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Report: AT&T Assisted NSA in Spying on Internet Traffic

A New York Times report released Saturday revealed that the communications giant AT&T provided assistance to the National Security Administration. The two spied on American citizens by getting access to emails and other private forms of communication over the past decade.

“AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks, ” reports The New York Times.

Documents from 2003-13 also reveal that surveillance equipment was installed in 17 different AT&T Internet hubs. That means that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was right. Snowden uncovered that the NSA was monitoring the United Nations Internet traffic at the AT&T New York headquarters between 2011-13. However, his leaks did not connect AT&T with the NSA.

The New York Times and Pro Publica have reviewed the documents granted to them by Snowden.

According to Reuters reporter Will Dunham, “AT&T started in 2011 to provide the NSA more than 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records daily after ‘a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,’ referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the Times reported.”

The only response so far from AT&T comes by way of Reuters. The communications company’s spokesman Brad Burns told the news organization that AT&T does not release information unless a person’s life is in danger.

Customers are concerned that their Fourth Amendment rights have been violated; the United States is concerned that state secrets will become public, and AT&T is still relatively quiet on the matter.

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If You Value Your Privacy, This New Facebook Feature is Not for You

This month, Facebook released its new product “Moments” during a time when online privacy has come under attack.

“If you’re unfamiliar, ‘Moments’ is one of Facebook’s sister apps for mobile devices. It works by burrowing into all the photos on your camera, and sorting them into discrete temporal events – that party, that bike trip, that office function – to create ‘Moments.’ The app then tags everyone it recognizes by comparing the faces in the photos to existing Facebook friends (your ‘social graph’ in tech parlance), and invites you to share the resulting ‘Moment’ with everyone tagged in the photo,” reports Jeff John Roberts for Fortune.

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This feature will change how everything works for online Facebook users. Because of the constant debate over privacy and the lack of strong laws that prevent social media sites and websites from tracking your location and creating ads suited to you, this  feature will not be welcomed with open arms.

In fact, Canada and many European nations have banned the tag feature. Those same countries will more than likely reject the “Moments” feature.  In Ireland, privacy watchdogs have noticed that the feature has only a default mode, meaning that users can’t decide to turn it on or off.

According to Slash Gear writer Chris Davies, “the social network claims more than 97-percent accuracy at identifying the right people, juggling in excess of 120m parameters as it builds 3D face models using a neural network. Last year, Facebook said it had trained the network using more than 4,000 people and in excess of four million images.”

The debate over the new app/feature is just getting started. “Moments” was released June 15 and it is available in the App Store and Google Play.

 

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Internet Privacy May Be Hard to Find in 2025, Many Experts Say

With increased government surveillance, the iCloud and the Sony hacking scandals and hacktivist groups on the rise, Internet security and privacy may be a thing of the past.

According to a Pew Research Center report released Dec. 18, 2,511 experts are on opposite sides of the issue on whether privacy is a feasible thing to achieve by the year 2025.

“This report is a look into the future of privacy in light of the technological changes, ever-growing monetization of digital encounters and shifting relationship of citizens and their governments that is likely to extend through the next decade,” according to researchers and writers Lee Raine and Janna Anderson of Pewinternet.org.

The report looked at a range of criteria and asked questions involving the issue.

Pew asked experts to think about “if policy makers and technology innovators could create a secure, popularly accepted, and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure by 2025 that allows for business innovation and monetization…”

The political issues around privacy on the Internet may create unwanted gridlock for an issue that needs fixing immediately.

“I do not think 10 years is long enough for policy makers to change the way they make policy to keep up with the rate of technological progress. We have never had ubiquitous surveillance before, much less a form of ubiquitous surveillance that emerges primarily from voluntary (if market-obscured) choices. Predicting how it shakes out is just fantasy,” wrote John Wilbanks, chief commons officer for Sage Bionetworks. 

Out of the experts polled, 55 percent believed that privacy was unable to be a reality in today’s technological landscape. The remaining 45 percent seem to be more optimistic about it. All of the experts believed that the Internet is inherently public entity. 

This issue will continue to be debated for the next decade and beyond as long as the Internet remains a vital part of modern life.