It isn’t just online advertisers that benefit from user-tracking cookies. The National Security Agency has been taking advantage of the cookies that companies force on users to pinpoint targets they want to hack, according to newly released Edward Snowden documents.
Where's Waldo? Ask the NSA.
That's right, you can add location tracking to the list of surveillance activities being carried out by the secretive US National Security Agency.
When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations.
While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden succeeded where President Barack Obama couldn't - getting Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to upgrade computer security against hackers.
Microsoft is planning to encrypt some or all of the data traffic moving through its servers in an attempt to protect both its consumers and, presumably, its own corporate secrets, according to a report from the Washington Post.
The maneuver is prompted by concerns that the NSA has tapped critical communications links inside the company's networks, "people familiar with the emerging plans" told the Post.
Microsoft is moving toward a major new effort to encrypt its Internet traffic after concluding that the National Security Agency may have broken into its global communications systems, said people familiar with the emerging plans.
In October, a report surfaced that the US National Security Agency secretly accessed data from tech giants like Google and Yahoo, by way of intercepting the unencrypted traffic flowing between each company's data centers.
Singapore and South Korea played key roles aiding Australia and the United States to tap undersea telecommunication cables linking Asia, the Middle East and Europe, further leaks from former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden's documents revealed.
Despite CEO Marc Benioff’s claim that Edward Snowden’s leaks on mass surveillance were “irrelevant” for Salesforce, another executive at the cloud giant has claimed customers were keen to see improved security in response to the explosive revelations.
Benioff told journalists at the company’s Dreamforce conference this week the leaks had not been a “a major issue”, saying the customer data Salesforce dealt with was not the kind the US government typically went after.
The US Supreme Court today denied a motion by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) for a court order against the National Security Agency (NSA)'s blanket collection of telephone records.
According to the New York Times, while the Court gave no reasons for the rejection, the reason was likely procedural: In its response to the EPIC petition, the government had argued that the petition did not meet the requirements for a writ of mandamus, and that the proper procedure for EPIC would be "...to file an action in federal district court, as other parties have done."
