- Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Electronic Frontier Foundation launched an FOIA lawsuit a week ago – the outcome will be telling for the future of the United States’ many citizen-suspects. Did you mean “If the American people find out” ..?

[via Schneier on Security] Interesting that a corporation’s attempts at avoiding taxes would open it up to liability on this scale – Facebook’s existence more or less hinges upon the sleight of hand which allows its “users” to believe that they are also its “customers”. Pro Tip: If you’re on Facebook, you are a supplier [...]

The critical question is: At what level will the American public be comfortable with Google sharing information with NSA? – Google to enlist NSA to help it ward off cyberattacks [via Bruce Schneier] Wake me up when this nightmare is over… wait, that won’t work…

Sometimes, however, you may not be able to get in touch with a site’s webmaster, or they may refuse to take down the content in question. For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. [...]

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two [...]

More than half of the internet’s top websites use a little known capability of Adobe’s Flash plug-in to track users and store information about them, but only four of them mention the so-called Flash Cookies in their privacy policies, UC Berkeley researchers reported Monday. Unlike traditional browser cookies, Flash cookies are relatively unknown to web [...]

Military organizations consider social networking sites’ core features (and persistent vulnerabilities) to be an unacceptable risk: “These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries,” reads a Marine Corps order, issued Monday. “The very [...]

George Orwell’s Big Brother represents the totalitarian rule of the party: a figure of dubious veracity imbued with absolute authority and control whose omniscient watch over its subjects is permanent and unquestionable. Surveillance underpins the efforts of any totalitarian state – the power of an authority is limited to the information upon which it may [...]