Facebook users lambaste UN Mission in Libya after recognizing warlord Haftar as “Libyan National Army commander”

https://www.libyaobserver.ly/news/facebook-users-lambaste-un-mission-libya-after-recognizing-warlord-haftar-%E2%80%9Clibyan-national-army

Facebook photos for spy files

Attorney-General George Brandis. Picture: AAP

Πηγή: The West Australian
By Nick Butterly
30 Oct 2015

Facebook pictures and images from State driver’s licences and passports could be collected in a Federal database to help police and spies find their targets.

Privacy advocates have rung the alarm bell over the plan, warning it smacks of a nightmarish science fiction plot that could ultimately lead to Australians being monitored wherever they go.

During a recent Senate hearing, officials from the Attorney-General’s Department gave an update on the system National Facial Biometric Matching Capability.

The department hopes to gather all passport photos in government databases as well as State driver’s licence pictures for a gargantuan repository of images of Australians.

The photographs could then be run through facial recognition programs to find subjects of interest.

Under questioning, bureaucrats admitted that social media images could be “scraped” from the web and sucked into the database. “It is possible that still images out of those kinds of environments which you talk about could be put into the system,” Attorney-General’s department official Andrew Rice told the hearing.

“That will be a choice for the users of the system, and their making that choice will be on the basis of their existing legal permissions.”

Department experts were unable to say how serious a crime would need to be to allow police or agencies to use the database to search for a suspect.

“Will you be able to chase down a litterer, for example,” Greens WA senator Scott Ludlam asked officials.

Attorney-General George Brandis told the hearing the Government needed no legislation to create the system.

Senator Ludlam questioned what safeguards would be in place to ensure the system was not abused. “The National Facial Recognition Database — referred to internally by the ominous title “the capability” apparently without any sense of irony — is the next step in our self-proclaimed freedom-loving Government’s project to make a dystopian sci-fi surveillance state a reality in Australia,” he said.

The hearing was told the only other country that had attempted to compile so many images of citizens from different sources was Brazil. Officials said the program they were building was more “complex” than those administered even by giant US agencies such as the FBI.

1st Amendment Violated as Facebook Assists Police in Pre-Crime Investigations

Πηγή: Occupy Corporatism
Susanne Posel
August 22 2012

On August 16th former US Marine Brandon Raub was arrested for posting his opinion about the US government on his Facebook page . Raub is currently being held in a psychiatric ward. In a statement by Raub, he explains : “I’m currently in John Randolph in the psychiatric ward being held against my will. They were concerned about me calling for the arrest of government officials.”

Raub’s lawyers say that he will be held for “up to 30 days’ further confinement in a VA psych ward” after “government officials again pointed to Raub’s Facebook posts as the sole reason for their concern and for his continued incarceration.”

While Raub was taken forcefully, put into handcuffs and taken by the FBI to be questioned, both the FBI and Secret Service deny that Raub was arrested or detained by them.

Facebook comments were recently cited as evidence in a court case concerning cyber bullying where comments on a personal page were ruled by a US Federal court as information that can be lawfully obtained by the police to be used against a defendant.

William Pauley, US District Court Judge, stated that because the defendant made violent threats in his posts which are deemed public information that they are allowable as evidence against him by prosecutors.

On April 24th, District Judge Raymond Jackson ruled that by clicking a “like” button on Facebook, that this affiliation is public domain and not protected by the 1st Amendment. Jackson wrote : “Simply liking a Facebook page is insufficient. It is not the kind of substantive statement that has previously warranted constitutional protection,” and continues to say that, “Facebook posts can be a matter of public concern; however the Court does not believe Plaintiffs Carter and McCoy have alleged sufficient speech to garner First Amendment protection.”

The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit with the US Department of Defense (DoD) because the federal agency refused to admit their relationship with social networks with regard to surveillance and law enforcement investigations.

Government officials scan Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube for evidence of criminal activities, activists and possible suspects who may have not committed a crime just yet. And these agencies named in the lawsuit refused to cooperate with the EFF in explaining how gathering this information would impact “citizen’s privacy rights and associated legal protections.”

Hoping to dupe Americans into posting on their Facebook page, the CIA gathers information while inviting people to register and read information about the “employment opportunities.”

While government agencies are using Facebook to data mine on Americans, it has been suggested in the social meme that without a Facebook page, a person’s mental stability is questionable.

Now, having a profile or not is the barometer of whether or not a person is “suspicious” or not. Some psychologists are even suggesting that not having a Facebook profile means that you are a psychopath. The link between the Batman shooter and the Norwegian mass murderer was their lack of Facebook profiles. In fact, this may “be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

Trapwire , the most impressive pre-crime surveillance software corporation with clients from Wal-Mart to the White House, is but one of many types of Big Brother network grids that have incrementally begun to invade our lives.

Alexander Keith, director of the National Security Agency (NSA) described at a yearly Def Con computer hacking conference that the internet is “at great risk from exploitation, disruption and destruction.” He went on to voice his “concern that it’s going to flow into destructive attacks that could have consequences for our critical national infrastructure and the Internet itself.”

Basically, Keith is concerned because the internet is currently not controlled by federal agencies. When the NSA needs more hackers , they recruit out of colleges and universities across the US under the official Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations. By using college students, the NSA is amassing an “elite team of computer geniuses” that will be trained in all methodology of hacking based on their exceptional cyber intelligence, military capabilities and ability to enhance law enforcement’s expansion of spying on Americans.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has requested the authority to criminally prosecute those who lie on Facebook and other social media as a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. According to Richard Downing, the DoJ deputy computer crime chief, the law must provide for “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider.”

