NSA Gave Up Names of Americans Wiretapped to Ex-State Dept. Official

By Jason Leopold

Three years ago, John Bolton, the former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control, told Congress that he had asked the NSA to reveal to him the identities of 19 American citizens who were caught up in 10 of the NSA's raw intelligence reports since 9/11.

By law, the agency is prohibited from spying Americans and if the NSA intercepts the names of Americans in the course of a wiretap, the agency is supposed to black out the names prior to distributing its reports to other agencies. But the NSA did not second guess Bolton's requests and willingly turned over the identities of U.S. citizens caught up in the wiretaps.

........The NSA also disclosed to senior White House officials and other policymakers at federal agencies the names of as many as 10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while purportedly eavesdropping on foreigners.

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Copyright laws threaten our online freedom

By Christian Engström            Financial Times

If you search for Elvis Presley in Wikipedia, you will find a lot of text and a few pictures that have been cleared for distribution. But you will find no music and no film clips, due to copyright restrictions. What we think of as our common cultural heritage is not “ours” at all.

On MySpace and YouTube, creative people post audio and video remixes for others to enjoy, until they are replaced by take-down notices handed out by big film and record companies. Technology opens up possibilities; copyright law shuts them down.

This was never the intent. Copyright was meant to encourage culture, not restrict it. This is reason enough for reform. But the current regime has even more damaging effects. In order to uphold copyright laws, governments are beginning to restrict our right to communicate with each other in private, without being monitored.  File-sharing occurs whenever one individual sends a file to another. The only way to even try to limit this process is to monitor all communication between ordinary people.

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The writer is the Pirate party’s member of the European parliament

Innovation: When advertising meets surveillance

07 July 2009 by Tom Simonite    www.newscientist.com

Privacy campaigners are celebrating the news that the UK's largest ISP has dumped plans to roll out a controversial system, created by a firm called Phorm, which would snoop on users' web use in order to serve up personalised advertising.

The Phorm episode is just the latest battle in the long-running war over online privacy. But the next skirmishes over privacy-invading technology will not be fought online, but on the streets.

With electronic billboards, processing power, cameras and other sensors becoming ever cheaper, it's become possible to manufacture products that allow web-like targeting in the real world.

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