Representatives of Obama‘s Administration continue to insist that spying on Americans is not a violation of constitutional rights of citizens and carried out exclusively in the interests of national security.
However, Chris Kitts, the father of beforeitsnews.com, believes that the obtained information is used not only for security purposes.
According to Chris Kitts, Washington creates “The machine for the implementation blackmail. Now they have access to the emails of people who are in the data store in Utah.
Read moreDuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, served over 1bn searches in 2013 after a huge surge in interest following the Snowden revelations. Until Edward Snowden's files detailing the extent of state surveillance, the search engine received around 1.5m queries per day. But in the weeks and months following the Guardian's publication of the NSA files, the number of users more than doubled.
By November, more than 4 million people were using the site every day, and on Tuesday 7 January the site had its biggest day so far, serving 4,452,957 queries in a 24-hour period. "Needless to say, it was a great year for us," DuckDuckGo said in a blogpost. "We're looking forward to similar greatness in 2014.
Read moreFrench data protection watchdog CNIL fined Google 150,000 euros for ignoring its three-month deadline to align its practice of tracking and storing user information with the country’s law.
"The company does not sufficiently inform its users of the conditions in which their personal data are processed, nor of the purposes of this processing," CNIL said in a statement.
The watchdog also ruled that Google must publish its decision on google.fr for a period of 48 hours within eight days of being notified of the ruling.
Read moreSince the first of many leaked documents showed that the NSA has been gathering phone records as part of its anti-terrorism program, there's been an ongoing fight over just what these records reveal.
To supporters, the metadata collection is a limited system that's rarely queried and doesn't contain enough information to be considered an invasive search: the NSA has said it doesn't collect either the content of calls or the names attached to phone numbers.
As many technology and legal experts on the other side say, though, metadata matters, and a Stanford Security Lab project demonstrates that removing names from a database doesn't effectively mean much.
Read moreThe National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.
The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.
Read moreOver 2 million passwords for popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as Google and Yahoo accounts have been stolen and posted online, with Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki also featuring on the hitlist.
Internet security firm Trustwave exposed the extensive data hoard, saying in its blog that the responsible botnet – dubbed Pony – had harvested information from thousands of vulnerable computers on a global scale.
The information included login credentials, email addresses and passwords. In total, 1,580,000 website login credentials were stolen, alongside 320,000 email and 41,000 FTP accounts.
Read moreGovernment requests for data soared from 3,580 in 2009 to 10,918, Google said on Thursday -- and those are only the data demands the web giant is allowed to publish.
A 2013 Transparency Report described on the Internet giant's Public Policy blog is the latest in an ongoing effort to provide a window into worldwide governmental efforts to tap into the digital profiles Google builds and the digital communications it relays. The report revealed a tremendous increase worldwide in government efforts to mine Google’s data.
The company has used the periodic disclosures as an opportunity to push back against those government demands, many of which Google is banned from even discussing
Read moreMicrosoft has declared war on Google in a series of high profile criticisms about the way the firm scans the contents of every email its users send to target ads at them.
Microsoft has launched a campaign openly criticising its rival Google for snooping on people’s emails.
The software company has said it is appalled how Google uses “private information for profit” and found the majority of people think scanning emails is “an invasion of privacy. “ In a series of new adverts, Microsoft explains how Google reads every email users send, picking up on key words to target advertising in a bid to make more cash.
Read moreGoogle's Executive Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt isn't a huge fan of the NSA or its surveillance methods, it seems.
Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt declared: "It's really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if true."
His comment follows recent reports of a nefarious tool crafted by the agency and the UK's GCHQ that accessed Google and Yahoo data lairs without permission. Schmidt also said that to "potentially violate people's privacy, it's not OK," and that the broad public scrutiny months of leaks has uncovered is unnecessary to find a few bad eggs.
Read moreGoogle is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising, or AdID, that would replace third-party cookies as the way advertisers track people's Internet browsing activity for marketing purposes.
Google, the world's largest Internet search company, is considering a major change in how online browsing activity is tracked, a move that could shake up the $120 billion digital advertising industry. Google, which accounts for about a third of worldwide online ad revenue, is developing an anonymous identifier for advertising, or AdID, that would replace third-party cookies as the way advertisers track people's Internet browsing activity for marketing purposes, according to a person familiar with the plan.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland