Economic Fallout of the NSA Surveillance Scandal

From PC Mag:

Microsoft, despite denials, appears to be in bed with the NSA. Apparently all encryption and other methods to keep documents and discussions private are bypassed and accessible by the NSA and whomever it is working with. This means a third party, for whatever reason, can easily access confidential business deals, love letters, government classified memos, merger paperwork, financial transactions, intra-corporate schemes, and everything in between.

With that said, do you really want to buy a Microsoft product? Do you want to buy anything that gives easy access to snoops poking around at their leisure? If you'd think twice about this, then why would a foreign government rely on Microsoft Office with any confidence? Personally, if I were any foreign government or corporation, I'd stop using all Microsoft products immediately for fear of America spying on me. Nothing can be secret.

If I was a shareholder in any public company, I'd get up at the annual meeting and ask if the company was using Microsoft products and if so, I'd demand to know why it has not dumped them for something else . . . 

You've Been Skyped: Microsoft Provides NSA with Backdoor Access

The paranoiacs are proven right, yet again.  New documents reveal that Microsoft has provided the NSA with access to its users' audio and video chats on Skype, as well as email and message chat logs.  If you want secure messaging, you may have to revert back to carrier pigeons.  From Ars Technica:

Skype audio and video chats, widely regarded as resistant to interception thanks to encryption, can be wiretapped by American intelligence agencies, according to a new report in The Guardian. The report appears to contradict claims by Microsoft that it has not provided the contents of Skype communications to the government.

In a story published Thursday, based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, The Guardian offers some detail about extensive cooperation between the FBI, the National Security Agency, and Microsoft to enable government access to user communications via the intelligence tool known as PRISM. That cooperation included, according to the leaked NSA documents, enabling access to Outlook.com e-mails and chats, the SkyDrive cloud storage service, and Skype audio and video calls.

Anti-Tracking, Anonymous Search Engines Bloom in Aftermath of Mass Surveillance Leaks

If you're not using a search engine such as Duck Duck Go, then it is very likely that the search engine you are using is tracking your every move.  Search engines that value privacy and anonymity online are entering a boom following revelations of mass dragnet internet surveillance by government and business.  From The Guardian:

Gabriel Weinberg noticed web traffic building on the night of Thursday 6 June – immediately after the revelations about the "Prism" programme. Through the programme, the US's National Security Agency claimed to have "direct access" to the servers of companies including, crucially, the web's biggest search engines – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Within days of the story, while the big companies were still spitting tacks and tight-lipped disclaimers, the search engine Weinberg founded – which pledges not to track or store data about its users – was getting 50% more traffic than ever before. That has gone up and up as more revelations about NSA and GCHQ internet tapping have come in.

"It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism," says Weinberg, right, a 33-year-old living in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia on the US east coast. "We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press." From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight.

Yet you've probably never heard of DuckDuckGo.

Florida Lawmakers May Have Made Internet Illegal

As if you needed any more evidence of the ineptitude of U.S. lawmakers, here's a story out of Florida on a lawsuit alleging that state lawmakers have inadvertently made computers and smart phones illegal in their zeal to crack down on gambling at internet cafes.  From PC Mag:

A law passed earlier this year, which was intended to crack down on illegal gambling at Internet cafes, is worded in such a way that some are concerned that it might actually allow for a ban of all smartphones and computers in the state.

A lawsuit filed by café owner Consuelo Zapata argues that, among other things, the bill "interfere[es] with the promotion of goods and services — computers with Internet access — that are used for the communication of information and ideas."

The bill in question - HB 155 - was signed in to law by Gov. Rick Scott on April 10 and bans "electronic gambling devices."

Lawsuit Against Mass Electronic Surveillance to Proceed

From the EFF:

A federal judge today rejected the U.S. government's latest attempt to dismiss the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) long-running challenge to the government's illegal dragnet surveillance programs. Today's ruling means the allegations at the heart of the Jewel case move forward under the supervision of a public federal court.

"The court rightly found that the traditional legal system can determine the legality of the mass, dragnet surveillance of innocent Americans and rejected the government's invocation of the state secrets privilege to have the case dismissed," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director. "Over the last month, we came face-to-face with new details of mass, untargeted collection of phone and Internet records, substantially confirmed by the Director of National Intelligence. Today's decision sets the stage for finally getting a ruling that can stop the dragnet surveillance and restore Americans' constitutional rights."

App Provides Visualization of Twitter Retweets

From Wired:

The online application Where Does My Tweet Go?, created by information architect Benoît Vidal and the team at MFG Labs in France, uses a visual algorithm to illustrate how your messages spread between your followers and strangers alike. Rather than looking at your Twitter feed and seeing an obscure number of retweets for a post, these graphs let you see how your messages travel and who moves them along in the Twitterverse. Vidal says that while they were inspired by how information gets out so quickly over the Internet, they were also inspired by their dissatisfaction with other applications that tracked your activity and gave you content suggestions, but did so in an invisible way.

At&T Is Preparing to Follow Other Companies and Sell Your Data

From Fierce Wireless:

AT&T (NYSE:T) said it "may" begin selling anonymous information about its customers' wireless and Wi-Fi locations, U-verse usage, website browsing, mobile application usage and "other information" to other businesses. The carrier said it will protect its customers' privacy by providing the data in aggregate so it cannot be used to identify an individual. The carrier also said its customers can opt out of the program.

AT&T is not the first company to sell anonymous information about its customers' location and behavior. Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and most other Internet companies have long sold such data. In the wireless industry, Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) launched its Precision Market Insights business last year, which also anonymizes and sells customer location and usage information. Further, companies such as AirSage and SAP have recently begun selling aggregated location and usage information from wireless carriers.