LISBON Technology has given internet giants irresistible power when they work in concert with governments, whistleblower Ed Snowden told the Web Summit that opened in Lisbon on Monday.

When we see government and corporations working in concert they become the left and right hands of the same body. What we see is the concentration of power, he told the European celebration of start-ups and new technologies gathering high-tech entrepreneurs and investors.

If you create an irresistible power how do you police the expression of that power when it is used against the public rather than for it? he asked, speaking by video link from Russia, where he has lived since 2013.

The U.S. government last month urged tech giants to allow police to read encrypted messages, saying access was essential to prevent serious crime despite privacy concerns.

Snowden has just published a book that lays out his reasons for passing tens of thousands of secret documents to major news organizations in 2013.

The files were compiled while he worked for the U.S. National Security Agency and revealed a dense network of communications and internet scrutiny by the NSA and partner agencies around the world.

Snowden recognized that public awareness is growing over the abuses he has denounced, and he lauded efforts to protect privacy, especially in Europe.

But he told the gathering of some 70,000: The problem is not data protection, its data collection and the blind faith that internet users must have in the internets masters.

The four-day summit is expected to focus on politics and tax issues, as well as new mobilities, medical applications, robotics and cryptocurrencies, organizers said.

Tech has become hyper-political, said Paddy Cosgrave, the Irish founder and boss of Europes biggest tech gathering.

Increasingly, the front page of newspapers around the world are dominated by issues relating to technology, he told AFP.

Among the main events are discussions on the future of money, cars, medicine, housing, advertising, medias and humans presence in outer space.

But what has emerged as the leading topic is how high-tech has become a crucial factor in the Chinese-U.S. trade war, the monetary power of sovereign governments and the radicalization of social media.

As sector giants continue to face calls for fair taxation or even dismantlement, regulators such as the EU Commissions vice president and competition chief, Margrethe Vestager, are expected to draw a crowd.

Vestager is to close the summit on Thursday, speaking just after Michael Kratsios, who is being sent from the White House to present the U.S. viewpoint on internet taxation and regulation.

Vestager has spearheaded European efforts to get companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google to pay more in taxes in countries where they earn large amounts of their profits.

In addition to her post as EU competition chief, the Dane has also now been tasked with overseeing digital activities across the 28-member bloc.

Vestager is incredibly popular because shes trying to create a level playing field for innovators in particular in Europe, Cosgrave told AFP.

At another event, former Cambridge Analytica executive Brittany Kaiser is expected to outline risks to personal data in the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

The now defunct data consultancy allegedly hijacked personal data on Facebook users ahead of the 2016 U.S. vote.

Huaweis rotating chairman, Guo Ping, is another headliner.

He is likely to call for support from the tech community after the Chinese phone giant was banned from the United States owing to suspicion its systems could be used to collect data for Beijing.

A scheduled address almost certain to raise the issue of internet taxation is by Pascal Saint-Amans, head of the OECDs Centre for Tax Policy and Administration.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development is drafting a unified approach to a digital tax on internet giants and multinational groups to be presented by next June.

View post:
Fugitive Edward Snowden warns of Web giants' 'irresistible power' when they work with governments - The Japan Times

The Department of Justice is asking for information that could help it identify the anonymous author behind a forthcoming book that has been billed as an "unprecedented behind-the-scenes portrait" of President Donald Trump's time in office.

Assistant attorney general Joseph Hunt sent a letter on Monday to the author's publisher and literary agency demanding assurances that the author, who claims to be a current or former senior official in the Trump administration, did not sign a nondisclosure agreement and "did not have access to any classified information in connection with government service."

If the two firms, Hachette Book Group and Javelin, could not provide such a guarantee, Hunt asked them to provide the anonymous author's dates of government service and the agencies where the author was employed.

The government could likely use those details to determine the author's identity. The book, titled "A Warning," is scheduled to go on sale Nov. 19.

Hachette and Javelin responded defiantly later in the day, declining to comply with the Justice Department's request.

"Our author knows that the President is determined to unmask whistleblowers who may be in his midst. That's one of the reasons A WARNING was written," Javelin said in a statement. "But we support the publisher in its resolve that the administration's effort to intimidate and expose the senior official who has seen misconduct at the highest levels will not prevent this book from moving forward."

Hachette, for its part, said it had made a commitment of confidentiality to the author "and we intend to honor that commitment."

