Governments love to use external enemies as a way to further their agendas. Alarmed by reports that American spies are gathering data from popular web services , Ilya Kostunov, a lawmaker from Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia party in the lower house of government, yesterday said he wants state officials to stop using US social networks and email […]
Some of America‘s biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency’s recently-exposed “PRISM” and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats […]
It’s official. We are living in a surveillance state. This week’s revelations that wave after wave of Verizon call data, and an endless sea of emails and Facebook posts, are all being trawled by government dragnets are shocking but not really surprising. We’ve known for years that the government’s intelligence machinery has invisible means of cultivating […]
U.S. Web users are searching for information about North Korea with astounding, unprecedented frequency. Google searches for “North Korea,” currently seven times the previous peak during the country’s 2006 nuclear test, are dramatically outpacing those for Beyonce or even President Obama. Last week, North Korea was the third most-popular term on Twitter, following only Easter and Good Friday. […]
What if the government could know the future? It’s trying. Armed with billions of tweets, Google (GOOG) searches, Facebook (FB) posts, and other publicly available social-media and online data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is sponsoring research projects involving 14 universities in the United States, Europe, and Israel with the goal of using advanced analytics to […]
WORLD VIEW: ‘It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.” So said Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt this week in a Bloomberg interview defending the company’s use of legal incentives in Britain, Ireland and other states to minimise worldwide taxation and therefore maximise worldwide profits. He spoke as a perfect storm engulfed […]
When Google established its international tax scheme, it followed a path well worn by other multinational companies. The company booked its sales from outside the U.S. at its international headquarters in Ireland. Most of that profit was then sent on to the Netherlands, largely free of tax. From there, the money went on to a […]
IT IS an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield brilliance and of cunning with coin. The sequence of doorstop fantasy novels that George R.R. Martin began with “A Game of Thrones”, and which HBO has now turned into […]
In 2006 Egyptian human rights activist Wael Abbas posted a video online of police sodomizing a bus driver with a stick, leading to the rare prosecution of two officers. Later, Abbas’s YouTube account was suddenly suspended because he had violated YouTube‘s guidelines banning “graphic or gratuitous violence.” YouTube restored the account after human rights groups informed its parent company Google that Abbas’s posts were a […]
PICK YOUR WAY through the narrow alleys of a south Delhi slum to the dark, low-ceilinged home of a fortune-teller with a green parrot. For a bundle of rupees he sets the bird to work, picking from a selection of cards. The man glances at one and lets his conjectures fly. India will soon be […]
looking beyond borders 