The Latest Snowden Revelations:
In this shocking article, Glen Greenwald, Laura Poitras and the rest of the crack reporating team at The Guardian explain the Faustian security deals Microsoft has been forced to cut with the NSA. We can only imagine how analogous policies are applied to the security of their Operating Systems and software.
Birgitta Jonsdottir
In an excellent interview with the Pacifica Radio Network, Iceland parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir talks about her experiences with Wikileaks, the FBI, the Iraq war, and how United States surveillance policy relates to world peace. Her article is really worth a read. Ms. Jonsdottir appears to be an exceptional idealist and a courageous woman. The importance of making the correlation between imperialist control structures and the surveillance state can not be underestimated. The surveillance state IS the control structure. Without it, internal propaganda, suppression of dissent, the formation of public opinion cannot be managed to support continual war. As an example of this in our own state, read carefully this blog post and links. See also Ms. Jonsdottir's interviews on Democracy Now (1,2) and her journalism at the The Guardian.
An example of social network analysis through meta-data
If you would like to see a graphic demonstration of meta-data analysis of your e-mail, you can surrender access to your meta-data to http://immersion.media.mit.edu . I found this a very informative simulation. If you highlight any one person you immediately see their e-mail linkage. Click on a single individual and a new page appears that is centered on e-mail interactions with that person. Of course, it is hardly a complete picture of all my social contacts or e-mail accounts, but the grouped networks allowed me to easily see the weight of my relationship with other "collaborators" as MIT calls them. It should be fairly straightforward to understand, I would think, how weighted meta-data such as this would be important to the surveillance state.