"Please be assured that Hachette takes its legal responsibilities seriously and, accordingly, Hachette respectfully declines to provide you with the information your letter seeks," the New York-based literary giant wrote.

The author of the book gained notoriety under the pen name "Anonymous" after publishing an op-ed in The New York Times last fall in which the person claimed to be part of an internal "resistance" movement within the administration. The op-ed went viral and spurred speculation about which Trump administration official could be behind it.

The Trump administration has aggressively pursued government officials suspected of leaking information to members of the media. In September, the Justice Department filed suit against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and his publisher Macmillan for failing to submit his book, "Permanent Record," to the government for clearance.

Read more:
The Justice Department is asking for details about 'Anonymous,' the author of forthcoming book on Trump administration - CNBC

Europes facts safety laws is continue to lacking the stage and will remain a paper tiger right up until online giants are hit with significant fines, according to NSA-contractor turned whistleblower and privateness campaigner Edward Snowden.

The Typical Data Safety Regulation (GDPR) arrived into drive throughout the European Union on 25 Could 2018 and is developed to give EU citizens far more control above their particular details. Most notably it introduces probably substantial fines for organisations that are considered not to have guarded the information of their buyers. And even though GDPR has been found by several as a significant improve to data defense and has prompted phone calls for equivalent legislation in other places, Snowden appears underwhelmed.

This is a good piece of laws in terms of the exertion they are striving to do. Is GDPR the right solution? I consider no and I assume the blunder it makes is actually in the title the Normal Knowledge Safety Regulation misplaces the challenge, Snowden explained to the Internet Summit tech meeting in Lisbon.

Advertisement

The dilemma isnt details protection, the issue is information assortment, he claimed.

Snowden was speaking by way of a video clip website link from Russia, where he is now dwelling after leaking particulars of solution US federal government surveillance programmes to reporters back again in 2013.

Regulating the security of information presumes that the assortment of knowledge in the initial place was proper, was suitable, that it wont characterize a risk or a danger, that it is really alright to spy on everyone all the time whether they are your customers or your citizens so extended as it under no circumstances leaks, so very long as only you are in command of what it is that you have stolen from every person, he extra.

Snowden explained that while GDPR is a superior very first effort and hard work that the bar was set pretty minimal prior to: What I am expressing is that its not the alternative, its not the fantastic internet that we want.

A single of the most substantial options of GDPR is that organisations can confront a most fantastic of 20 million euros or 4 per cent of around the globe turnover whichever is increased. When some substantial GDPR fines have currently landed, Snowden explained: Right until we see those fines currently being utilized each individual solitary calendar year to the internet giants, right until they reform their behaviour and commence complying not just with the letter but with the spirit of the legislation, it is a paper tiger that truly presents us a untrue sense of reassurance, he reported.

For Snowden the more substantial concern is that assortment of personal details by websites, apps and far more has turn into a dominant business model for the internet.

We have legalised the abuse of the particular person, by means of the private. We have entrenched a method that makes the population susceptible for the gain of the privileged, he reported.

Information is not harmless. Information just isnt abstract when it really is about persons. It can be not data which is currently being exploited, it really is people today that are currently being exploited. It is not facts and networks that are becoming influenced and manipulated it is you.

See the original post here:
GDPR is missing the position, says Edward Snowden - Mash Viral

Scroll through the messaging app Signal, and it reads like a Page 6 of the sports world. The boldfaced names span from the underworld to the executive suites, encompassing those on the biggest stages to the players behind the scenes.

There's the father of the country's top basketball recruit, and he's listed alongside top executives in the NFL and NBA. There are plenty of college football and basketball coaches, mixed in with the agents, runners and street hustlers who dominate basketball's black market.

There are star athletes seeking privacy, university officials attempting to sidestep public-records requests and folks at every level of sport seeking the superior security the app boasts.

In an environment wheretampering issues loom over professional sportsand awidespread federal investigation still lingers over the NCAA landscape, the desire for privacy, encryption and even disappearing messages has increased. And that's why Signal, long the private messaging domain to evade or pry information from the alphabet soup of Washington power brokers FBI, NSA and CIA has surged into the NFL, NBA, NCAA and beyond.

