background preloader

Start Here

Facebook Twitter

Suspect Nation. Why Privacy Matters. The Era of Mass Surveillance and State Control. Hillary Clinton Speaks on Internet Freedom. Richard Stallman - Facebook is Mass Surveillance. Www.readwriteweb.com/archives/obama_meets_with_the_real_leaders_of_the_world_pho.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29. What does the President of the United States say to the unelected leader of a teaming populace fast approaching the equivalent population, but half his age? Thanks for following me on Facebook? Watch out for Zynga, I don't trust them? Barack Obama met yesterday with CEOs from Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, Yahoo and other leading tech companies (but no Microsoft, ouch) to discuss global media disruption, OTA installs for the Bohemian Grove iPad app and the risk of inflation in Farmville.

Who knows what they talked about? Cheers! Pentagon Wants a Social Media Propaganda Machine | Danger Room. You don’t need to have 5,000 friends of Facebook to know that social media can have a notorious mix of rumor, gossip and just plain disinformation. The Pentagon is looking to build a tool to sniff out social media propaganda campaigns and spit some counter-spin right back at it. On Thursday, Defense Department extreme technology arm Darpa unveiled its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media.

SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself. This is more than just checking the trending topics on Twitter. Not all memes, of course. Of course, SMISC won’t be content to just to hang back and monitor social media trends in strategic locations. Photo: USAF. Exclusive: Military’s ‘persona’ software cost millions, used for ‘classified social media activities’ By Stephen C. WebsterTuesday, February 22, 2011 17:49 EDT Most people use social media like Facebook and Twitter to share photos of friends and family, chat with friends and strangers about random and amusing diversions, or follow their favorite websites, bands and television shows.

But what does the US military use those same networks for? Well, we can’t tell you: That’s “classified,” a CENTCOM spokesman recently informed Raw Story. One use that’s confirmed, however, is the manipulation of social media through the use of fake online “personas” managed by the military. These “personas” were to have detailed, fictionalized backgrounds, to make them believable to outside observers, and a sophisticated identity protection service was to back them up, preventing suspicious readers from uncovering the real person behind the account. When Raw Story first reported on the contract for this software, it was unclear what the Air Force wanted with it or even if it had been acquired.

Mystery bidder. Revealed: Air Force ordered software to manage army of fake virtual people. By Stephen C. WebsterFriday, February 18, 2011 15:07 EDT Update (below): HBGary Federal among bidders These days, with Facebook and Twitter and social media galore, it can be increasingly hard to tell who your “friends” are. But after this, Internet users would be well advised to ask another question entirely: Are my “friends” even real people? In the continuing saga of data security firm HBGary, a new caveat has come to light: not only did they plot to help destroy secrets outlet WikiLeaks and discredit progressive bloggers, they also crafted detailed proposals for software that manages online “personas,” allowing a single human to assume the identities of as many fake people as they’d like.

The revelation was among those contained in the company’s emails, which were dumped onto bittorrent networks after hackers with cyber protest group “Anonymous” broke into their systems. Government involvement Update: The contract has since been taken off FBO.gov. Manufacturing consent “That’s me. Web Services as Governments. “For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe” Kevin Slavin "Those algorithms that govern our lives. What tech execs are saying about your privacy. How the new Facebook buttons are watching you. Where’s the only button we actually want: dislike? At f8, Facebook’s developer conference, they’ll be announcing a bunch of new buttons that will join the 905,000 websites that already use “Like” buttons. Now you’ll have “Read,” “Listened,” “Want,” and “Watched.” buttons.

But did you know that social buttons track you at each site you visit, even if you never click on them? This means that data on your visits (what sites you’re on and when, plus your IP address and cookie ID’s) all go back to Facebook’s databases. According to our surveys of users, this is neither obvious nor transparent: 66% of people had no idea. Check out the infographic below for stats. Facebook social buttons have taken the web site markets by storm in the last year, increasing their penetration for the top 10,000 sites (by how many visitors they get each month) from about 3% (300 sites using the Facebook buttons last September) to over 15% today. The takeaway: Social buttons are more than a means of sharing. I Have Seen The Future, And Its Sky Is Full Of Eyes.