A felony can be committed by the user of a social media site by exceeding the authorized access; meaning any infraction of the website’s term of service. Put in other words , “If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime. Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law.”

The NSA has transformed itself into the largest and most comprehensive intelligence agency with the expressed purpose of collecting data on American citizens. Emails, cell phone calls, text messages, Google searches, parking receipts, and all other forms of information are collected and stored for future use. Social media sites like Facebook readily give over information to federal agencies that conduct such surveillance.

And like we have seen with the case of US Marine veteran Brandon Raub, it can be used against you.

Internet Giants Combine Forces Creating New Lobby to Control Capitol Hill

Πηγή: BLN

By Susanne Posel
July 31

The titans of the Internet, including Google, eBay, Amazon and Facebook, are combining forces under the blanket of a newly formed lobby group that wants to influence lawmakers on how they can manipulate the Internet, as well as how important they truly are.

In September of this year, the lobby groups called the Internet Association, will be based in Washington, DC, and headed by Michael Beckerman, former adviser of the Energy and Commerce Committee within the House of Representatives.

The Internet Association’s goal is to control the perspective of elected officials on Internet technologies, their uses and cooperation with various federal agencies. Their website claims they are “dedicated to advancing public policy solutions to strengthen and protect an open, innovative and free Internet.”

Beckerman explains:

The Internet isn’t just Silicon Valley anymore. The Internet has moved to Main Street. Our top priority is to ensure that elected leaders in Washington understand the profound impacts on the Internet and Internet companies on jobs, economic growth, and freedom.Through the influence of money and pressure, this lobby seeks to have an over-reaching effect on the Internet as a whole. In conjunction with major corporations in the tech industry, and by remaining focused on subversive control over the internet, the Internet Association will lead the way toward Big Brother becoming a very necessary part of our lives.

Google - Internet monster and collector of information for the National Security Agency (NSA) - announced back in March that they will use a new feature to spy on Android and smartphone customers that will allow background noise to assist Google in identifying location, and therefore track unsuspecting Americans better.

They also altered their privacy policies to better gather intelligence on Internet users. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission gained greater oversight over Google’s handling of personal information as part of a settlement reached last year. Google submitted to the agreement after exposing its users email contacts when it launched a now-defunct social networking service called Buzz in 2010.

Internet services, like Skype, have begun working with law enforcement to assist in exposing political dissidents, protesters and other terrorist types identified by the FBI.

Skype has completely opened their online chats and customer information to law enforcement in an effort to conduct surveillance regardless of whether or not a warrant has been obtained.

Since Microsoft purchased Skype in 2011, their willingness to cooperate with federal surveillance initiatives has grown exponentially. Online chats are monitored under the guise of stopping hackers from controlling the Internet.

Microsoft claims to be aware of their role in spying on Americans, and is conducting such surveillance with secrecy while working with local and international law enforcement agencies.

Authorities wanted access to Skype because, they claimed, and that the encryption programs made it hard to track pre-determined terrorists groups, hackers, jihadis, drug lords. Although this is simply a ruse to gain access to Skype conversations that were previously off-limits.

Since Skype has been traditionally used by the same people the FBI claims are dangerous terrorists (those who pay in cash, have tattoos and own guns), their new owners, Microsoft, are more than willing to comply with government agencies to spy on their customers in the name of safety.

Lauren Weinstien, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, explains:

The issue is, to what extent are our communications being purpose-built to make surveillance easy? When you make it easy to do, law enforcement is going to want to use it more and more. If you build it, they will come.’Mark Gillett, Skype chief development officer, has vehemently denied that they were making their program more surveillance based to assist federal and local agencies in spying on citizens. However they have been making their bandwidth connections stronger so that information can be transferred more readily, as well as proxy interceptions and file transfers.

Skype operates every communication in conjunction with outside agency surveillance requests. Those once-encrypted calls are now open to interpretation by law enforcement.

Facebook has been used by the US government to track of the world’s terrorist and terrorism, according to Rose Gottemoeller, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control.

An ordinary citizen becoming more involved is a great benefit to the US government in their mission to use the false flag of terrorism to sway public opinion. Gottemoeller says using social media as a crowd-sourcing tool is an effective in helping the U.S. and other governments “understand what’s going on with a nuclear facility in a certain country, for example, or what’s going on with the production of chemicals at a chemical plant.”

Gottemoeller envisions utilizing social media users as an effective way to keep atomic bombs out of the hands of terrorists, as well as the control of governments and regimes.

The manipulation of the Internet will only get worse as time goes on; politicians remain cooperative to the powers-that-be, and the people continue to support the technologies that enslave us all. Silently, Big Brother looms over our shoulders, listening, watching and judging us at every turn.

The technology we have grown dependent on will be the chains that bind us to the control grid.

CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher

CIA Director David Petraeus unwinds with some Wii Golf, 2008.

Πηγή: Wired
By Spencer Ackerman
March 15 2012

More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.

Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.

The CIA has a lot of legal restrictions against spying on American citizens. But collecting ambient geolocation data from devices is a grayer area, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hardware manufacturers, it turns out, store a trove of geolocation data; and some legislators have grown alarmed at how easy it is for the government to track you through your phone or PlayStation.