Signal was considered transformative upon its inception in 2010 for its ability to increase transparency in political reporting and protect whistleblowers. Wired Magazine called it "the security community's gold standard for surveillance-resistant communications." NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden once said heused the app every day. AddedJonathan Kaufman, the director of Northeastern University's School of Journalism: "For political reporters right now, it's as common a tool as a notebook or a pencil."

An app that went mainstream in the political world to increase transparency has actually taken on the opposite role in the sports world. For public schools in college sports, the app has emerged as an outlet to avoid detection from Freedom Of Information Act requests. In the professional sports world, it's used to combat the uptick in tampering enforcement. In college sports, it's an aide to the pervasive and creative methods to avoid NCAA amateurism rules.

Signal is viewed as the safest encryption app available. Kaufman said the messages remain secure and can't be compromised or intercepted "without a hell of a lot of effort." And while it doesn't allow for the full allotment of GIFs and emoticons of traditional text banter, it's a place where information, documents and even phone calls can be conducted with increased discretion.

"Our general counsel encouraged us to get on Signal," said a high-ranking collegiate athletic official. "There's auto-delete based on the rules you set, and that helps us avoid FOIA requests. ...It's become the main method of communication between the administration and our [athletic] staff."

The use of the app for privacy can be beneficial in numerous ways. Think of Signal as a more secure version of WhatsApp, a popular texting app that is separate from a cell phone's traditional texting app. With Signal, all the messages, photos and documents passed back and forth are encrypted, and the app makersbrag about the security on its website.

Perhaps most important is that Signal does not have access to the message, which in theory means that no outside entity can use legal means to access the conversations.

That extra level of security has nudged Signal from the purview of security officials, whistleblowers and reporters in Washington to all levels of sports. Multiple prominent people in basketball caught up in the federal investigation are using the app, as the amount of runners, middlemen and agents on the app make it a handy underworld directory. (NCAA investigators appear wise to this; many of them have joined in the past few weeks.) "It's striking to me how mainstream Signal has become," Kaufman said. "To some of us, it used to feel like something out of a James Bond movie."

One grassroots source said the app has been filled with so many basketball underworld characters that it doubles as a source of amusement. "My favorite thing to do is open it up once in a while and see who is on there," he said. "It's exactly who you would think would be on there."

In the NBA and NFL, Signal spans every level from players to executives. In the wake of a round of NBA free agency where news of deals were broken prior to the formal start of free agency, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announcedstricter enforcement of rules for tamperingand salary-cap circumvention. The NBA evendistributed a memo this week that appeared to target the use of Signal, saying teams can't use communication methods that auto-delete.

Story continues

In the post-deflate-gate NFL, players, agents and executives took cues from the leagueweaponizing Tom Brady's text messagesand have flooded to Signal as a tool for extreme privacy. It's not uncommon to have the setting set to wipe all messages after 24 hours.

In the sports world, Signal has become a place where business gets done.

At 5:52 p.m. ET on June 30, ESPNbroke the story that Kevin Durant was signing with the Brooklyn Nets, eight minutes before free agency even opened. During a news conference at Las Vegas summer league, commissioner Adam Silver admitted there was no point in the league having tampering rules they couldn't enforce.

On Sept. 20, Silver announced stricter punishments for tampering rules and salary-cap circumvention. More importantly, the NBA widened the scale of its surveillance.

Signal bustles with NBA agents, and in recent weeks, more and more general managers and front-office executives began popping up on the app. As part of the NBA's enhanced enforcement, the league is permitted to randomly audit five teams this season. That includes relinquishing all electronic communication between employees, agents and players without cause. This will become a ponderous task for teams to gather all that information at the risk they could get audited.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver speaks at a news conference before an NBA preseason basketball game between the Houston Rockets and the Toronto Raptors on Oct. 8. (AP)

Teams are in a wait-and-see period on how to view the NBA's enforcement rhetoric. Are the rule changes a sign the NBA is serious about enforcement? Or are league officials serious about looking like they're serious about enforcement? Even if it's the latter, there's a chance that a sacrificial lamb could help the NBA seize the optics.

"As there's more and more enforcement, more and more people who feel like they don't want to comply will use methods that enable them not to comply," a league source said. "That's not just a Signal thing. That's using anything someone can think of."

While Signal has emerged in NBA circles as a safe haven from outside eyes viewing communication, that's also under NBA scrutiny. The NBA is requiring front-office officials to retain all records of professional communication between players and agents for a year. The league office distributed a memo on Thursday reminding teams just that. A source with knowledge of the memo told Yahoo Sports the NBA also mandated a new rule: Team personnel may not use apps that auto-delete relevant communication.

