PRISM is/was an NSA intelligence-gathering program. It has been widely speculated that friendly governments spy on other countries so that said country doesn't violate laws about spying on their own people. And this happened in NZ. The activist was from Fiji, and was very active in trying to get democracy for Fiji and get rid of the prime ( Read more... )

It was called the Terrorist Surveillance Program, and apparently was superseded by PRISM ( Read more... )

The NSA, PRISM, and trying to keep your information private and secure ( Read more... )

This is pretty funny, actually. Lavabit is a secure email provider: the only people with your crypto keys is you with your public and private keys and the recipient with their public and private keys. The way that this encryption works is that everyone gives their public key to anyone who wants it, but keeps their private key a closely-guarded ( Read more... )

Interesting story. Guy steals woman's purse, then begins stalking her. She recognizes his car in the neighborhood, tells a cop, they get a district attorney to issue a subpoena to the phone company for a pen recording on the guy's phone line. Snatcher is arrested, sentenced to a decade in prison. Appeals ultimately to the Supreme Court that the ( Read more... )

Basically, the NSA doesn't want to watch communications on a computer-by-computer basis. They tap backbones, the connections where huge amounts of information flows between internet servers. They tap major ISPs. Your computer? Chump change. If they know what you're saying to other people, they don't really need to tap your computer. And the ( Read more... )

From Bruce Schneier's blog:

Lavabit E-Mail Service Shut Down ( Read more... )

I don't find that the least surprising. It's going to take lawsuits and new elections to shut it down, and even then, can we be sure? This started over a decade ago with things like the Total Information Awareness program, and when those were screamed down, quietly got broken in to little unnoticeable pieces and became things like PRISM ( Read more... )

A federal judge today rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency ( Read more... )

In 2006, Mark Klein was working for AT&T in San Francisco and learned about a room that only a very small group of techs had access to that all internet lines passed through. He suspected that it was being used to siphon all data on the internet and pass it to the government. He later learned that similar/identical rooms were installed in other ( Read more... )