Privacy

Yahoo Tried Real Hard–But Failed–to Avoid Joining PRISM

While everyone’s skeptical about how and why so many tech companies are involved with PRISM, the New York Times has run a heartening piece which describes how Yahoo fought hard—but ultimately failed—to avoid joining the initiative. https://gizmodo.com/the-tech-companies-in-prism-arent-telling-the-complete-512052926 A document dating back to 2008 shows that a company now identified to be Yahoo petitioned the secret…

Bloomberg: Tech Companies Got Access to Classified Info in PRISM Deal

Bloomberg is reporting that the recent NSA Prism scandal is just a tiny scratch on the privacy surface. Citing “four people familiar with the process”, the agency claims that in fact thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies work with US national security agencies. In return for providing “sensitive information”, Bloomberg claims these companies receive…

Edward Snowden Used a Thumb Drive to Smuggle Thousands of PRISM Files

The highly-classified, confidential documents that revealed the NSA’s massive data-mining operation, PRISM, were leaked from the NSA’s facilities on none other than a simple, innocuous thumb drive. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 Any sort of portable digital device is understandably barred by the highly secretive branch of government, but whistleblower Edward Snowden somehow managed to download thousands of files—of…

What We Still Don’t Know About PRISM

A lot remains uncertain about the number of users affected by the NSA PRISM surveillance program that is taking place, the extent to which companies are involved, and how the NSA handles this sensitive data. Here are some of the biggest unresolved questions. Does the NSA regularly collect and examine a huge swath of the…

The Top 10 Countries Who Request Data from Tech Companies

Spoiler alert: the country that requests the most data from tech companies is the US. We’re number one! We’re number one! This should really be no surprise for anyone who’s been following the news lately but our dominance is actually pretty admirable. Take that you Frenchies! Try to catch us Aussies! We’re horrible. Actually the…

The Best and Worst Redesigns of PRISM’s Atrocious PowerPoint

There are plenty of reasons to be discomforted by the recent NSA PRISM scandal, chief among them the total obliteration of any remaining notion of privacy we might have had. But there’s another (less pressing, yes, but still confidence-shattering) concern that has echoed around our internet’s hallowed halls this past week: the fact that this…

The Privacy Dangers of a Cashless Society Were Clear Over 40 Years Ago

Your bank and credit card companies have quite a file on you. They know how often you go out to eat, how often you drink, how often you fill up your gas tank, along with the time and location of all these activities. Cash is all but dead, and with that comes a digital trail…

The Majority of the US Population Support Government Phone Tracking

For all the media coverage telling the US public it should be up in arms about the NSA’s phone tracking, a new study from Pew suggests that the majority of the population couldn’t care less—and in fact support the practice. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 Seems that 56 percent of Americans think that tracking phone call metadata is an…

The Tech Companies in PRISM Aren’t Telling the Complete Truth

Apple. Facebook. Google. Microsoft. Yahoo. AOL. YouTube. Skype. PalTalk. The tech companies that have been associated with PRISM have all unequivocally denied involvement with the spying program. But are they speaking the whole truth? Or are they simply using choice words to evade the real question? It definitely doesn’t look like the whole truth. When…

Why You Should Care About NSA Surveillance

Many people argue that, since they have nothing to hide, they don’t care about the NSA capturing all their emails, messages, calls, photos, videos and documents. This Gizmodo post is a good example of that. These arguments are horribly wrong. https://gizmodo.com/why-i-just-dont-give-a-shit-about-prism-or-any-other-s-511941519 Yes, the world doesn’t give a shit about you and your antics, your Instagrams…

Why Is Anyone Surprised That the Government Spies on Us?

Everybody from Tea Party patriots to left wing weirdos are up in arms over PRISM, the government’s ultra secret surveillance program that’s been reading Americans’ emails, listening to their phone calls and raking through their Internet data—among other things—since 2007. Details of the program exploded onto the public stage this week just hours after news…

Why I Just Don’t Give a Shit About PRISM (Or Any Other Spying)

Last night, the world found out about the NSA’s pervasive, encompassing PRISM surveillance program. We learned that we are all being monitored, in a literal sense, and that the largest tech companies on the planet are involved. There is no way to avoid it. And I just can’t find any reason to care. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 To…

An Early Online Privacy Expert Revisits His 1985 Predictions Today

Back in 1985, Larry Hunter was a grad student studying artificial intelligence at Yale. He had access to the kinds of computers and networking tools that few Americans even knew existed at the time. And for that reason, he saw into the future. Specifically, the future of online privacy. So how did his predictions hold…

Report: AT&T and Sprint Are Working With the NSA, Too (Duh)

The Wall Street Journal reports unnamed sources, which claim that Verizon isn’t the only telecom turning over extensive phone records to the NSA. The agency’s logging includes “call data” from AT&T and Sprint as well as information from ISPs and credit card records. If you’ve been following this week’s disclosures about the NSA’s expansive spying…

Hacker Group Retaliates By Leaking Secret NSA Documents

In response to PRISM—the NSA and top tech companies’ spy network to capture all your calls, photos, videos and files—hacker group Anonymous has published 13 secret US government’s secret documents. These include documents about PRISM and the Department of Defense’s Strategic Vision for controlling the internet. https://gizmodo.com/nsa-surveillance-scandal-feds-shut-down-snowdens-secu-511588927

What Are You Going To Do Following the NSA’s Massive Privacy Invasion?

Since it’s become apparent that the NSA has been siphoning off data from phone companies and internet giants—spying on everything from phone records to Facebook—the internet is awash with people ready to make a stand. But what are you going to do? https://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-and-fbi-have-been-spying-on-our-internet-habits-511750202 Are your outraged enough to cancel your Verizon contract, quite Facebook and…

Perhaps understandably, the likes of Facebook, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al are all flatly denying allegations that they allow the NSA direct access to their servers. Importantly, that’s not the same as not sharing data with them.

The Government Responds to the PRISM Spying Program

So PRISM totally exists. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, basically confirmed the Washington Post and Guardian report about how the NSA can pry data from Apple, Facebook, Google and whoever else. https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267 Here’s what Clapper wrote about PRISM: The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section…

Report: The Government Monitors Literally Every Phone Call in the US

First we found out that the NSA had been keeping track of all of every single US Verizon customer’s phone activity ever since the Boston bombing. Just an hour ago we learned that tech companies were in on the act. And now? The punchline: According to NBC News, every single phone call made in the…

The NSA Mines an Insane Amount of Data From Every Tech Service You Use

Wow. Nothing is sacred. The Washington Post has discovered that the NSA and FBI have teamed up to tap into the servers of nine US tech companies—Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, you name it—and have extracted e-mails, photographs, audio, video, documents and connection logs. They basically have free reign to take whatever they want. And they’ve…