Surveillance & Technology

Congress Releases Zuckerberg’s Prepared Testimony Ahead of Wednesday’s Hearing…

Congress has released Mark Zuckerberg’s prepared testimony ahead of a Wednesday hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It’s one of two Capitol Hill appearances for the Facebook founder and CEO this week. Zuckerberg is also scheduled to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees Tuesday. Facebook is facing […]

April 9, 2018 at 6:19 pm

Top Officials at Backpage.com Indicted After Classifieds Site Taken Offline…

Seven top officials of the website Backpage.com, long accused of facilitating child sex trafficking, have been arrested after a grand jury in Phoenix issued a 93-count indictment alleging conspiracy and money laundering, and the government on Friday seized all of Backpage’s websites around the world. The indictment was unsealed Monday in Phoenix after all defendants […]

April 7, 2018 at 12:21 pm

Facebook Is Tracking Me Even Though I’m Not on Facebook…

I don’t use Facebook. I’m not technophobic — I’m a geek. I’ve been using email since the early 1990s, I have accounts on hundreds of services around the net, and I do software development and internet protocol design both for work and for fun. I believe that a globe-spanning communications network like the internet can […]

April 7, 2018 at 12:14 pm

Cybersecurity Fiasco: Interior Department Computers Trying to Talk to Russia…

Three years after Chinese hackers stole security clearance files and other sensitive personal information of some 22 million U.S. federal employees, cyber-defenses at the Department of Interior, which hosted White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) servers targeted in the theft, were still unable to detect “some of the most basic threats” inside Interior’s computer […]

April 7, 2018 at 12:13 pm

CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou Personally Delivers Petition for Assange to Ecuador’s D.C. Ambassador on Behalf of Intelligence Veterans…=

Earlier today, CIA whistleblower and member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) John Kiriakou personally delivered a letter to the Ecuadorian embassy in Washington, DC, which was addressed to Ecuadorian Ambassador, Francisco Jose Borja Cevallos. The document calls for the immediate restoration of communications for Wikileaks Editor-In-Chief Julian Assange. One week ago, Julian Assange’s […]

April 7, 2018 at 11:56 am

Homeland Security Finds Suspected Listening Devices in Washington…

For the first time, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged the existence in Washington of what appear to be rogue devices that foreign spies and criminals could be using to track individual cellphones and intercept calls and messages. The use of what are known as cellphone-site simulators by foreign powers has long been a concern, […]

April 7, 2018 at 11:22 am

Sandberg: Facebook Users Would Have to Pay to Opt Out of Sharing Data…

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg says that while Facebook doesn’t sell or give away its users’ information (it just allows third party apps to do that), the company still “depends on your data,” and if users wanted to completely opt out of all of the platform’s data-driven advertising, they would have to pay for it. Sandberg […]

April 6, 2018 at 7:08 pm

What Is Mark Zuckerberg Hiding? Facebook Secretly Deletes Some of Its Founders Private Messages Over Fears Sensitive Data May Be Leaked…

Facebook has deleted some of Mark Zuckerberg’s private messages over fears sensitive data could be leaked. Three sources claim old Facebook messages from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their inbox. The recipients were not notified – raising concerns about what the Facebook CEO could be hiding. Facebook claims the change was made after the 2014 Sony […]

April 6, 2018 at 5:34 pm

Facebook Backs Off Its Creepy Plans to Secretly Access Private Medical Records…

Facebook has been in talks with high profile US hospitals in an attempt to obtain patient data about illnesses and prescriptions. The project was being led by a Stanford cardiologist called Freddy Abnousi who claims to lead ‘top-secret projects’ on his LinkedIn. The project aimed to build profiles of people that combined their medical conditions […]

April 5, 2018 at 8:10 pm

3,000 Google Workers Sign Letter Demanding End Involvement with the Pentagon…

Revelations last month that Google was designing software for the US military’s illegal drone warfare program have sparked outrage among employees. More than 3,000 Google workers have signed a letter to executives demanding that it end its involvement with the Pentagon. The program, known as “Project Maven,” involves the use of artificial intelligence systems to […]

April 5, 2018 at 8:10 pm

Can We Be Saved From Facebook? by Matt Taibbi…

We shouldn’t be asking Facebook to fix the problem. We should be fixing Facebook. It’s our collective misfortune that this perhaps silliest-in-history supercorporation – a tossed-off hookup site turned international cat-video vault turned Orwellian surveillance megavillain – has dragged us all to the very cliff edge of modern technological capitalism. We’ve reached a moment in […]

April 5, 2018 at 7:55 pm

Facebook Bans Image of Jesus for ‘Excessively Violent Content’…

Facebook has rejected an advertisement by a Catholic college for an online theology program, declaring that the ad contained “shocking, sensational, or excessively violent content” because of the image of a medieval crucifix. On Good Friday, the Franciscan University of Steubenville tried to publish a series of Facebook advertisements for an online program in theology, […]

April 5, 2018 at 7:09 pm

The High-Definition, Artificially Intelligent, All-Seeing Future of Big Data Policing…

Predictive analytics and new surveillance technologies are already transforming policing, helping prioritize who police target, where they patrol, and how they investigate. But police practices will be entirely revolutionized when video surveillance cameras gain new artificial intelligence capabilities. AI will soon allow for new forms of tracking and monitoring in ways that could reshape the […]

April 4, 2018 at 7:32 pm

Ouch!: Amazon Stock Drops $260B Following Trump’s Tweets…

Who says name-calling doesn’t hurt? Amazon investors can measure the pain of President Trump’s Twitter attacks over the past three trading days in dollars. They’ve lost a collective $260 billion as the e-commerce giant’s shares tumbled 2.8 percent since the president’s March 29 renewal of his social-media onslaught against the company run by Washington Post […]

April 4, 2018 at 6:46 pm

New Android Malware Secretly Records Phone Calls and Steals Private Data…

Security researchers at Cisco Talos have uncovered variants of a new Android Trojan that are being distributed in the wild disguising as a fake anti-virus application, dubbed “Naver Defender.” Dubbed KevDroid, the malware is a remote administration tool (RAT) designed to steal sensitive information from compromised Android devices, as well as capable of recording phone […]

April 4, 2018 at 4:57 pm

Mystery of How Birds Navigate Is Solved: Scientists Discover Eye Proteins That Allow Them to See the Earth’s Magnetic Field…

Migrating birds appear to have a ‘sixth sense’ which means they always manage to find their nesting grounds – a talent that has long mystified scientists. Now researchers have found the secret to this skill is down to a protein in the bird’s eyes that is sensitive to blue light. This protein lets them ‘see’ […]

April 4, 2018 at 4:56 pm

Facebook Said the Personal Data of Most Its 2B Users Has Been Collected and Shared with Outsiders…

Facebook said Wednesday that most of its 2 billion users likely have had their personal information scraped by outsiders without the users’ explicit permission, dramatically raising the stakes in a privacy controversy that has dogged the company for weeks, spurred investigations in the United States and Europe and sent the company’s stock price tumbling. The […]