Signal wasn't specifically mentioned. The app has an optional auto-deleting function that sets a disappearing timer anywhere from five seconds to one week on sent and received messages. According to the source, no impermissible apps were specifically mentioned. (A few years back, an NBA source noted that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban encouraged league executives to download an app called Cyber Dust, now known as Dust, to discuss trades and moves. Cuban endorsed Dustas part of his entrepreneurial empire.)

As long as they don't auto-delete messages, teams are permitted to use apps like Signal. That means an agent is free to badger a general manager about his client's playing time or update him on his health, just like they can on any other communication platform.

It's hard to say how the NBA can enforce such a distinction, however. The whole point of deleting messages on an app as secure as Signal is that nobody will know you deleted them. You can't audit something you don't know exists or existed.

Since 2018, Signal has become an increasingly popular app in the sprawling legal and agent ranks orbiting NFL teams, the league's union and thousands of players whose communications are subject to investigation. But unlike the intelligence community, it's not the military-grade end-to-end encryption that creates an attraction. Instead, it's the ability to consistently spike messages not only from the sender's phones, but the receiver's device as well. A feature which barring screenshots and a comprehensive record of timestamps kept by the parties sending and receiving messages can make it extremely difficult for retrieval during litigation.

Two NFL executives said they are unaware of an NFL mandate to retain information, similar to the one the NBA has. An NFL spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

One prominent example of prying eyes that has made Signal an easy sell to players in the NFL: The deflate-gate fiasco involving New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in 2015. In the midst of that league investigation, text messages and calls exchanged between Brady and Patriots employees became a pillar of suspicion in the NFL's probe. The league also accused Brady of allegedly obstructing the investigation bydestroying a cell phone before it could undergo a forensic auditby investigators. Ultimately, the NFL ended up using parts of Brady's communications and his failure to turn over his phone to levy a four-game suspension.

In this June 17, 2015, file photo, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady calls out signals during an NFL football minicamp in Foxborough, Massachusetts. (AP)

The lesson learned by lawyers familiar with the proceeding? Multiple elements of your communications including your actions with that data can be weaponized against you in the league's system of justice.

The resulting reaction was simple. Some lawyers and agents have spent the ensuing years looking at systems of communication outside of text messages that could be used to wipe out phone data on a consistent, or even scheduled, basis. Some advised clients to use apps that deleted digital messages or phone call logs every 24 hours.

The legal justification was succinct: If you want communications to stay consistently private and you don't want to have to justify that privacy to an arbitrator or investigator down the road you should be using something like Signal to wipe your messages on a consistent basis. If you do that, and NFL investigators come along asking why texts were deleted, the answer becomes defensible: "This is one form of communication I prefer and it automatically wipes my messages for privacy on a scheduled basis."

As one lawyer with multiple NFL clients framed it, "If an NFL investigator says, 'Turn over your phone for an audit,' and you've been using Signal, your privacy in that audit is strengthened when Signal has been wiping your messages with regularity. If it's your common practice to use Signal and the app has been erasing information every single day for a year, it's very hard for someone to argue that you're hiding something when the behavior of erasing information is not only consistent, but even done according to a schedule."

Applied to Brady in deflate-gate, if he and other Patriots employees had been using Signal for all of their communications, not only would those communications have been wiped clean, there would have been no available log showing when they communicated. Brady also could have handed over his phone to the NFL and then had a strong legal argument for why his Signal app had destroyed all of his messages so long as the deletions had been part of a standard wiping schedule.

"It's a tool for privacy and that's what I tell players," the lawyer said. "The reasons for why you're seeking that privacy is your business. You could just say 'Someone could hack my phone or I could lose it or I don't trust people. I feel more secure about my phone when everything gets deleted once a day.' Now the burden is on the other side to prove that you're lying about that. If you've been consistently deleting things on a schedule, it's hard to prove that you're doing it for nefarious purposes."

Another lawyer with NFL clients said Signal has become a preferred conduit to leak documents to parties that shouldn't have them, or engage in communications that aren't supposed to be taking place. The app, he said, can be particularly useful in cases of litigation where wide swaths of messages can become subject to discovery either by eliminating "searchable" texts in a phone audit, or simply being a form of communication that opposing lawyers aren't aware of during discovery.

