Government Surveillance
Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian - the leading journalist behind the NSA metadata collection story - took a look at the Washington Post's profile of General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA. In it, he found the "crux of the NSA story" in the phrase "collect it all." But that phrase isn't unique to the NSA. Big technology companies, like Google, share that ethos too.
More revelations about collaboration between technology and communications companies and U.S. Federal agencies came Thursday from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, this time asserting that Microsoft worked much closer with the FBI and NSA than the company seems to have previously stated.
In a blog post late Monday, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer announced the number of requests for user data that the U.S. has made of the company in a six-month period, making Yahoo! the fourth major technology company to do so in the last week or so, after Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. Yahoo!'s admission was shorter and less detailed than some of the others and represented the highest count of United States government data requests in a six-month period divulged so far.
Following the lead of Microsoft and Facebook, on Monday, Apple Inc. revealed how much data on its customers the United States Government has asked for in recent months. Apple is one of the many tech companies that have been named as cooperating with the government in the NSA Internet surveillance program, called PRISM.
It's been a busy week in social media, with new ways to display what you've been doing on Twitter with #FollowMe and Facebook revealing how law enforcement has tried to follow what you're doing by disclosing information requests on its users from local and federal law enforcement. Also this week, Facebook opened a server near the Arctic Circle and is ditching sponsored ads, Twitter started testing how to give users more use of analytics, and Foursquare maps your life.
