As you probably suspected, the NSA’s massive phone record collection "has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism," according to a new study. In fact—and perhaps more interestingly—the agency’s real problem isn’t a lack of information. It’s an excess of secrecy.
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The report from the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies on the U.S. government’s mass spying—domestically and around the globe— has much that’s good in it. As the folks handling the only ongoing case where National Security Letters have been declared unconstitutional, we also especially appreciate the recommendation that NSLs may only be issued after judicial review and subject to significant additional limitations. We appreciate their strong endorsement of strong, non-backdoored encryption. And we never thought we’d see a presidential panel explain the risks posed by the government’s stockpiling of Zero Days rather than making sure that they are fixed.
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In December, it was reported that security firm RSA — according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden — was paid millions by the NSA to put a back door into … Continue reading
In honor of the late programmer and activist Aaron Swartz and in light of information contained in documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the EFF, Free Press, Demand Progress, and other … Continue reading
At this point, nobody’s surprised to hear that the authorities can track your cell phone. But what you might not realize is just how easy and how incredibly cheap it is.
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Amidst the hustle and bustle of the holiday shopping season, hackers silently managed to nab millions of instances of customer card data, the means and extent of which were unknown … Continue reading
Google has updated Gmail with a feature that some of you might not appreciate. Now, simply typing in someone’s name into the ‘To’ field will automatically grab their address from Google+, and, worse, the service is applied to your account by default.
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Ever since Edward Snowden pulled back the curtain on the NSA’s relentless snooping, the anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo’s been breaking traffic records practically everyday. The privacy-friendly site just announced that it answered a whopping one billion search queries last year.
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Snapchat, the photo messaging service, suffered a major security breach in recent times, something it was given an ample heads-up for, yet did nothing to mitigate. After the account details … Continue reading
Google has been slapped with a fine by France’s CNIL, a data protection entity that has taken issue with the Internet giant’s privacy policy migration into a single unit. Though … Continue reading
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