"Some [discovery] requests, it's obvious the [other counsel] doesn't even know Signal exists," one lawyer said. "They'll ask for emails or SMS messages and other things, but never mention anything that would include something from Signal. In those situations, you just follow the discovery request as narrowly as it is presented and then go about your business like the Signal account doesn't exist."

More from Yahoo Sports:

Visit link:
Why has a privacy app used by Edward Snowden hit the NBA, NFL and NCAA? - Yahoo Sports

Please enable Javascript to watch this video

NEW YORK The Justice Department has sent a letter to the publisher and literary agency of the anonymous government official whose book is scheduled to come out later this month. The letter raises questions over whether any confidentiality agreement has been violated and asked for information that could help reveal the author's identity.

The publisher, Hachette Book Group, responded Monday by saying it would provide no additional information beyond calling the author a "current or former senior official."

The book, "A Warning," is by the official who wrote an essay published last year in The New York Times, alleging that numerous people in the government were resisting the "misguided impulses" of President Donald Trump. News of the Justice Department letter was first reported by CNN.

"A Warning" has a Nov. 19 release date. The DOJ letter, dated Monday, is from Assistant Attorney General Joseph H. Hunt and addressed to Hachette general counsel Carol F. Ross and to Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer of the Washington, D.C.-based Javelin literary agency.

"If the author is, in fact, a current or former 'senior official' in the Trump Administration, publication of the book" might violate "that official's legal obligations under one or more nondisclosure agreements, including nondisclosure agreements that are routinely required with respect to information obtained in the course of one's official responsibilities or as a condition for access to classified information," reads the letter, which Hachette shared with The Associated Press.

"We request that you immediately provide us with your representations that the author did not sign any nondisclosure agreement and that the author did not have access to any classified information in connection with government service. If you cannot make those representations, we ask that you immediately provide either the nondisclosure agreements the author signed or the dates of the author's service and the agencies where the author was employed, so that we may determine the terms of the author's nondisclosure agreements and ensure that they have been followed."

Ross wrote back that the publisher was not "party to any nondisclosure agreements" that would require pre-publication review. Ross added that "Hachette routinely relies on its authors to comply with any contractual obligations they may have" and that it was committed to maintaining the official's anonymity.

"Hachette respectfully declines to provide you with the information your letter seeks," she wrote.

Other recent books have drawn attention from Trump and the DOJ. In September, the U.S. government filed a lawsuit against former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, alleging he violated nondisclosure agreements by publishing the memoir "Permanent Record" without giving the government an opportunity to review it first.

In 2018, a Trump lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to the publisher of Michael Wolff's inflammatory account of the Trump White House, "Fire and Fury." The letter was ignored, and the book became a million seller. As of midday Monday, "A Warning" was No. 50 on Amazon.com's best seller list. It briefly topped the list after its announcement last month.

Read more here:
DOJ sends letter to publisher of book by Anonymous - Q13 News Seattle

Good morning, heres your Monday morning briefing to set you up for the day ahead. Look out for these three things happening around the world today.

Web Summit, one of Europes largest technology conferences, gets underway with a keynote from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Also speaking on day one is Huawei president Guo Ping, who will outline his vision for the 5G era. Other speakers at the four-day event include former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the EUs commissioner for competition Margrethe Vestager and CEO of Wikipedia Katherine Maher.

The annual event takes place at Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.

Ride-hailing firm Uber Technologies posts its third-quarter earnings for 2019.

Last quarter Uber reported earnings per share of -$4.72, the largest quarterly loss in its history. This was largely due to stock-based compensation following a much-hyped but ultimately lacklustre IPO in May.

Investors have raised concerns about the loss-making firms ability to become profitable. Analysts predict losses to narrow compared with the previous quarter, with revenue rising by as much as 16% and earnings per share standing at -$0.85.

The UK governments Digital, Culture, Media and Sport sub-committee on disinformation hears evidence from PayPal executives about how online payments are changing the way people donate to political parties and campaigns.

Under political campaigning laws, any contribution of more than 500 must come from a UK-based company or individual. However, it is unclear how payment services such as PayPal can always be sure that someone isnt circumventing these rules, for instance by making multiple smaller donations without handing over their details.

The session, which takes place at 1:15 PM, forms part of a wider investigation into how disinformation and data privacy abuses affect democracy.

How the threat of hacking looms over the 2020 election

Get the Verdict morning email

Google acquires Fitbit in $2.1bn move into wearables

How smart networks are powering the hospitals of the future

See original here:
Edward Snowden kicks off Web Summit / Uber posts Q3 earnings / PayPal gives evidence on political donations - Verdict

SAN FRANCISCO In recent months, satellite photos have streamed into a former textile factory here revealing a build-up of potent Russian air defense systems in Ukraine, a serious new threat to NATO aircraft.

This is not a secret CIA facility, and the images didn't come from a billion-dollar surveillance satellite.

They were taken by private spacecraft some the size of a loaf of bread operated by Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley company that is leading a revolution in how humans glimpse Earth from space.

A short stroll from the downtown San Francisco headquarters of Yelp and LinkedIn, Planet operates the largest and least expensive fleet of satellites in history the first to take pictures of the entire landmass of the globe, once a day, and sell them to the public. The company is part of a fast-growing commercial satellite industry that is democratizing insights once available mainly to people with Top Secret government security clearances.

In May, one of Planet's satellites captured a white plume of smoke from an illegal North Korean missile test, an image that rocketed through the next day's news cycle, undercutting President Donald Trump's insistence that the North Korean regime is negotiating with the U.S. in good faith.

"I think it's so important that the pictures don't lie," said Will Marshall, one of Planet's co-founders and a former NASA spacecraft designer. "The picture is what it is. And sometimes that can be inconvenient. But it also will help us to transition away from this post-truth world, towards one more grounded in facts."

The U.S. intelligence community is a Planet customer, but so are environmental groups, farmers, Wall Street traders and journalists. Planet's fleet of imaging satellites documents climate change, natural disasters, the growth of refugee camps and the number of cars in the parking lots of a national retail chain.

When floods inundated Western Iowa in March, state officials didn't have a handle on the severity of the damage until they saw Planet's overhead imagery. They say the data helped them better coordinate the response.

As last year's Camp fire raged across California, Planet's imagery helped officials decide where to send firefighting crews.

"Earthquakes, fires, floods, typhoons, tsunamis We can help, because we have an image the day before, an image afterwards, to help responders quickly get in there," Marshall said.

Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.

The first spy satellites weighed nearly a ton and sent back pictures by dropping giant film canisters into passing airplanes. These days the most sophisticated government photo satellites can be the size of a school bus, and cost billions.

Marshall and his partners built their first satellite in a garage, applying the principles of the smart phone, stuffing a sophisticated camera and telescope into a rectangular box that weighs as much as a bowling ball.

Then they began blasting dozens of them into space at a time, piggybacking on commercial launches of larger satellites.

Planet won't say how much each one costs to make, except that it's "orders of magnitude" cheaper than traditional satellites.

Commercial imaging satellites are not new; Americans have been looking at pictures from space of their houses on Google maps for years. But those pictures tend to be several years old, because there are only so many commercial satellites and they can only cover so much ground.

Planet has changed the game.

The company's satellites are lined up in orbit like a Saturn ring, taking a photo of the same spot at the same time at least once every 24 hours.

Never before have humans been able to document change on the planet's surface in quite this way. Marshall, who has given two Ted Talks on his technology, has a tag line for what he hopes this new imagery will mean for Earth: "You can't fix what you can't see."

The company's fleet of 140 satellites beams back 1.2 million images a day. That is so much data that customers are turning to artificial intelligence to make sense of it. That technology is in its infancy, which means this could be the beginning of a new age of insights about the Earth. One day, there could be enough satellites in orbit to provide total persistent overhead coverage an-on demand photo of any spot on the earth at any time, weather permitting.

Other U.S. commercial satellite firms, including BlackSky and Maxar, operate more expensive satellites with better resolution than Planet's, but they don't have as many in orbit.

Planet's small satellites stay in orbit only two or three years before burning up as they fall form the sky. So the company is constantly building more of them, with newer and better technology.

"Last year we built roughly as many satellites as the whole world put together, outside of us, here in this little lab in San Francisco," Marshall said.

The company, which has yet to go public, is now valued at $2 billion.

