But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.
Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program (via azspot)
humanrightswatch: Jubilant Libyan women wait to vote at polling station in Benghazi.  Female candidates ended up winning 32 seats, or 40 percent, of the 80 proportionally-elected parliamentary seats. Individual candidates contested the remaining 120 seats elected by popular votes (majoritarian races), and only one woman won. In total, women won 33 of the 200 seats and comprise 16.5 percent of the General National Congress. © 2012 Samer Muscati/Human Rights Watch

humanrightswatch:

Jubilant Libyan women wait to vote at polling station in Benghazi.  Female candidates ended up winning 32 seats, or 40 percent, of the 80 proportionally-elected parliamentary seats. Individual candidates contested the remaining 120 seats elected by popular votes (majoritarian races), and only one woman won. In total, women won 33 of the 200 seats and comprise 16.5 percent of the General National Congress.

© 2012 Samer Muscati/Human Rights Watch

reuters: Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee working as a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency, leaked details of a top secret U.S. surveillance program, acting out of conscience to protect “liberties for people around the world.” Both the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper - to whom he gave the documents he had purloined - published Snowden’s identity on Sunday after he sought to be identified. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” he told the Guardian, which published a video interview with him on its website.  “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” Snowdown said. The Guardian published revelations last week that U.S. security services had monitored data about phone calls from Verizon and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook. Photo of Edward Snowden courtesy of the Guardian

reuters:

Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee working as a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency, leaked details of a top secret U.S. surveillance program, acting out of conscience to protect “liberties for people around the world.”

Both the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper - to whom he gave the documents he had purloined - published Snowden’s identity on Sunday after he sought to be identified.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” he told the Guardian, which published a video interview with him on its website. 

“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” Snowdown said.

The Guardian published revelations last week that U.S. security services had monitored data about phone calls from Verizon and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook.

Photo of Edward Snowden courtesy of the Guardian

You know it’s bad when @MMFlint & @Glennbeck AGREE & are next to each other in a Twitter Search. And it has to do with National Security. #prism #EdwardSnowden #wearescrewed #NSA

You know it’s bad when @MMFlint & @Glennbeck AGREE & are next to each other in a Twitter Search. And it has to do with National Security. #prism #EdwardSnowden #wearescrewed #NSA

Peeping Barry

“Now that we are envisioning some guy in a National Security Agency warehouse in Fort Meade, Md., going through billions of cat videos and drunk-dialing records of teenagers, can the Ministries of Love and Truth be far behind?

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.” “How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.” “

I think the crucial thing to realize is that hundreds of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions—in fact, billions of people around the world essentially rely on the Internet exclusively to communicate with one another. Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chats and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication. And what the objective of the National Security Agency is, as the stories that we’ve revealed thus far demonstrate and as the stories we’re about to reveal into the future will continue to demonstrate—the objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. And that’s what this program is about. And they’re very explicit about the fact that since most communications are now coming through these Internet companies, it is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do.
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
sunfoundation: Maps and Charts about the #Occupygezi Protests in Turkey Environmentalists began protesting a week ago against the Turkish government’s decision to replace Gezi Park, a significant but not major park inside Istanbul, with a shopping mall. It was one in a series of moves which the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) has taken in an effort to grow the Turkish economy. Besides a few environmentalist no one in Turkey really cared.

sunfoundation:

Maps and Charts about the #Occupygezi Protests in Turkey

Environmentalists began protesting a week ago against the Turkish government’s decision to replace Gezi Park, a significant but not major park inside Istanbul, with a shopping mall. It was one in a series of moves which the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) has taken in an effort to grow the Turkish economy. Besides a few environmentalist no one in Turkey really cared.

Your iPhone Works for the Secret Police - James Allworth - Harvard Business Review

theemergencystate:

Thanks to Nicolette Ladoulis for showing me this article and pointing out this quote from it: “The thing about that wall that cleft Berlin in half is that it didn’t just represent a means of keeping people from freely moving. It represented something much more — it was about ideas and principles. About the balance between security and freedom. About whether you were there to serve the state, or the state was there to serve you. What I can’t seem to shake is the feeling that somehow, the country most responsible for tearing that wall down has somehow managed to rebuild one in its own back yard.”

Hell of a read. Worth the time! 

guardian: ‘The freaky Dark Side of the Moon-style design looks like something a Bond villain would use – but it does sum up the surveillance program pretty neatly’ Tim Dowling on the dubious logo of the “$20m spy initiative that no one is meant to know about”

guardian:

‘The freaky Dark Side of the Moon-style design looks like something a Bond villain would use – but it does sum up the surveillance program pretty neatly’

Tim Dowling on the dubious logo of the “$20m spy initiative that no one is meant to know about”

humanrightswatch: A boy sits inside his now-destroyed former classroom in Aleppo, Syria. © 2012 AP Photo

humanrightswatch:

A boy sits inside his now-destroyed former classroom in Aleppo, Syria.

© 2012 AP Photo

humanrightswatch

Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?
David Foster Wallace (via theatlantic)

America's voting system is a disgrace

When the polls close in most other democracies, the results are known almost instantly. Ballots are usually counted accurately and rapidly, and nobody disputes the result. Complaints of voter fraud are rare; complaints of voter suppression are rarer still.

The kind of battle we are seeing in Florida — where Democrats and Republicans will go to court over whether early voting should span 14 days or eight — simply does not happen in Germany, Canada, Britain or France. The ballot uncertainty that convulsed the nation after Florida’s vote in 2000 could not happen in Mexico or Brazil.

Almost everywhere else, elections are run by impartial voting agencies. In France, elections are the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, which establishes places and hours of voting, prints ballots (France still uses paper) and counts the votes. In Germany, an independent federal returning officer oversees a complex state and federal voting system. In Canada, federal elections are managed by a specialized agency, Elections Canada. Mexico, emerging from a sad history of electoral manipulation, created in the 1990s a respected independent agency, the Federal Electoral Institute. Brazil has nationwide electronic voting, producing instantaneous, uncontested results.

Politicalprof: The explanation is worse than the comment ...

politicalprof:

By now, pretty much everybody knows about Mitt Romney’s thoughtless, mean, and utterly misbegotten comments about the 47% of Americans who are apparently dependent on government handouts for survival, and the rest of Americans, who pay income taxes and carry the freeloaders. This statement is…

theatlantic:

Occupy Wall Street’s Raucous Birthday Party: Arrests, Sermons, and Signs

[Images: Julie Dermansky]

hypervocal: This is what the scene looks like outside US embassy in Tunis (via @weeddude).

hypervocal:

This is what the scene looks like outside US embassy in Tunis (via @weeddude).