That’s not the only data exploit intriguing Petraeus. He’s interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies — and sweeping away the “digital footprints” of agents who suddenly need to vanish.

“Proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come,” Petraeus observed. “Moreover, we have to figure out how to create the digital footprint for new identities for some officers.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Online cache is not a spy’s friend. But Petraeus has an inadvertent pal in Facebook.

Why? With the arrival of Timeline, Facebook made it super-easy to backdate your online history. Barack Obama, for instance, hasn’t been on Facebook since his birth in 1961. Creating new identities for CIA non-official cover operatives has arguably never been easier. Thank Zuck, spies. Thank Zuck.

Facebook settles with FTC over deception charges

This Oct. 11, 2010 file photo, shows the logo of the online network Facebook, recorded in Munich with a magnifying glass of a computer screen of a laptop. Facebook said Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2011, it is settling with the Federal Trade Commission over charges it deceived consumers. The FTC had charged that the social network told people they could keep the information they share private and then allowed for it to be made public. The charges go back to 2009.

Πηγή: AP
By BARBARA ORTUTAY

Nov 29 2011

NEW YORK (AP) -- Facebook is settling with the Federal Trade Commission over charges it deceived consumers with its privacy settings to get people to share more personal information than they originally agreed to.

The FTC had charged that the social network told people they could keep the information they share private, then allowed it to be made public.

The charges go back to at least 2009, when Facebook changed its privacy settings so that information users may have deemed private, such as their list of friends, suddenly became viewable to everyone.

"They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance," the FTC said.

The FTC said the settlement requires Facebook to get people's approval before changing how it shares their data.

In a blog post, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company has made a "bunch of mistakes." But he adds that this has often overshadowed the good work Facebook has done. He says Facebook has addressed many of the FTC's concerns already.

The settlement is similar to one Google agreed to earlier this year over its Buzz social networking service. Like Google, Facebook has agreed to obtain assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years.

Facebook isn't paying anything to settle the case, though future violations could lead to civil fines.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has created two new executive positions - a chief privacy officer of products and a chief privacy officer of policy as part of its response to the settlement.

Facebook, Google oppose US online piracy bills

Πηγή: Hindu Business Line
Nov 16 2011

Internet heavyweights Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo! have joined ranks to oppose legislation in the US Congress intended to crack down on online piracy.

In a joint letter, the firms yesterday said they “support the bills’ stated goals — providing additional enforcement tools to combat foreign ‘rogue’ Web sites that are dedicated to copyright infringement or counterfeiting.”

“Unfortunately, the bills as drafted would expose law-abiding US Internet and technology companies to new uncertain liabilities, private rights of action, and technology mandates that would require monitoring of websites,” they said in the letter to the House and Senate judiciary committees.

“We are concerned that these measures pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job-creation, as well as to our nation’s cyber-security,” the Internet giants said.

The separate bills introduced in the House and the Senate would give the US authorities more tools to crack down on “rogue” Web sites accused of piracy of movies, television shows and music and the sale of counterfeit goods.

The Stop Online Piracy Act has received some bipartisan support in the House of Representatives and is the House version of a bill introduced in the Senate in May known as the Theft of Intellectual Property Act, or Protect IP Act.

The legislation has received the backing of Hollywood, the music industry, the Business Software Alliance, the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce and other groups.

In addition to Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo!, the other companies signing the letter were AOL, eBay, LinkedIn, Mozilla and Zynga.

AP Exclusive: CIA following Twitter, Facebook

Πηγή: AP
By KIMBERLY DOZIER

Nov 4 2011

McLEAN, Va. (AP) -- In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets - up to 5 million a day.

At the agency's Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians" also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms - anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.

From Arabic to Mandarin Chinese, from an angry tweet to a thoughtful blog, the analysts gather the information, often in native tongue. They cross-reference it with the local newspaper or a clandestinely intercepted phone conversation. From there, they build a picture sought by the highest levels at the White House, giving a real-time peek, for example, at the mood of a region after the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden or perhaps a prediction of which Mideast nation seems ripe for revolt.

Yes, they saw the uprising in Egypt coming; they just didn't know exactly when revolution might hit, said the center's director, Doug Naquin.

The center already had "predicted that social media in places like Egypt could be a game-changer and a threat to the regime," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press at the center. CIA officials said it was the first such visit by a reporter the agency has ever granted.

The CIA facility was set up in response to a recommendation by the 9/11 Commission, with its first priority to focus on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. But its several hundred analysts - the actual number is classified - track a broad range, from Chinese Internet access to the mood on the street in Pakistan.

While most are based in Virginia, the analysts also are scattered throughout U.S. embassies worldwide to get a step closer to the pulse of their subjects.

The most successful analysts, Naquin said, are something like the heroine of the crime novel "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a quirky, irreverent computer hacker who "knows how to find stuff other people don't know exists."

Those with a masters' degree in library science and multiple languages, especially those who grew up speaking another language, "make a powerful open source officer," Naquin said.

The center had started focusing on social media after watching the Twitter-sphere rock the Iranian regime during the Green Revolution of 2009, when thousands protested the results of the elections that put Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad back in power. "Farsi was the third largest presence in social media blogs at the time on the Web," Naquin said.

The center's analysis ends up in President Barack Obama's daily intelligence briefing in one form or another, almost every day.

After bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May, the CIA followed Twitter to give the White House a snapshot of world public opinion.