As with any surveillance technology, the proliferation of commercial imagery can be put to ill use, by both governments and the private sector. The U.S. government limits the resolution of commercial satellite photos to ensure American spies still have the best pictures, and so the satellites cannot be used to snap close-ups of backyard sunbathers. But commercial satellites are not without privacy risks, and industry experts are only beginning to grapple with the implications. How long before a satellite photo of a straying spouse's car, parked where it should not be, is used in a divorce case?

Robert Cardillo, who until last year led the U.S. spy agency that processes satellite imagery, says the leaders of his field are now grappling with the same sort of influx of new data as the National Security Agency did when human communication migrated to the internet. And he wants to avoid an Edward Snowden moment revelations about surveillance that alarm the public.

"We're awash in pixels," said Cardillo, the former director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, or NGA, which has contracts with Planet and other private satellite companies. "Who controls the data? Where is it stored? How do you protect privacy? We have an opportunity to have this conversation now with the American people."

Biking and walking to work in downtown San Francisco, Planet's hoodie-and-jeans-wearing employees argue that their products are not designed for spying. They named their small satellites "doves" for a reason, Marshall said they believe they are a force for good.

A New Zealand livestock company is using Planet's imagery to monitor the grass in its pastures and send the cattle to the areas where the grass is higher. Arizona State University, the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and the University of Queensland partnered with Planet to map the world's coral reefs. Humboldt County, California has used the pictures to dramatically improve its enforcement actions against illegal marijuana farmers.

For Sarah Bidgood, who researches U.S.-Russia arms control issues at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, Planet's images have been invaluable, helping her track those new Russian weapons in Ukraine's Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014.

It's better for everyone if private analysts can study the world's geopolitical hotspots, she said.

"That's one of the things that Planet is doing that I think is so essential to the work of analysts like myself," Bidgood said. "It is placing information that gives us insights into granular changes on the ground into our hands. And that's what allows us to do good, nuanced analysis that can lead to good policy."

Here is the original post:
Tiny, privately owned satellites are changing how we view the Earth - NBC News

Who Loves ICE is a column examining the companies profiting from their work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Booz Allen Hamilton portrays itself on its website as a company committed to changing the world for the better, driven by a high regard for its fellow humans.

We are a global firm of approximately 26,300 diverse, passionate, and exceptional people driven to excel, do right, and realize positive change in everything we do, the management and tech consulting firm states. We believe in corporate and individual citizenship that make our communities better places for all.

Evidently, the company believes one way to make communities better places for all is to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the law enforcement agency behind policies like family separation and the housing of immigrants in inhumane conditions.

Booz Allen Hamilton has made at least $32 million working with the agency in the 2019 fiscal year, according to USAspending.gov, a government spending tracker.

Most of that money has come from ICEs information technology division and detention compliance and removals office, which have paid Booz Allen Hamilton for immigration data modernization support services and law enforcement systems and analysis project management office support, according to the website USAspending.gov. ICEs detention compliance and removals office handles deportations, and the sanitary, safety, and health conditions within ICE detention facilities.

When VICE asked about the services the company provides to ICE and how working with the agency falls in line with the firms values, Booz Allen spokesperson Jessica Klenk noted the company does not have any involvement in detention operations or family separation.

For many years we have provided support to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Klenk said. Our work is predominately [sic] analytic in nature and related to combating human trafficking and other criminal behavior. We only perform work that is consistent with our values.

Last year, consulting firm McKinsey & Company ended its work with ICE after the New York Times reported that the company had received over $20 million working with the agency. That same year, a separate Booz Allen Hamilton spokesperson denied that the firms work with ICE involved the separation of children from adults in a New York Times interview.

Booz Allen Hamilton has not indicated it has any plans to end its contracts with ICE.

The company gained national attention for its work with the government in 2013, when Edward Snowden, a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton, decided to blow the whistle on the National Security Agencys mass surveillance system. Snowden only had access to the information he provided because of the agencys work with Booz Allen Hamilton.

Excerpt from:
Booz Allen Hamilton Is Making Millions Working with ICE - Vice News

At the recent Joe Rogan podcast, Edward Snowden explained how carrier networks and tech companies collectively use smartphones to spy on us.

But this time, he is pointing fingers at Facebook. In a forthcoming interview on the Voxs Recode Decode podcast, Edward Snowden says its a mistake to think that tech companies are lesser of a threat to privacy than the NSA (National Security Agency).

Whistleblower Edward Snowden is a former NSA employee who is living the life of a political refugee in Russia for the last six years.

