allo" Edward Snowden’s latest tweets will not make Google very happy. On the eve of Google’s latest app launch called Allo (a WhatsApp chat competitor), Snowden is tweeting to all his followers, and everyone concerned with NSA/FBI/CIA surveillance, not to touch the Allo. Google Allo, the new “smart” messaging app launched on this Wednesday, is ‘dangerous’ and should be avoided, says Snowden. Snowden posted a series of Tweets warning his followers to stay away from Google Allo. Snowden says Allo plans to… “record every message you ever send and make it available to police upon request”. RT reports that Allo is designed to take on chat message leader WhatsApp. –promises to deliver quick conversations with features like; “Smart Reply” that can guess your answers and respond to messages with just the tap of a button, and “Google Assistant”, which answers your questions and helps you search for things directly in your chat.How does Allo plan on predicting your every word and witty emoji, you ask?

“He makes George W. Bush and Nixon look good”: Why Obama’s attack on privacy is so historic. As increasingly tends to be the case, this year’s edition of the Academy Awards was deemed by many to have been a boring dud. But aside from Chris Pine’s tears and Patricia Arquette’s clarion call for true gender equality, one of the few memorable moments of the show was undoubtedly when Laura Poitras won the best documentary award for her movie on the Edward Snowden NSA leaks, “Citizenfour.” Flanked by the film’s producer and editor, as well as Salon alum Glenn Greenwald, Poitras used her acceptance speech to argue that the Snowden leaks “don’t only expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself.” That’s a view shared by many critics of mass surveillance — and none more so than Robert Scheer, the celebrated journalist, author and founder of Truthdig. I think the Internet is the best and worst of worlds. I love it. I edit an Internet publication and it’s been very liberating, and yet it has the seeds of very vicious surveillance and destruction of privacy.

Dubai detectives to get Google Glass to fight crime. The Legal Claim Against Surveillance. People have a fundamental right to communicate with each other free from pervasive government surveillance. The right to communicate, and the ability to choose to do so secretly, is essential to the open exchange of ideas which is a cornerstone of a free society.- Devin Theriot-Orr, Riseup.net, July 2014 Can you take a signals intelligence agency to court, or at the very least, something approximating to it? Various bodies have been putting their minds together, considering the formidable obstacles, the endless riddling hoops. Last week, they lodged a claim before Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal against both the UK’s GCHQ and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), arguing that the former’s targeting of Internet service providers was illegal, destructive and retarding of the goodwill such providers rely upon.

Ultimately, such interference on the part of GCHQ cripples the very functioning of the Internet, a true violation of associated freedoms of use. Dr. Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created in One of the World's Freest Countries. June 2, 2014 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.

In the past several months, we have been provided with instructive lessons on the nature of state power and the forces that drive state policy. And on a closely related matter: the subtle, differentiated concept of transparency. The source of the instruction, of course, is the trove of documents about the National Security Agency surveillance system released by the courageous fighter for freedom Edward J. Snowden, expertly summarized and analyzed by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald in his new book, " No Place to Hide. " The documents unveil a remarkable project to expose to state scrutiny vital information about every person who falls within the grasp of the colossus - in principle, every person linked to the modern electronic society. Nothing so ambitious was imagined by the dystopian prophets of grim totalitarian worlds ahead. You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi. Feb. 13: This article has been corrected [1].

The East German secret police, known as the Stasi, were an infamously intrusive secret police force. They amassed dossiers on about one quarter of the population of the country during the Communist regime. But their spycraft — while incredibly invasive — was also technologically primitive by today’s standards. While researching my book Dragnet Nation [2], I obtained the above hand drawn social network graph and other files from the Stasi Archive [3] in Berlin, where German citizens can see files kept about them and media can access some files, with the names of the people who were monitored removed. The graphic shows forty-six connections, linking a target to various people (an “aunt,” “Operational Case Jentzsch,” presumably Bernd Jentzsch, an East German poet who defected to the West in 1976), places (“church”), and meetings (“by post, by phone, meeting in Hungary”).

Translations by Yvonne Zivkovic and David Burnett. Inside America's Plan to Kill Online Privacy Rights Everywhere. The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable. The diplomatic battle is playing out in an obscure U.N. General Assembly committee that is considering a proposal by Brazil and Germany to place constraints on unchecked internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services.

American representatives have made it clear that they won’t tolerate such checks on their global surveillance network. The stakes are high, particularly in Washington — which is seeking to contain an international backlash against NSA spying — and in Brasilia, where Brazilian President Dilma Roussef is personally involved in monitoring the U.N. negotiations. The concession "is regrettable. How People Disappear. Obama Proposes FISA Reforms Amid Growing Concerns Over NSA Surveillance.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama announced new measures Friday to increase transparency and reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court amid growing concerns over the National Security Agency's widespread surveillance programs. Speaking to reporters at a press conference, Obama proposed the first of several steps "to help restore public confidence" following revelations in June that the federal government was secretly mining millions of Americans' phone and electronic communications.

"Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate but not always fully informed way," Obama said. "But given the history of abuse by governments, it's right to ask questions about surveillance, particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives. " "No, I don't think Mr. Email Service Lavabit Shuts Down, Cites U.S. Government Interference. European Union Seeks Drone and Spy Satellite Network. DEA Special Operations Division Covers Up Surveillance Used To Investigate Americans: Report.

By John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. High-Level US Government Officials Have Warned for 40 Years that Mass Surveillance Would Lead to Tyranny in America. Postal Service Is Logging All Our Mail for Law Enforcement. Data Mining for Terrorists. In the post 9/11 world, there's much focus on connecting the dots. Many believe that data mining is the crystal ball that will enable us to uncover future terrorist plots.

But even in the most wildly optimistic projections, data mining isn't tenable for that purpose. We're not trading privacy for security; we're giving up privacy and getting no security in return. Most people first learned about data mining in November 2002, when news broke about a massive government data mining program called Total Information Awareness. The basic idea was as audacious as it was repellent: suck up as much data as possible about everyone, sift through it with massive computers, and investigate patterns that might indicate terrorist plots. But TIA didn't die. This shouldn't be a surprise. The promise of data mining is compelling, and convinces many. Security is always a trade-off, and for a system to be worthwhile, the advantages have to be greater than the disadvantages.

Terrorist plots are different. Surveillance and the Corporate State. With all of the fear mongering the subject has received in recent decades, Americans have in fact had remarkably little to fear directly from ‘terrorism.’ While actual attacks have been spectacular—they were designed to garner attention, they are both rare and far less dangerous than opportunistic politicians and the dim bureaucrats of the ‘security’ state care to communicate.

As comedian Stephen Colbert (correctly) pointed out, including the attacks of September 11, 2001 and more recently in Boston, more Americans have died from furniture falling on them than from terrorist attacks. Depending on which statistics you choose, 10X – 20X more Americans die every year from (preventable) medical errors than have died in the entirety of U.S. history from terrorist attacks. In practical terms, terrorism is among the least probable threats Americans face. The George W. These facts are known to the Obama administration, the Pentagon, the NSA, the CIA and various and sundry spy agencies. The Government Has No Right To Pry Into What Goes On In The Privacy Of Your Home. I’ve been keeping up with the news recently, and as you’ve probably seen, this last week has been marked by several shocking revelations concerning the conduct of the National Security Agency and the federal government’s overall attitudes toward the privacy of the American people.

It’s spawned a vigorous debate, but to me, the answer couldn’t be any clearer: No matter what pretexts the presidential administration might have about protecting the American people, the government simply does not have the right to poke their nose into what goes on in the privacy of your own home. Bottom line: Your home is your sanctuary. And in your home, you should be able to do whatever you want for how long you want without worrying about someone spying on you. The fact is, this country was built on a few fundamental principles, not least of which is the inalienable right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Under the U.S. Think about what that could mean for a second. Nation Mostly Alarmed That Government’s Top Programs Handled By 29-Year-Olds. Wiretaps through Software Hacks to Get Legal Scrutiny. Earlier this year a group of researchers published a controversial idea for giving law enforcement access to suspicious electronic communications.

Instead of forcing tech companies like Facebook and Google to build backdoors into their software, the researchers suggested law enforcement simply exploit existing vulnerabilities in Web software to plant their digital wiretaps. This approach would turn security-compromising software bugs—a bane of software companies and their customers for the past couple of decades—into a tool for gathering evidence against criminals communicating via voice-over-IP (VoIP) calls, instant messaging, some video game systems and other Internet-based channels. Although the researchers made clear that the FBI and other agencies should obtain a court order before placing their digital wiretaps, the proposal raises more than a few thorny legal questions.

Skeptics say that much more scrutiny is necessary for a proposal as unorthodox as “Going Bright.” NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news. High-Tech NYPD Unit Tracks Criminals Through Facebook and Instagram Photos - On the Inside. Tip for Julian: Don’t Eat at Popeyes. Guerrilla surveillance camera destruction hits the U.S.

Cctv. Retailers Track Consumers With Facial Recognition Technology As They Shop. Understand Klout. What Your Klout Score Really Means | Wired Business. On the Leakiness of Surveillance Culture, the Corporate Gaze, and What That Has To Do With the New Aesthetic. How Your Movements Are Being Tracked, Probably Without Your Knowledge. Welcome to the National Security Agency - NSA/CSS. BRS Labs | Behavioral Recognition Systems.