The strange similarities in Google, Facebook, and Apple’s PRISM denials. After the news broke yesterday about a secret government surveillance program called PRISM, the companies named in the news reports — led by Google, Apple, and Facebook — responded with denials. In effect, they were saying two things: We do not give the government direct access to our servers. And we’ve never heard of PRISM. Some added a third point: We want more sunlight on this issue, too. Forgive me if I don’t think that’s saying much. First, the context: Yesterday the Washington Post published a slide deck reportedly intended for an audience of top National Security Agency advisors, detailing the PRISM program. The slides named seven different companies, plus two subsidiaries of two of those companies, as targets for this data collection, which included user photos, videos, audio files, and more.
These denials of the report all seem oddly similar, with Facebook chiming in most recently to say it also hasn’t heard of PRISM. Let’s look at each of the three denial points in turn. The Revolution Will Be Live-Mapped: A Brief History of Protest Maptivism. The revolution may not be televised, but it will be Google-mapped with crowdsourced data from social media networks. Modern-day digital cartography is transforming the ancient art of protest—with live tactical maps built by cyberactivists using Google Maps, Umaps, or the open source world map open street map, and updated in real-time with tips from the ground sent via social media. The maps help activists avoid police, find shelter, medical help, food and other protest groups, and stay mobile to avoid arrest or violence. This kind of maptivism was instrumental during the Arab Spring two years ago.
Now, as Turks in Instanbul protest the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Tayyip, live maps and social media are again playing a crucial role—enough to compel Tayyip to call Twitter "the worst menace to society. " Savvy Turks created a Google map on June 1 to track police movement near Taksim Square. Not long after Libya, people starting rising up in Syria. Biosphere 2: How a Sci-Fi Stunt Turned Into the World's Biggest Earth Science Lab. Flickr: Image If you were born after 1980 or so, then you probably most closely associate the concept of a manmade biosphere with Pauly Shore and fart jokes you didn't even think were funny when you were eleven.
But unlike the Biodome, the Biosphere was an actual thing. And it was almost as disastrous as the movie. In 1991, an apocalypse-fearing oil billionaire named Ed Bass poured $150 million into building the Biosphere 2, a 3-acre-wide complex of glass and steel. The completely sealed-off habitat encompassed five different biomes, and was ostensibly designed to be deployed off-planet in order to kick start otherworldly colonies. The New York Times' new documentary about the Biosphere 2 splashes the spotlight back on the once-ambitious effort to build a self-sustaining space station in the Arizona desert.
The structure was built by Peter Pearce, an erstwhile associate of the famed Buckminister Fuller, the futurist who patented the geodesic dome. Image: Flickr Image: Flickr. The Motherboard Guide to Avoiding the NSA. If you've been reading the headlines about the NSA mining intelligence data from the world's largest data mongers, and haven't already burnt down your house with everything you own in it and set sail for a libertarian expat community in Chile, then there are some less dramatic suggestions in store for you. Evading the NSA's comprehensive surveillance system is no simple task, especially as we only know snippets of the agency's capabilities.
But we're going to try our best. First, it's time to take an inventory of anything you own or are borrowing that can be traced. Phones, credit cards, cars, e-mail addresses, bank accounts, social media profiles, wi-fi coffee machines, residences, P.O. boxes, and so on—any piece of property where there is more than a handwritten cash receipt proving more than purchase price should either be ditched or reengineered to steer clear of the NSA's radars. Cash Image via Flickr Prepaid Credit Cards Image via Flickr Bitcoin Illustration by the author Phone Image Via.
Meet the Man Behind the Push to Ban Killer Robots. Image via Wikipedia Depending on who you ask, armed robots that can discern by themselves when and how to stage attacks, without guidance from humans, present either an unprecedented danger to humanity or its greatest mechanism of defense. But both sides agree that such "lethal autonomous robots," as they're known, are on their way whether we're ready for them or not. The prospect of free-thinking war machines waging the ultimate battle against the human race has been bouncing around most of our minds since Arnold promised us that he'd be back in the 1980s.
That was back when the idea of a walking, talking robot soldier was, like Schwarzenegger himself, more caricature than distressing. Less then three decades and more than a few drone strikes later, a new UN report is calling for "national moratoria" on developing killer robots in every country on the globe. MOTHERBOARD: Why is it important that we acknowledge this report, and these issues, right now? Yes, the NSA Can Spy on Every US Citizen. NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo via Wikimedia Commons On June 9, two reporters from the Guardian newspaper announced to the world the source of one of the most significant classified-document leaks in history. Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old national-security contractor from Hawaii, revealed that he was compelled by conscience to inform the world about a massive abuse of authority perpetrated by the US National Security Agency.
According to the documents Snowden provided, which have been authenticated, the US government has been systematically collecting the phone records and online communications of millions of American citizens. Both the media and the public were shocked by the news that the NSA had such broad digital surveillance capabilities. A program utilized by the agency, code-named PRISM, provides intelligence analysts with the ability to intercept almost any form of online communication, from any person. The challenge for Mr. Follow Dell on Twitter: @dellcam. What They Know - Wsj.com. How to Build a Secret Facebook. The NSA's Utah data center near Bluffdale, Utah. Via Google Street View Since retiring from a three-decade career at the NSA in 2001, a mathematician named William Binney has been telling anyone who will listen about a vast data-gathering operation being conducted by his former employers.
"Here’s the grand design," he told filmmaker Laura Poitras last year. "You build social networks for everybody. That then turns into the graph, and then you index all that data to that graph, which means you can pull out a community. That gives you an outline of everybody in that community. The invasive spying program Binney described—one that could build a "social graph" of nearly any user of the American Internet, like some massive, secret Facebook—was in the works, he says, when he left the agency. But now we know more about one aspect of the US's surveillance arsenal. This was not the kind of reality that Binney, like Snowden and other recent espionage whistleblowers, signed up to build. As J. Protecting your privacy. Proxies. What Is PRISM?