Tag: Privacy

Video interview of Snowden by the Guardian

A very interesting interview:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/-sp-edward-snowden-interview-rusbridger-macaskill
He doesn’t drink, he’s reading Dostoevsky and, no, he doesn’t wear a disguise. A year after blowing the whistle on the NSA, America’s most wanted talks frankly about his life as a hero-pariah – and why the world remains ‘more dangerous than Orwell imagined’.

FBI's new facial recognition database, containing data for almost a third of the US population

The Machine’ depicted in CBS’s ‘Person of Interest’
Who will watch/oversee the watchers?
If you thought that the NSA wanted too much personal information, just wait a few months. The EFF is reporting that the FBI’s new facial recognition database, containing data for almost a third of the US population, will be ready to launch this summer. Codenamed NGI, the system combines the bureau’s 100 million-strong fingerprint database with palm prints, iris scans and mugshots. Naturally, this has alarmed privacy advocates, since it’s not just felons whose images are added, but anyone who has supplied a photo ID for a government job or background check. According to the EFF’s documents, the system will be capable of adding 55,000 images per day, and could have the facial data for anything up to 52 million people by next year. Let’s just hope that no-one tells the Feds about Facebook, or we’re all in serious trouble.

MUST HEAR Al Gore: Snowden not a traitor

Gore also reportedly chided the NSA’s operations, many of which began after he left office, as a “threat to the heart of democracy.”
[… BUT What he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the United States Constitution that were WAY MORE SERIOUS THAN THE CRIMES HE COMMITTED…]