Allow me just a little self-congratulatory chest-beating. Four years ago I started writing a near-fiction thriller about the risks of swarms of UAVs in the wrong hands. Everyone I talked to back then (including my agent, alas) thought the subject was implausible, even silly. Well, it’s not like I’m the next Vernor Vinge — it always seemed like a pretty blatantly obvious prediction to me — but I am pleased to see that drones and drone swarms have finally become the flavor of the month. In the last month, the Stanford Law Review has wrung its hands about the “ethical argument pressed in favor of drone warfare,” while anti-genocide activists have called for the use of “Drones for Human Rights” in Syria and other troubled nations; the UK and France declared a drone alliance; and a new US law compels the FAA to allow police and commercial drones in American airspace, which may lead to “routine aerial surveillance of American life.”

Terrified yet? No? Look who's watching: it's not the FBI, it's Facebook. Even the most sophisticated security agencies could not have dreamed up something like Facebook ... "Your friends have a lot in common with you, it’s your friends who betray you. " Photo: Bloomberg The CV you'd rather the boss didn't see Stored inside a series of ordinary brick buildings beside a sprawling wasteland on the edge of San Francisco Bay are intimate details of your life, relationships and opinions. This information repository is not the headquarters of the FBI or CIA, but Facebook Inc, Mark Zuckerberg's multibillion-dollar social networking behemoth with access to more than 840 million people, and their data. While full-body scanners and CCTV cameras often evoke Big Brother fears, the growing trend in surveillance is much closer to home. Advertisement Social media has become the latest way governments, police and corporations spy on their citizens, most of whom have no idea they are being watched.

But it is not just governments and security agencies spying on cyber space. This Is The Most Powerful Spy Center In The World. Deep in the Utah desert, at the feet of the Wasatch mountain range, is one of the most secret, most guarded, most secure facilities in the world. Here is where everything you say is analyzed to search for security threats against the United States. It’s the National Security Agency’s Utah Data centre, a $US2 billion facility that will capture, record and scrutinise every communication in the world, from emails to phone calls to text messages to chats.

It will also crack codes. According to Threat Level, the encryption cracking will be the most powerful in the world, and will help get into “financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications.” There will be four data rooms, 2322.6m² each, full of servers, cooled down by 60,000 tonnes of machinery and 6.4 million litres of water per day. The new totalitarianism of surveillance technology | Naomi Wolf.

A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal.

He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military. Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant. Except that it turned out to be true. Facebook could face €100,000 fine for holding data that users have deleted | Technology. Facebook could face a fine of up to €100,000 (£87,000) after an Austrian law student discovered the social networking site held 1,200 pages of personal data about him, much of which he had deleted.

Max Schrems, 24, decided to ask Facebook for a copy of his data in June after attending a lecture by a Facebook executive while on an exchange programme at Santa Clara University in California. Schrems was shocked when he eventually received a CD from California containing messages and information he says he had deleted from his profile in the three years since he joined the site. After receiving the data, Schrems decided to log a list of 22 separate complaints with the Irish data protection commissioner, which next week is to carry out its first audit of Facebook.

He wrote to Ireland after discovering that European users are administered by the Irish Facebook subsidiary. Europe-v-facebook.org | EUROPE versus FACEBOOK. Google Admits Handing over European User Data to US Intelligence Agencies. Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws. Gordon Frazer, Microsoft UK's managing director, made news headlines some weeks ago when he admitted that Microsoft can be compelled to share data with the US government regardless of where it is hosted in the world. At the center of this problem is the USA PATRIOT ACT, which states that companies incorporated in the United States must hand over data administered by their foreign subsidiaries if requested. Not only that, but they can be forced to keep quiet about it in order to avoid exposing active investigations and alert those targeted by the probes. This situation poses a serious problem for companies like Microsoft, Google or Amazon, which offer cloud services around the world, because their subsidiaries must also respect local laws.

This is not only a theoretical problem. Pentagon Seeks a Few Good Social Networkers.