Since tweets can't necessarily be pegged to a geographic location, the analysts broke down reaction by languages. The result: The majority of Urdu tweets, the language of Pakistan, and Chinese tweets, were negative. China is a close ally of Pakistan's. Pakistani officials protested the raid as an affront to their nation's sovereignty, a sore point that continues to complicate U.S.-Pakistani relations.

When the president gave his speech addressing Mideast issues a few weeks after the raid, the tweet response over the next 24 hours came in negative from Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, the Persian Gulf and Israel, too, with speakers of Arabic and Turkic tweets charging that Obama favored Israel, and Hebrew tweets denouncing the speech as pro-Arab.

In the next few days, major news media came to the same conclusion, as did analysis by the covert side of U.S. intelligence based on intercepts and human intelligence gathered in the region.

The center is also in the process of comparing its social media results with the track record of polling organizations, trying to see which produces more accurate results, Naquin said.

"We do what we can to caveat that we may be getting an overrepresentation of the urban elite," said Naquin, acknowledging that only a small slice of the population in many areas they are monitoring has access to computers and Internet. But he points out that access to social media sites via cellphones is growing in areas like Africa, meaning a "wider portion of the population than you might expect is sounding off and holding forth than it might appear if you count the Internet hookups in a given country."

Sites like Facebook and Twitter also have become a key resource for following a fast-moving crisis such as the riots that raged across Bangkok in April and May of last year, the center's deputy director said. The Associated Press agreed not to identify him because he sometimes still works undercover in foreign countries.

As director, Naquin is identified publicly by the agency although the location of the center is kept secret to deter attacks, whether physical or electronic.

The deputy director was one of a skeleton crew of 20 U.S. government employees who kept the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok running throughout the rioting as protesters surged through the streets, swarming the embassy neighborhood and trapping U.S. diplomats and Thais alike in their homes.

The army moved in, and traditional media reporting slowed to a trickle as local reporters were either trapped or cowed by government forces.

"But within an hour, it was all surging out on Twitter and Facebook," the deputy director said. The CIA homed in on 12 to 15 users who tweeted situation reports and cellphone photos of demonstrations. The CIA staff cross-referenced the tweeters with the limited news reports to figure out who among them was providing reliable information. Tweeters also policed themselves, pointing out when someone else had filed an inaccurate account.

"That helped us narrow down to those dozen we could count on," he said.

Ultimately, some two-thirds of the reports coming out of the embassy being sent back to all branches of government in Washington came from the CIA's open source analysis throughout the crisis.

Facebook caught tracking its users again

Πηγή: thinq
By Gareth Halfacree

Oct 4 2011

Hacker and thorn in Facebook's side, Nik Cubrilovic has once again caught the company doing precisely what it claims not to: tracking its users when they visit third-party sites.

Cubrilovic first tugged the social networking giant's tail with claims that a uniquely identifiable cookie was being loaded from clients' systems when they visited any third-party site that hosts Facebook content - such as the popular 'Like' button - even if the user had logged out.

Facebook denied any such activity, claiming: "Facebook does not track its users across the web. Instead, we use cookies on social plugins to personalise content - e.g. show you what your friends liked - to help maintain and improve what we do - e.g. measure click-through rate - or for safety and security e.g. keeping underage kids from trying to signup with a different age.

"No information we receive when you see a social plugin is used to target ads, we delete or anonymise this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information," the company added in a belated response to our original piece covering Cubrilovic's findings.

Sadly, that response turned out to be poppycock. Even as a Facebook PR guru was churning out the statement above, engineers were working to remove a supposed 'bug' in the company's log-in system that was failing to clear the personally identifiable cookie Cubrilovic was seeing loaded on third-party sites.

With that bug fixed, Cubrilovic claimed that the biggest issue was resolved. Sadly, more privacy concerns have reared their ugly head for the social networking giant - and Cubrilovic is once again at the centre of the controversy.

In an updated post, Cubrilovic claims that a user-tracking cookie excised in May following an exposé by the Wall Street Journal - again claimed by Facebook to be a 'bug' rather than a deliberate attempt to track its users when they visit third-party sites - is back, and allows Facebook to even track users who have never signed up to their service in the first place.

"This cookie could then be read later and used to track the user across different web properties and back to the Facebook site. The cookie was being set even if the user had never been to the Facebook site, and even if they didn't click a 'Like' or 'Share' button," Cubrilovic writes of the reports in May. "Today, that cookie is back. It is being set by all the third-party sites that we tested."

Cubrilovic claims that, contrary to Facebook's previous statements that it has no interest in tracking its users, the company is wilfully violating the privacy of web users in order to improve the targeting of its advertising, which is the main source of income for the social networking service.

While he admits that there is the possibility that the cookie has been re-enabled by mistake - which, if Facebook's claims back in May that the tracking was a result of a bug, would be the only explanation acceptable to those wondering just what Facebook is up to on the privacy front - coming so soon after another cookie was deleted it seems vanishingly unlikely.

Instead, Facebook appears to be playing a game of whack-a-mole: removing each cookie as it is found to be used for tracking purposes and simply moving on to another, re-enabling older cookies when it thinks that nobody is looking.

We have reached out to Facebook for a response on this latest privacy gaffe, but have yet to receive a response.

