LAST MONTH, I met Edward Snowden in a hotel in central Moscow, just blocks away from Red Square. It was the first time we’d met in person; he first emailed me nearly two years earlier, and we eventually created an encrypted channel to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, to whom Snowden would disclose overreaching mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British equivalent, GCHQ.
With a long history that pre-dates the Internet, computer fans in Sweden have always been in the thick of various file-sharing scenes. If they weren’t sharing discs at swap meets, Swedes were sharing content via now-ancient BBS systems.
When the Internet came along things began to take off, but it wasn’t until the launch of The Pirate Bay in 2003 that Sweden was catapulted onto the world stage. However, after emerging as some of the world’s most passionate file-sharers, a new study has found that interest in the activity is trending downwards, despite 91% of the population being online.
There’s no one else on Earth who’s more familiar with the surveillance capabilities of governments, spy agencies and criminals who is also willing to discuss those capabilities. Edward Snowden’s wide-ranging conversation with the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Micah Lee on operational security for normal people is a must-read for anyone who wants to be safe from identity thieves, stalkers, corrupt governments, police forces, and spy agencies. (more…)
Every six months, Facebook releases a report that details when and how global governments make requests for data on the social media platform. And once again, this installment of the ‘Global Government Requests Report’ shows that countries are continuing to take advantage of this pathway to find information on its citizens. For the first half of 2015, requests by government and law enforcement increased 18 percent,from 35,051 requests to 41,214. Far and away the most prodigious generator of inquiries was the United States, which made 26,579 requests for user account data in that period. Facebook provided information on 17,577 of those accounts, resulting…
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