The latest bombshell revelation from Edward Snowden via the Guardian newspaper is a program called XKEYSCORE. In a previous article, the Free Press released a drop down menu that allowed NSA analysts to simply fill in the blank defining how an internet user is foreign.
Since the beginning of the recent protest movement around the deaths of multiple unarmed African American men at the hands of police in multiple states there has been a push for police to wear body cameras. In the Tamir Rice and John Crawford III cases here in Ohio, video exists in the public sphere that clearly shows what happened. Yet in both cases the policeman who pulled the trigger is still free to roam the streets and still feeding at the public trough.
Edward Snowden was not cleared for the details of this program. He revealed it's existence nonetheless. The program is called BULLRUN and it appears to have been going on for a very long time. Snowden's 2013 revelation of it in the New York Times does not appear to have slowed it down. In fact, it appears that the NSA and FBI have retreated to a more comfortable controversy from the Clinton Era, complete with technology from the time period. Remember the Clipper Chip? Like Vanilla Ice, it endlessly returns from the 1990s, growing worse each time.
Recently Facebook has been on a media offensive. They have been touting their March 28 purchase of experimental Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV, called drones) manufacturer Ascenta. Ascenta has built a solar-powered extreme endurance drone that can remain aloft at high altitude for years. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees this as the key to his dream of expanding internet access in the developing world.
On January 17, the Guardian.uk revealed startling new information about National Security Agency (NSA) bulk collection of mobile phone users’ text messages.
Pundits often speculate on the price of American foreign policy. They often wonder what the cost of maintaining the nation's good image abroad might be. Thanks to a recent AP report, there may now be the beginnings of a metric to measure that. On January 5, the AP ran a story about the fraudulent commercial underbelly of the social media industry. Among other things, it detailed information-age sweatshops in Bangladesh – where you can bulk purchase social media clout for half a penny per click.
The holiday season brought the world two federal rulings on the National Security Agency’s collection of data on every single person in the country. The cases were brought in two different federal districts before two different federal judges. Federal District Judge Leon, of the District of Columbia, called the NSA’s practices “Orwellian,” and “likely unconstitutional” but declined to issue an injunction prior to a full trial.
I never thought I'd be writing about online gaming, especially first person shooters. Today, I'm compelled to stop chilling with the rest of the grognards and play Paul Revere to the online gaming community's colonial Boston. The manual does not specify how many lanterns this one gets.
NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden has asked for Clemency so he can come home. The debate his revelations ignited has spawned multiple reform bills in Congress including one from Senate Intelligence committee chair Diane Fienstein. However, the White House and Feinstein continue to scream for his blood in the media. The media has failed to report that Feinstein's bill normalizes rather than reforms the NSA spying on the whole world.