Back in 2013, Snowden leaked several classified government documents to international media, therefore, revealing the unethical mass surveillance activities conducted by the NSA.

Six years after the disclosure of NSA files, Snowden told Recodes Kara Swisher that the mass surveillance powers of tech companies such as Facebook and Google are equally worrisome as the powers of government agencies such as the NSA.

Facebooks internal purpose, whether they state it publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent of their capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment, said Edward Snowden on the podcast.

He also states that Facebook and Google collect an insane amount of data over the facade of Oh, were connecting people. and Oh, were organizing data.

On the other hand, Snowden showed believe that government agencies know more about users than tech companies because of their reach over different platforms.

In the conversation with Kara Swisher, Edward also talks about the bleak privacy laws that have no jurisdiction over the data collected from tech giants. He also mentions the current scenario where there is no accountability on the information stored.

Why Google should be able to read your email. There is no good reason why Google should know the messagesFacebook shouldnt be able to see what youre saying

Since the infamous Cambridge Analytica Scandal, government agencies have become more stringent on the data collection practices of Google and other tech giants. To this date, Mark Zuckerburg is being questioned about the mishaps that occurred on Facebook.

A few months ago, the state of California passed the Privacy bill to empower users over the data collected by tech giants. Meanwhile, other governments are also doing something or the other to curb data collection policies of tech companies.

However, the question is is it enough?

Read more:
Edward Snowden Says Facebook Equally Dangerous As The NSA - Fossbytes

Image Credit: Pixabay

New Delhi: As Indians break their heads over WhatsApp spygate where an Israeli bug infected select users smartphones to access their personal details, the mass surveillance technology has truly come of age and now the governments just need to make a missed call to install an "exploit link" into the device of a person they want to bug and listen in.

From the days when surveillance methods involved bugging the phone or cable wires to tap phones (remember Radia tapes!) to track a person's vehicle by installing a tracking device beneath the car, cyber criminals and hackers have devised modern and untraceable tools to hack into your systems.

The most popular mass surveillance programme is 'PRISM' - under which the US National Security Agency (NSA) collects user's personal communications from various US internet companies.

'PRISM' allegedly collects stored Internet communications based on demands made to internet companies.

The NSA can use PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get access to data.

Its existence was leaked by NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, who warned that the extent of mass data collection was far greater than the public knew.

US President Barack Obama, during a visit to Germany, stated that the NSA's data gathering practices constitute "a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people".

According to Amnesty.org, NSA and UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are monitoring you with code names.

'Muscular' is one such project that "intercepts user data as it passes between Google servers". Yahoo! was also said to be affected.

Between December 2012 and January 2013, 'Muscular' collected 181 million records but "Google has now strengthened security between their servers since then.

Another tool called 'Optic Nerve' allowed secret access to Yahoo! webcam chats. In a six-month period, it spied on 1.8 million Yahoo! users and took one still image every five minutes of video per user.

"GCHQ targeted Belgacom, Belgium's largest telecommunications provider with spyware called Regin, a malicious piece of software designed to break into Belgaom's networks. The purpose of the GCHQ hack was to spy on phones and internet users using the Belgacom network".

Since then, the technology has evolved to such an extent that just a missed call is enough to snoop on anyone, anywhere.

Citizen Lab, a laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy of the University of Toronto, has identified over 100 cases of abusive targeting of human rights' defenders and journalists in at least 20 countries across the globe via the new piece of Israeli spyware called Pegasus.

Once Pegasus is installed, it begins contacting the operator's command and control (C&C) servers to receive and execute operators' commands, and send back the target's private data, including passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and live voice calls from popular mobile messaging apps.

"The operator can even turn on the phone's camera and microphone to capture activity in the phone's vicinity, and use the GPS function to track a target's location and movements," said Citizen Lab.

The spyware can be placed on phones using multiple vectors, or means of infection. The WhatsApp exploit from May 2019 was one such vector.

In 2017, the wife of a murdered Mexican journalist was sent alarming text messages concerning her husband's murder, designed to trick her into clicking on a link and infecting her phone with the Pegasus spyware.

In 2018, a close confidant of Jamal Khashoggi was targeted in Canada with a fake package notification, resulting in the infection of his iPhone. Citizen Lab has tracked more than two dozen cases using similar techniques.

See more here:
Mass surveillance technology just needs a missed call to hack you - Gulf News