Politics

In a secret court in Washington, Yahoo’s top lawyers made their case. The government had sought help in spying on certain foreign users, without a warrant, and Yahoo had refused, saying the broad requests were unconstitutional. The judges disagreed. That left Yahoo two choices: Hand over the data or break the law. So Yahoo became Continue Reading →

When news broke last week that Verizon was handing over information about all of its calls to the National Security Administration, things were bad enough. In the week since then, however, things have only gotten worse for our personal security. A program called PRISM was outed by the Washington Post. According to the top-secret document Continue Reading →

Facebook is the third, but it won’t be the last. On Tuesday, Facebook joined Google and Microsoft in requesting permission from the government to provide increased transparency on the data demands it receives under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The company is succinct in its statement, which Mike Issac of AllThingsD excerpted. Written by Ted Continue Reading →

Ahead of a U.S.-EU summit this Friday, the European Parliament had a brief debate about the PRISM surveillance scandal on Tuesday morning. With near unanimity, the speakers raised strong concerns with the program’s mass collection of Europeans’ personal data. For those unfamiliar with the workings of the European Parliament, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) Continue Reading →

Google’s chief legal officer has asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller for permission to disclose the number of requests for information it has received from federal agencies under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In a corporate blog post that went up minutes ago, Google’s David Drummond published Continue Reading →

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside Continue Reading →

President Obama just delivered his first public statements on the massive government surveillance efforts on internet companies and phone records targeting millions of ordinary citizens, which were revealed by leaked documents published online earlier this week. Answering a reporter’s questions after his speech on healthcare in San Jose, California, the president sought to downplay both Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. The program, code-named PRISM, has not been Continue Reading →

President Barack Obama thinks American students aren’t connected enough, and that access to faster Internet connections and technologies is crucial in today’s schools. That’s why he wants to make sure that 99% of students have high-speed broadband access within the next five years. “We are living in a digital age, and to help our students Continue Reading →

Since April 25, and running through July 19, Verizon has been giving the National Security Agency (NSA) daily information on all calls, both domestic and international. First reported by The Guardian, this transference of data comes after a “top secret court order issued in April.” So what, exactly, is Verizon handing over after you call Continue Reading →