UPDATE 1824:

Facebook has pointed us towards a comment by log-in engineer Gregg Stefancik - the man who claimed the originally reported tracking cookie was a 'bug' - denying any wrongdoing. "We still have a policy of not building profiles based on data from logged out users," Stefancik claims. "As we discussed last week, we are examining our cookie setting behavior to make sure we do not inadvertently receive data that could be associated with a specific person not logged into Facebook.

"We have been made aware of two instances in the past two weeks related to cookies which needed to be addressed. What you describe in this post is not a re-enabling of anything, but a separate issue involving a limited number of sites, including CBSSports. We have moved quickly to investigate and resolve this latest issue which will be fully addressed today. We encourage security researchers to test our practices and report them to us through our whitehat programme which rewards people like you who identify issues," Stefancik pointedly concludes - neglecting to mention that issues submitted through the whitehat programme in exchange for rewards are handily kept out of the public eye.

Facebook's 'New Class Of Social Apps' : 'Big Business For Site, Big Burden For Users'

Πηγή: Huffington Post
By Bianca Bosker
Sep. 22 2011


The “completely new class of social apps” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Thursday at the f8 developer conference will feed Facebook even more information about its users and supercharge sharing on the social networking site.

But what promises to be big business for Facebook could prove to be a burden for users, who will see any activity they take on certain Facebook apps published instantly on the social networking site.

Thanks to the new version of Facebook's Open Graph developer platform -- a change Facebook called the “most significant update to Platform since it launched in 2007” -- once users have agreed to let an app access their profile, interactions with that app will automatically be fed into their friends’ “tickers,"the stream of updates that now appears to the right of the Facebook News Feed. Listen to a song on music streaming service Spotify, and your friends will be able to see the track the moment you click play. Read an article on one of the news reader apps, and the app will broadcast to Facebook the headline of the story together with your name. The actions shared with Facebook will vary by app, with a cooking app posting different updates than a fitness app, for example.

Zuckerberg noted that the change to apps will allow users to share a “magnitude more” than before: not only does he see the potential for new industries such as “lifestyle” and “media” brands, to integrate social features in more robust ways, but the new Open Graph eliminates the need for an app to ask each time it posts to a user’s stream.

This allows the process of sharing to become more automated and more frequent, which in turn gives Facebook a host of new data about its 800 million users that it can then leverage to sell and personalize ads.

But this wasn’t what Zuckerberg highlighted during his keynote at the conference. Instead, the CEO focused on Facebook's users and the benefit this new category of apps will bring to them. He pitched these more social apps as a seamless way to share and as a source of “realtime serendipity.”

“Spotify isn’t going to have to prompt me every time I do something and it adds an activity to my timeline, so it’s a frictionless experience,” he said. “You discover a huge amount of new music this way.”

Though the sharing settings will vary by app and Facebook allows users to control which friends see the updates posted by each app, as well as delete the posts, the change nonetheless underscores Facebook’s continual willingness to push the limit on privacy. It furthermore highlights a new era in which Facebook will not have to ask each time it posts information about its users.

At the very least, there is the potential for some embarrassing personal preferences to come to light, such as a predilection for bad pop music or a compulsion for stories about Kate Middleton. Depending on what apps choose to integrate with Facebook’s new Open Graph and in what way, there could also be far more intimate details that are revealed -- theNike Plus app will offer a good deal about your fitness level, for example -- though of course users can deactivate an app any time they choose.

Even Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor took some heat for his taste for Kenny G, which came to light when Zuckerberg demonstrated how Spotify synced with Taylor’s profile.

“Bret, we might have to talk about that after f8,” Zuckerberg teased.

Some users had their reservations about Facebook’s latest changes.

“It is getting kinda creepy now. Facebook wants to know everything. I might go buy a goat and live in a cave,” tweeted @Gabriellala.

@EJC added, “Facebook is going to be so much better for creepy stalkers now.”

Facebook's users could find themselves overwhelmed not only by how much they're sharing, but by how much others are sharing with them. PC Mag's Mark Hachman explains:
What a user does not have control over, apparently, is how to filter the ticker feed. In one example demonstrated by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, a user playing the Facebook game "Words with Friends" was able to share each and every word the player played, with a link to the word and game board so that Zuckerberg could follow along in real time. Theoretically, a Facebook user with a large collection of socially-active friends will turn that ticker into a blur, with game moves, songs, videos, movies, articles, and other activities all contributing to the frequent updates. If brands are dependent on using the ticker to push their information, it's unclear how well that work.

Study confirms social media’s revolutionary role in Arab Spring

Πηγή: Digital Trends
By Andrew Couts
Sep. 13 2011


A study from the University of Washington shows that social media, like Twitter and Facebook, did, indeed, play a major role in sparking the Arab Spring revolutions that engulfed the Middle East and Northern Africa this year.

Social media really did play an instrumental role in the wave of “Arab Spring” revolutions that swept across parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa earlier this year, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Washington sifted through more than 3 million tweets, countless hours of YouTube videos and gigabytes of blogs to find out whether the Internet, and social media services like Twitter and Facebook really played the revolutionary role many claimed they did.

According to the study, online chatter about revolution often began just before actual revolutions took place. And social media also served as an outlet for citizens of the region to tell their stories of revolution, which played an inspirational role for neighboring countries, the study found.

“Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising,” said Philip Howard, a University of Washington communications professor and the study’s leader. “People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”

In Egypt, where the Arab Spring blossomed, Howard and his team found that the number of tweets that mentioned revolution in that country exploded from 2,300 per day to more than 230,000 per day. The number of videos, Facebook updates and blog posts about government opposition also rose dramatically.

