National Security has come to mean less and less privacy for the general public. Now NSA under the façade of protecting the nation wants to sift through the entirety of the internet to fight terrorism. According to a scathing Wired report America’s top spy, Michael McConnell, is requesting access to any and all web-pages, emails, instant messages, pictures and anything that might be found on the internet. All of this without the need for a warrant.
From Wired:
Presumably using unsupported stats like that, in May 2007 McConnell convinced President Bush that a massive cyber-attack on a singe U.S. bank would be worse for the economy than than the deadly terrorist attacks of September 11, the article reports. In response, the NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.
In order for cyberspace to be policed, Internet activity will have to be closely monitored. Ed Giorgio, who is working with McConnell on the plan, said that would mean giving the government the authority to examine the content of any e-mail, file transfer, or Web search. “Google has records that could help in a cyber-investigation,” he said. Giorgio warned me, “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
The story has also been picked up by Wall Street Journal which reports McConnell acknowledges in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. … McConnell, a South Carolina native, also reveals that he fancies himself a fabulous dancer.
Facebook is dancing on a slippery slope for the past few weeks. It started off with Beacon – a feature in Facebook which broadcasts users buying habits and trends to his/her friends. MoveOn.org and other public interest sites have successfully brought that controversial feature to the forefront and forced Facebook’s hands in respecting users’ privacy. This was reported earlier on TeqEdge as a win for users over the Facebook corporate machine. But Facebook didn’t get the message. Wired magazine reports that a new feature called SocialAds is allowing companies and applications to use users’ profile pictures for media and publicity campaigns.
Facebook describes Social Ads as they …
leverage the power of Facebook News Feed by serving relevant stories about friends engaging with your business. … The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your website through Facebook Beacon. … The social stories, such as a friend’s becoming a fan of your Facebook Page or a friend’s taking an action on your website …
According to William McGeveran of the Harvard Law School such acts by Facebook is borderline spam where the advertiser is inserting the user into its ad campaign without explicit permission. Facebook users are only asked in general if they want to share information, not if they want their name and picture to be featured in an ad for some product. If you are concerned of your profile picture ending up on the ad snippets you can restrict Facebook privacy settings.
If you think Adobe is spying on you, you are correct. Adobe is collecting data on How you use Adobe products via a behavioral analytics firm called Omniture. UneasySilence has posted a screenshot of Adobe program trying to connect to the mother-ship.
Omniture has tried to conceal this “user tracking” by using 192.168.112.2O7.net as the server where the program connects to. 192.168.X.X is a private address range which generally indicates your local network behind your home router. This is a very shady technique and Omniture provides an obscure link to opt-out. Adobe could have simply provided a poll to see how the users use the program instead of secretly collecting usage data. Hopefully the publicity will make Adobe change the setting to make it an opt-in feature.
Source: Valleywag
