Richard Stallman's response to the Facebook scandal

In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Richard Stallman shares his view on the latest Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Facebook shattered

The last week has been devastating for Facebook, with revelations about the Cambridge Analytica data abuse, but also uncontrolled access...

Expanding police and surveillance powers across Europe

In January, two interesting and thorough reports on expanding police and surveillance powers across Europe were published: Amnesty International published a 70 page report which summarizes its research into expanding...

Privacy attacks and government surveillance continue

At the Symantec Government Symposium on Tuesday, FBI director James Comey said he "can't resist talking about encryption and going dark", and will continue an "adult" discussion into 2017. What's...

Review: No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald

In his latest book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald gives a brief summary of the events since Edwards Snowden first contacted him 1 December 2012, up until UK government's...

anonabox : a Tor hardware router

Update: This project turned out to be too good too be true, at least for now. Wired has a brief article on the problems of the project, and why it...

Another assault on privacy by GCHQ

Recently, it was revealed by IT Security Guru that the British intelligence agency GCHQ had demand a backdoor into the secure email service PrivateSky by CertiVox. At the end of...

Trends: Snowden didn't change public's behaviour

For all the NSA documents revealed by Snowden, and for all the news headlines stressing the gravity of the situation, it seems the general public has not changed their behaviour...

The list of shame

Over the last years, Wikileaks has collected and published a set of files detailing the companies involved in implementing and assisting mass surveillance. The "Spy Files" includes mostly public product...

NSA's Social Graph

NSA is creating a social graph of everybody. That is the latest NSA story based on Snowden's documents. "The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial...

Latest NSA round-up

Glenn Greenwald has the latest round-up of various NSA surveillance related stories around the world this week. From the British GCHQ spying on Belgium's largest telecom, Belgacom, to Obama working...

The mind of a megalomaniac: NSA chief Keith Alexander

Glenn Greenwald recently had a nice story in the Guardian which showed how completely out of touch with society and reality NSA's surveillance operation has become. NSA chief Keith Alexander...

NSA survailance violations - a brief summary

A summary of the latest news and NSA revelations. Thanks to Snowden, we now know the NSA: Had James Clapper lie under oath to us - on camera - to...

PRISM - The political repercussions

It has been about a month and half since the NSA and PRISM story broke, and we are now starting to see some of the political repercussions. As expected, they...

PRISM - the effect

Another week with NSA and PRISM news has gone by, and now the reactions and comments start to take on more substance and show that people have had to the...

Privacy - A great opertunity for Free software, and funny news

It has been an entertaining week in the privacy and security headlines. Since the NSA stories broke last week, protecting ourselves from state surveillance suddenly became mainstream. We'll see if...

NSA surveillance - business as usual

This week saw two interesting, and supposedly shocking, stories about the scale of the US government's Internet surveillance. Starting Thursday with the news that the phone operator Verizon had been...

USB Smart Card Reader

Just got another shipment from Deal Extreme. This time a USB Smart Card Reader. It's for reading my soon to arrive Free Software Foundation Europe fellowship card. However, all I...

The Right to Read

There is something depressing and chilling when the most dystopian prophecies come true. Especially, when those dystopian prophecies are written by Richard Stallman, who has spent the better part of...

Cell phone privacy guide for Android

The Pirate Party of Canada has a nice list of applications and add-ons for Android phones which enhance security and privacy. It boils down to Use Cyanogenmod. Install applications from...

Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing

"The file-sharing landscape is slowly adjusting in response to the continued push for more anti-piracy tools, the final Pirate Bay verdict, and the raids and arrests in the Megaupload case",...

DRM on harddisk and flash sticks

CNet is covering a press release from Western Digital which announced a new consortium called Secure Content Storage Association (SCSA) to create standards for transferring restricted / locked contented between...

Low end hosting

I recently found this great overview of cheap and simple hosting and Virtual Hosting solutions: lowendbox.com. It includes many providers of cheap hosting solutions for private and small business use....

Pirate Party Enters Berlin Parliament

From TorrentFreak: "For the first time in history a Pirate Party has managed to enter a state parliament. With an estimated 9 percent of the total vote the Pirate Party...

WordPress for Android - Privacy Edition

I like WordPress, and I like Android. However, I do not like the attitudes some of their developers have towards privacy. It seems to be "everything goes, as long as...

...and on a related note...

The sign reads: Municipality of Barcelona Vigilance Zone in a 500m radius George Orwell Square

"I've Got Nothing to Hide" and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel Solove

Abstract: In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the "nothing to hide" argument. When asked about government surveillance and...

Schneier: Who Owns Your Computer?

"It recently came out that the firewall in Microsoft Vista will ship with half its protections turned off. Microsoft claims that large enterprise users demanded this default configuration, but that...

Thought crime in London

From David Mery's accounts in The Gaurdian: 7.10 pm: From my workplace in Southwark, south London, I arrange by text message to meet my girlfriend (...) 7.21 pm: I enter...