Because Twitter users can send updates from any mobile phone, Howard says that platform offers the “clearest evidence of where individuals engaging in democratic conversations were located during the revolutions,” since many people in the region do not have standard Internet access, but most do have a cellphone.

The study also found that government efforts to cut off access to Internet and cell phone service likely caused an increase in activism, especially in Egypt where access was shut down for five daysbefore being restored.

“Recent events show us that the public sense of shared grievance and potential for change can develop rapidly,” said Howard. “These dictators for a long time had many political enemies, but they were fragmented. So opponents used social media to identify goals, build solidarity and organize demonstrations.”

More recently, social media helped fuel days of riots in London and elsewhere in the UK. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded by saying that citizens who organize uprisings on social networks should be banned from accessing them — a suggestion that evoked ridicule from the notoriously authoritarian Iranian government. That idea was later discarded following a meeting between the British government, Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry.

The Spy Who Tweeted Me: Intelligence Community Wants to Monitor Social Media

Πηγή: Wired
By Sharon Weinberger
September 7, 2011


A research arm of the intelligence community wants to sweep up public data on everything from Twitter to public webcams in the hopes of predicting the future.

The project is the brainchild of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or Iarpa, a relatively new part of the spy community that’s supposed to help investigate breakthrough technologies. While other projects exist for predicting political events, the Open Source Indicators program would be perhaps the first that mines data from social media websites.

The idea is to use automated analysis to sift through the deluge of publicly available data to help predict significant societal events, like a popular revolution. The nascent project, called “Open Source Indicators,” is just the latest move by the national security community to come to grips with the flood of information now available on social media. As Danger Room’s Lena Groeger has reported, it’s also intended to predict natural disasters or economic disruptions.

The science underlying the project is the notion that early indicators of major social upheavals might be hidden in plain, socially-networked sight. “Some of these changes may be indirectly observable from publicly available data, such as web search queries, blogs, micro-blogs, internet traffic, financial markets, traffic webcams, Wikipedia edits, and many others,” the announcement, published August 25, says. “Published research has found that some of these data sources are individually useful in the early detection of events such as disease outbreaks, political crises, and macroeconomic trends.”

Indeed, social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, garnered major attention during recent events like the Arab Spring, and have been credited with helping to organize protesters and even foment revolution. Authoritarian governments trying to hold on to power noted the trend, and attempted at times to shut down access to those sites — and occasionally the Internet as a whole — in the hopes of stymieing efforts to organize protests.

The idea of the U.S. intelligence community culling data from social media is still a new one, and is likely to raise a number of questions. For example: what constitutes public data?

Iarpa, for its part, defines public data as “lawfully obtained data available to any member of the general public, to include by purchase, subscription or registration.” That raises its own host of questions, like whether the intelligence community could register a fake profile on Facebook, in order to “friend” people and obtain more information.

For those who fear the all-seeing surveillance state, Iarpa says there are some things the program won’t do. It won’t be used to predict events in the United States, for instance. Nor will it be used to track specific individuals.

Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry to attend riot summit

More than 1,400 people have appeared in court in connection with the riots

Πηγή: BBC

25 August 2011

Home Secretary Theresa May will meet senior police officers and executives from the major social networks later to discuss this month's riots in England.

Representatives from Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry are expected to attend the meeting, which will look at how to stop people plotting violence online.

The networks were criticised during the riots after it emerged they may have been used to plan some of the disorder.

The prime minister has said police may need extra powers to curb their use.

David Cameron also said the government would look at limiting access to such services during any future disorder.

But a Home Office source said there was "no suggestion" that any of the sites would be closed down.

Networks such as Blackberry Messenger - a service which allows free-of-charge real-time messages - were said to have enabled looters to organise their movements during the riots, as well as inciting violence in some cases.

Last week, Facebook and the owner of Blackberry, Research in Motion (RIM), both said they welcomed the opportunity to discuss the matter with Mrs May. Twitter has yet to comment.'Whether and how'

Crime and Security Minister James Brokenshire and Lynne Owens, assistant commissioner of central operations at the Metropolitan Police, will also be at the meeting - as will a member of the National Security Council.

A Home Office spokeswoman said the talks would explore "whether and how we should be able to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."

BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said one social media executive had told him the networks were keen to co-operate but that the idea of trying to block communications was "ludicrous" and had not been thought through.

Our correspondent said it was unclear whether the hour-long meeting would produce any major new policies.

Facebook says it has already prioritised a review of content that is "egregious during sensitive times like the UK riots" with the hope of being able to take down such material more swiftly.

A number of people have appeared in court in recent weeks for organising or attempting to organise disorder on social networks.

Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan and Jordan Blackshaw were jailed for four years for incitement on Facebook

Jordan Blackshaw, 21, from Marston, Cheshire, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, Cheshire, were jailed for four years for online incitement.

Blackshaw had created a Facebook event entitled "Smash Down Northwich Town" while Sutcliffe-Keenan set up a Facebook page called "Let's Have a Riot in Latchford". Both have said they will appeal.

Meanwhile, 21-year-old David Glyn Jones, from Bangor, north Wales, was jailed for four months after telling friends "Let's start Bangor riots" in a post that appeared on Facebook for 20 minutes.

