Privacy

The BBC has revealed that TalkTalk's net filtering system, which blocks millions of web addresses and has been praised by Prime Minister David Cameron, is being controlled by Chinese networking giant Huawei.

Huawei has come under scrutiny in recent months after being blocked from doing business with the US after allegations that it has links to the People's Liberation Army in China and that ultimately any Chinese company is subject to the Chinese government.

Would you volunteer to have your Internet history and consumer data analyzed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and its contractors in exchange for a shorter line at airport security? The TSA is betting that most Americans would.

Just before launching, the New York bicycle-sharing program Citi Bike accidentally leaked the private account information of 1,174 of its customers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The data was exposed via a software glitch and included customers' names, contact information, credit card numbers and security codes, passwords, and birth dates.

Non-U.S. clients of American cloud hosting companies are clearly rattled by revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency collects huge amounts of customer data from Internet Service Providers and telecommunication companies.

The National Security Agency (NSA) needs no new court rulings or eavesdropping tools to see how angry Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is about its conduct and oversight.

In a 45-minute speech at the Center for American Progress, the senator denounced the combination of an "always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state" and a covert corpus of law that hardly restraints it.

It may well be that the NSA is recording every breath you take, every move you make.

But it's going to take them quite some time to review whether your breaths and moves are, in some way, significant or even troubling.

So along comes an Android app that can help you by forewarning the NSA with "Look! It wasn't me!" I am grateful to Android Central for forewarning me about USA PRISM Plus. Being an Android app, this sprightly invention relies on utter openness. For it takes random shots of your cell phone and sends them to the NSA Careers Twitter account.

A secret court, based in a small, soundproof, and secured room in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, D.C., meets regularly to decide on new and renew existing federal surveillance orders.

Lawyers representing MIT are filing a motion to intervene in my FOIA lawsuit over thousands of pages of Secret Service documents about the late activist and coder Aaron Swartz.

I am the plaintiff in this lawsuit. In February, the Secret Service denied in full my request for any files it held on Swartz, citing a FOIA exemption that covers sensitive law enforcement records that are part of an ongoing proceeding. Other requestors reported receiving the same response.

Anonymous breached FEMA servers and pulled information on hundreds of agency contacts worldwide. According to the hacker collective, it was in response to Homeland Security training exercises that centered on a fictional version of the hacker collective. In a document containing non-sensitive data pulled from FEMA's system, Anonymous wrote that the attack was designed as a reminder that it would continue to fight against government efforts to police the internet.

In an interview with the Guardian, Losse said that when she joined Facebook in 2005, customer support staff were each handed a “master password,” which allowed them to log in as any Facebook user and access all their messages and data.

She said that staff needed to have access to accounts in order to manage and repair user issues, claiming that it was common practice at the time for early-stage startups to give their staff access to customers’ personal information.