New leaked documents show that the NSA specifically sought out "vulnerabilities" in Islamic "radicalisers" that could be used to undermine their credibility, including evidence of looking at sexually explicit material online
Documents showed that the NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks with malware in 2012, enabling them to get information that they otherwise would not have had access to. A map from an NSA presentation shows the extent of the secret hacking.
Extra reading:
(Image from the 'Tor Stinks' top secret NSA presentation)
Over at Journalist's Resource, "Open government and conflicts with public trust and privacy: recent research ideas" offers some background context and pulls together current thinking.
"If NGOs are to help contribute to a better future, they will need to change," says Ben Phillips , Campaigns and Policy Director at Oxfam, in The New Internationalist.
The BRIDGE website has all kinds of useful resources on gender and social movements.
(Screenshot from Katherine Viner's talk)
Guardian deputy editor Katherine Viner talks about what the digital means for almost everything about everything to do with journalism.
The US isn't just collecting electronic data on its citizens; it's also in the process of constructing a huge biometric database which will contain data like DNA and voice recognition profiles, iris scans and palm prints. Emptywheel.net looks at what exactly is being done, and what this means.
(The Wikipedia homepage)
New paper "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration Community: How Wikipedia's reaction to sudden popularity is causing its decline" finds that Wikipedia's "reasonable and effective strategies for maintaining....quality" have been detrimental to its growth.
John Lanchester, a British journalist and novelist, was asked by The Guardian to read through the Snowden documents concerning the GCHQ -- Britain's equivalent of the NSA. In an in-depth article, he writes about his findings: that Britain is sliding towards an entirely new kind of surveillance society.