And Johnny Melfah, 16, from Droitwich, Worcestershire, became the first juvenile to have his anonymity lifted in a riot-related case for inciting thefts and criminal damage on the site. He will be sentenced next month.Plotting violence

In the aftermath of the riots, which spread across England's towns and cities two weeks ago, Mr Cameron said the government might look at disconnecting some online and telecommunications services if similar circumstances arose in the future.

"We are working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality," he told MPs during an emergency session of Parliament.

Tim Godwin, the Met police's acting commissioner, also said last week that he considered requesting authority to switch off Twitter during the riots.

However, he conceded that the legality of such a move was "very questionable" and that the service was a valuable intelligence asset.

Meanwhile, Guardian analysis of more than 2.5 million riot-related tweets, sent between 6 August and 17 August, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting, including organising the street clean-up.

The newspaper found the timing of the messages posted "questioned the assumption" that Twitter was used to incite the violence in advance of it breaking out in Tottenham on 6 August.

Currently, communications networks that operate in the UK can be compelled to hand over individuals' personal messages if police are able to show that they relate to criminal behaviour.

The rules gathering such queries are outlined in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA).

Cheshire men jailed for four years for inciting riots

The men were jailed at Chester Crown Court

Πηγή: BBC

16 August 2011

Two men from Cheshire have been jailed for four years each for using Facebook to incite disorder during riots in England last week.

Jordan Blackshaw, 21, of Vale Road, Marston and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, of Richmond Avenue, Warrington, were jailed at Chester Crown Court.

The Recorder of Chester, Judge Elgan Edwards praised the swift actions of Cheshire Police.

He said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent to others.

Both men pleaded guilty under sections 44 and 46 of the Serious Crime Act to intentionally encouraging another to assist the commission of an indictable offence.

Martin McRobb, from the Merseyside and Cheshire Crown Prosecution Service, said: "They both used Facebook to organise and orchestrate serious disorder at a time when such incidents were taking place in other parts of the country.

"Both defendants, in Northwich and Warrington respectively, sought to gain widespread support in order to replicate similar criminality.'Abused technology'

"While the judge heard the two defendants were previously of good character, they admitted committing very serious offences that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years."

Assistant Chief Constable of Cheshire Police, Phil Thompson, said: "From the offset Cheshire Constabulary adopted a robust policing approach using the information coming into the organisation to move quickly and effectively against any person whose behaviour was likely to encourage criminality.

"Officers took swift action against those people who have been using Facebook and other social media sites to incite disorder.

"The sentences passed down today recognise how technology can be abused to incite criminal activity and sends a strong message to potential troublemakers about the extent to which ordinary people value safety and order in their lives and their communities.

"Anyone who seeks to undermine that will face the full force of the law."

Wiretapped Democracy

During the recent turmoil of the Arab Spring West countries heavily criticized the authoritarian regimes of the African continent for the repression of human rights underlying their support to the freedom of assembly and expression, which apply also on the Internet. Meanwhile in USA prepared a bill titled "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010" with witch Internet becomes a National Asset, a government agency management is created while  the US President is granted with powers to seize control of and even shut down the Internet with devastating results on the rest of the world. On top of this the UK Prime Minister Cameron coping with the recent London riots suggested that maybe the rioters should be banned from using social media. But how looks in fact the situation on freedom and privacy in the so called developed countries? Lets have a look.


Strange deaths

It seems that the economic crises in Europe is not the only reason for people to commit suicide. People that involve into wiretapping cases have a similar trend. Adamo Bove - head of security at Telecom Italia, the country's largest telecommunications firm - back in 2006 who at the direction of Milan prosecutors, he'd used mobile phone records to trace how a "Special Removal Unit" composed of CIA and SISMI (the Italian CIA) agents abducted Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric, and flew him to Cairo where he was tortured and the year before of his counterpart Costas Tsalikidis, a software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece that had just discovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in the company's mobile network, both found dead allegedly committing suicide. The bug was used to transmit the eavesdropping on the prime minister's (backing the Plan Pythia I) and other top officials' cell phone calls, including civil rights activists, the head of Greece's "Stop the War" coalition, journalists and Arab businessmen based in Athens, all in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation.

One similar case comes from the Wall Street. Mr. Karpel a trader that had agreed in 2008 to cooperate with federal authorities, and for about a year he taped conversations with fellow traders. Two days after federal prosecutors played for a jury a secretly recorded telephone conversation in a Manhattan courtroom, Karpel, one of those traders, hanged himself in his Fifth Avenue office although was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Recently, Mr. Sean Hoare so allegedly did commit suicide, being the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff concerning the News International phone hacking scandal. Well, before someone complains that these specific cases are rather outsiders as not connected to the public privacy - which is not correct - some recent facts point to the opposite direction.

Surveillance and Interceptions for everyone

For three years in thirty countries, Google's Street View cars collected data, including the content of personal emails, from wireless routers located in private homes and businesses. Several countries, including the U.K., Germany, Spain, and Canada, have conducted similar investigations and determined that Google violated their privacy laws.
While on July the Facebook's executive Randi Zuckerberg declared that "anonymity on the Internet has to go away" echoing the voice of a former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who previously called for "true transparency and no anonymity" on the Web, the death certificate of the whistleblowers is signed as they lose one of their most essential tools. Anonymity's real value is rooted in helping the powerless to challenge the powerful as the case of WikiLeaks exemplifies. In Congress last month, when a House committee moved forward a proposal forcing Internet service providers to keep logs of all online activity by their users. Clearly, if it ultimately becomes law, this legislation would undermine not just anonymity in public spaces, but privacy in general. Should it succeed, we may achieve transparency, but at far too high a cost.

