"Clear" For Takeoff: New App Removes All Of Your Objectionable Social Media Posts

If you have some kind of a social media account, chances are you've at some point made a statement or posted an image there that you're not particularly proud of.  Maybe you've let it get buried in a tidal wave of tech and time, but if it still exists, it can still be found...and possibly used against you.  Take this power away from your enemies with a new app...

(Image courtesy failbook.com.)

ACLU: None Of NSA's Phone Surveillance Stopped "A Single Terrorist Attack"

While the NSA has been monitoring all of our phone calls, it seems they've been phoning it in regarding any hint of actually stopping terrorism.  According to a report released by the ACLU this week, none of the NSA's "intelligence gathering" via phone records have helped to thwart a single terrorist attack...

Dropping The Ball On Watching Us All: NSA's "Complex" Software Mysteriously Deletes Info Before Lawsuit

The National Security Agency, who have been arguing accusations of massive breaches of privacy due to their supposed care about protecting the very national security their name entails, have turned out to be rather insecure after all...thanks to the apparent complexity their own software.

The Washington Post reports that the NSA was told to retain information for a lawsuit from the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), intended to assess the depths of the NSA's invasive espionage efforts, but that the information was difficult to retain due to the need to shut down certain software elements where the data would be contained. Deputy director Richard Ledgett claimed that trying to safely retain all of the information required for the lawsuit would be deleterious to the agency, and would create "an immediate, specific, and harmful impact on the national security of the United States."

The EFF maintains that some of the information required for their lawsuit, which deals with the unlawful and downright creepy Big Brothering of American citizens, has already been destroyed. The NSA, meanwhile, maintains massive operational facilities' worth of workers and computer systems in which any of their valuable peeping-tom discoveries could have been "lost."

Technologically Illiterate Court Claims Use of Open Wifi Is Wiretapping

While government agencies illegally and routinely spy on our everyday communications without repercussion, a court has ruled that sniffing open wifi signals may be considered wiretapping.  From Tech Dirt:

A couple years ago, we were disappointed to see a judge take the technologically wrong stance that data transmitted over WiFi is not a "radio communication," thereby making sniffing of unencrypted WiFi signals potentially a form of wiretapping. Indeed, based on that, the court eventually ruled that Google's infamous WiFi sniffing could be a violation of wiretap laws. This is wrong on so many levels... and tragically, an appeals court has now upheld the lower court's ruling.

There are serious problems with this. Under no reasonable view is WiFi not a radio communication first of all. That's exactly what it is. Second, sniffing unencrypted packets on an open network is a perfectly normal thing to do. The data is unencrypted and it's done on a network that is decidedly open. It's like saying it's "wiretapping" for turning on your radio and having it catch the signals your neighbor is broadcasting. That's not wiretapping. Third, even the court here admits that based on this ruling, parts of the law don't make any sense, because it renders those parts superfluous. Generally speaking, when a court ruling would render a part of a law completely superfluous, it means that the court misinterpreted the law . . .