Google has sued to shine more light on the secret court that approves controversial national security letters — the petition also represents part of the ongoing PR strategy of tech companies caught up in a surveillance scandal. Read more »
Former CIA staffer Edward Snowden talked about a lot of things during a live Q&A on Monday hosted by the Guardian newspaper — but there were also some important questions that he neglected to answer. Read more »
The company framed it as “Apple’s Commitment to Privacy,” but as with its internet peers, the biggest questions remain: how often did Apple comply and whose customer information did they give away? Read more »
Whatever the details might be, it seems clear that dozens of technology companies — and perhaps even more — have co-operated with the NSA on its surveillance program. And they could pay a high price for doing so. Read more »
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has told EU commissioner of justice Viviane Reding that the NSA is primarily targeting U.S. citizens and suspected foreign terrorists in its data collection efforts. Read more »
Connected cars will be a big business for cellular carriers as governments demand more embedded systems inside vehicles to meet safety demands. Tethering will also be big, but smartphone integration less so. Read more »
A lot of Americans might say they support NSA surveillance of their online activities, but many other people — including folks overseas — aren’t so thrilled. Can these laws withstand pressure from a tech lobby concerned about lost profits from fleeing users? Read more »
After a wave of initial shock at the revelations about NSA surveillance, there seems to be a pervasive feeling of resignation about our data being collected by the government. Have we grown too used to being spied on? Read more »
Updated: A narrow majority of Americans surveyed are okay with the government gathering data (or metadata) on our online activities, according to new Pew Research. Read more »
If a piece of information has been collected but has never actually been seen by the human eye, is it considered surveillance? Read more »
Updated: The deal U.S. citizens struck after 9/11 exchanging privacy for security should be up for renewal or at least subject to debate, says former Microsoft top tech guru Ray Ozzie. Read more »
The man who leaked top-secret documents from the NSA — about a digital surveillance program called PRISM that collected data from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others — has come forward to speak about why he did it. Read more »
Dell and Oracle deal takes coopetition to a new level, shows Oracle hardware vulnerability; will NSA spygate controversy impact cloud adoption? Read more »
Facebook built a system for the U.S. government that would allow intelligence agents easier access to personal data requested under a federal surveillance law, according to a report, and other companies agreed to work with investigators. Read more »
There’s much debate still to be had over the NSA’s recently uncovered data-collection practices, but some of the technologies underlying them are out in the open. Here’s what we know already. Read more »
Google has provided a lengthy statement on the reports of government spying on user data through some of the country’s largest tech companies. Read more »
The past few days have seen a blizzard of leaks about surveillance activity by the government’s ultra-secret NSA arm, including data collection from phone companies and internet giants. Here is what you need to know about this developing story. Read more »
Whether these top tier tech vendors were complicit or dupes in government spying on people’s data, this news does nothing to help their credibility. Read more »
After it emerged that the U.S. National Security Agency is apparently tapping into the Google and Facebook communications of people around the world, EU data protection officials and activists have started asking questions. Read more »
The revelation that U.S. spies are able to monitor communications over Google, Facebook and other American web firms’ platforms will have a big impact overseas, and nowhere more so than in Europe. Read more »
Here’s how nine Silicon Valley companies have responded to reports that the U.S. government can reach into their servers and extract personal data, almost at will. Read more »
The federal government is facing more troubling accusations about how it is using meta-data to spy on its own citizens. Read more »
How does the NSA analyze all the data it’s collecting from cell phone users? With a massive database system built with just such scale and workloads in mind. Read more »
It may not have been involved in the latest revelations about the NSA’s spying program, but the existence of a stateless repository for leaks would make it easier for similar information to be made public. Read more »
We talk a lot about the business benefits of big data and only a bit about the privacy implications. A report alleging that Verizon is sharing phone data at the request of the NSA may make privacy a higher priority. Read more »
Mega data centers’ innovations in serviceability, automatically detecting and recovering from failures, procurement practices, and so forth will become standard practice in all modern data centers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Sqrrl plans to parlay technology from the Apache Accumulo project, which enables the lock-down of segments of a record, to make big data applications more secure and compliant with government regulations, said CEO Oren Falkowitz, an NSA veteran. Read more »
The National Security Agency director Keith Alexander denied that the intelligence agency keeps massive dossiers on all U.S. citizens, a contention made recently by three former NSA hands and his denial sparked yet another spat in this ongoing controversy. Read more »
People who don’t like the idea of Google photographing their homes — and sniffing their wifi– will really hate this: The National Security Agency is compiling huge dockets of information on citizens including email and cell phone conversations, according to former NSA officials. Read more »
3Par, a Fremont, Calif.-based maker of storage arrays for data centers, pre-announced lowered earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal year 2009 yesterday, blaming, among other things, the fact that customers don’t have access to the electricity needed to add 3Par gear to their data centers. Data […] Read more »