Talking about privacy and Internet security here is a fictional scene "directed" by an expert of the field:

"An American executive is in France for a series of trade negotiations. After a day of meetings, she logs in to her corporate webmail account using her company - provided laptop and the hotel wireless network. Relying on the training she received from her company's IT department, she makes certain to look for the SSL encryption lock icon in her web browser, and only after determining that the connection is secure does she enter her login credentials and then begin to upload materials to be shared with her colleagues. However, unknown to the executive, the French government has engaged in a sophisticated man-in-the-middle attack, and is able to covertly intercept the executive's SSL encrypted connections. Agents from the state security apparatus leak details of her communications to the French company with whom she is negotiating, who use the information to gain an upper hand in the negotiations. While this scenario is fictitious, the vulnerability is not".

Beyond these in US there is an elation of Industrial Espionage and Electronic Surveillance as the State Department estimates that there are over 700,000 eavesdropping devices sold each year reporting that over 6,500 incidents of industrial espionage occur in the United States each year with an average economic impact of $1.25 million.

The present step against privacy in the web has the name of mandatory Internet surveillance - or mandatory data retention - a bill that will force ISPs to surrender personal details about customers to law enforcement without a warrant. This bill is at the center of controversy already in Canada backed by the conservatives as the government has been trying to modernize its surveillance and wiretapping laws for years now, to take into account the growth of cellphone and Internet communications. These requirements compel ISPs and telcos to create large databases of information about who communicates with whom via Internet or phone, the duration of the exchange, and the users’ location. These regime require that your IP address be collected and retained for every step you make online. Privacy risks increase as these databases become vulnerable to theft and accidental disclosure. Meanwhile, service providers have to dealt with the expense of storing and maintaining these large databases.

Mandatory Data Retention

The EU Data Retention Directive, adopted by the European Union in 2006 (for the background facts click here), is the most prominent example of a mandatory data retention framework (for a detailed analysis click here). The highly controversial Directive compels all ISPs and telecommunications service providers operating in Europe to retain a subscriber's incoming and outgoing phone numbers, IP addresses, location data, and other key telecom and Internet traffic data for a period of 6 months to 2 years, for all European citizens, including those not suspected or convicted of any crime. The Directive has been opposed by lawmakers in the European Parliament who argue that it fosters a surveillance society and undermines fundamental rights. The European Data Protection Supervisor named the Directive as "the most privacy invasive instrument ever adopted by the EU in terms of scale and the number of people it affects."

Despite that the the Bundestag's legal experts of the Working Group on Data Retention on April published an opinion stating that "it is impossible to rephrase the Directive in such a way that it would ensure compliance with the Charter of Fundamental Rights", a number of countries have already transposed the Directive into national legislation including Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein(see page 127), Malta (see also), the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal,Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Norway, and the United Kingdom along with some non European Union countries such as Serbia and Iceland.
Other countries fight against it like Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece (I sense that the pending change of Constitution will bear surprises), and Romania.

The Dutch Senate on April approved a long-anticipated shortening of mandatory retention periods for internet data to six months, it published its correspondence with the Dutch Minister of Security and Justice on the Data Retention Directive evaluation by the European Commission. The Senate criticized the report for "too easily sidestepping" several Constitutional Court cases across the European Union, in which implementation laws were ruled unconstitutional or the principle of blanket data retention itself was deemed in breach of the ECHR.

It is worth noting that on May the European Commission rushed into an agreement with US concerning the exchange of PNR (Passenger Name Record) data on individuals and circulated the final agreement prior to formally submitting to the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament for their agreement. The European Commission's Legal Service coming later advised that the PNR is "not compatible with fundamental rights".

In USA according to the newly released 2010 Wiretap Report, federal and state courts approved that wiretaps reached a new all - time high. increased by a 34%. It must be noted that in the data are not included interceptions regulated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) or interceptions approved by the President outside the exclusive authority of the federal wiretap law and the FISA).

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation reports, on July the House passed a bill that contains a mandatory data retention provision that would require your Internet service providers to retain 12 months' worth of personal information - while the National Sheriffs Association strongly supported the bill asking for a 18 months period - that could be used to identify what web sites you visit and what content you post online. The bill was re-written to also include the enforced retention of customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers and bank account numbers. This came as a result of the calls of the DOJ back in January when Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, said that data retention was crucial to fighting Internet crimes, especially online child pornography. In response to questions, he added  that up to two years of data retention "would be a useful starting point," which echoes what FBI director Robert Mueller told Congress in 2008.

The internet and telecom providers can handle the additional open-ended costs of mandatory data retention, since those costs will be transferred to the consumers. It will be the same as a new hidden tax. Smaller businesses, and start-ups may not be able to bear the added costs, thus reducing innovation, and killing competition with the big internet companies. Many organizations are actively opposing the bill claiming that it will devastate human society and U.S. Society as whole. By the same time the chief lawyer of the National Security Agency testifying to a Senate hearing stated that he believes the agency has the authority to track Americans via cell phones.

With the fiscal deficit plague infecting the whole West it is very possible that social unrest is on the top list of future events. In this upcoming time of crises the West governments will be called to prove that they are not authoritarian powers, that they listen and serve the population's demands and finally that they are credible and accountable entities enhancing the democratic liberties at the expense of their own political careers. Don't hold your breath...