Google has begun to encrypt all searches made by users even if they aren't signed in to Google but it reveals the searches to its advertising customers. The search giant appears to be taking advantage of the NSA spying scandal to increase the number of its advertisers.
Danny Sullivan reports:Post-PRISM, Google Confirms Quietly Moving To Make All Searches Secure, Except For Ad Clicks
Countries that have pledged to support Internet freedom should allow technology vendors to report the number of electronic surveillance requests they receive, a tech advocacy group said Thursday.
The Global Network Initiative, whose members include Facebook, Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has made the request to the 21 governments in the Freedom Online Coalition.
Linus Torvalds, who created the open-source Linux operating system 22 years ago, took the keynote stage at the LinuxCon conference along with fellow kernel developers to talk about the state of Linux kernel development.
Throughout the hourlong session Sept. 18, the panel was peppered with a barrage of questions on a wide variety of topics, with the outspoken Torvalds providing all manner of colorful comments.
A branch of the NSA has been collecting global financial data, including credit card transactions and data from SWIFT, which runs an international bank messaging system, according to a report Sunday from Der Spiegel.
The German publication provided details about a U.S. National Security Agency branch called "Follow the Money" that inputs financial data into a system called "Tracfin" that it said came from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden's unprecedented exposure of US technology companies' close collaboration with national intelligence agencies, widely expected to damage the industry's financial performance abroad, may actually end up helping.
Despite emphatic predictions of waning business prospects, some of the big internet companies that the former National Security Agency contractor showed to be closely involved in gathering data on people overseas - such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. - say privately that they have felt little if any impact on their businesses.
Marissa Mayer was on stage on Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference when Michael Arrington asked her about NSA snooping.
He wanted to know what would happen if Yahoo just didn't cooperate. He wanted to know what would happen if she were to simply talk about what was happening, even though the government had forbidden it.
"Releasing classified information is treason. It generally lands you incarcerated," she said, clearly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation.
The CEOs of Yahoo and Facebook were each on the hot seat Wednesday answering questions about the U.S. government’s data surveillance programs.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, in an on-stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, said she couldn’t say more about the programs than Yahoo already has because doing so could be “treason.”
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has declassified 1,800 pages of documents that indicate that the NSA routinely overstepped its authority and misled oversight bodies about the surveillance of US citizens.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a new batch of secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents Tuesday afternoon. The documents come from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and they detail NSA violations of spying protocols from 2006 to 2009. They were released in relation to an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit.
On a Tuesday morning phone call with reporters, two top intelligence officials downplayed the court's findings, insisting that the court "did not find any intentional effort" to violate the law.
The ongoing revelations about NSA snoopery have prompted The Chocolate Factory to accelerate its effort to encrypt user data at every possible point.
Mountain View had already announced that its Google Cloud Storage platform was adding server-side encryption to reassure users. User data uploaded to the service is now being encrypted using AES-128 in RAM before being written to disk.
