It’s been said that “If television’s a babysitter, the internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.” It’s true, but what a prolific, change-making drunk librarian she is. Whatever you call it -- the internet, the web, the information superhighway -- this crazy, amorphous “ consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions ” has taken hold of humanity and forever changed the way we live, work and play. We will never be the same, and neither will our attention spans. It all started on Aug. 6, 1991, a quarter of a century ago. That was the day the World Wide Web became publicly available. Pandora’s digital box burst open and it’s delighted and distracted us ever since. To celebrate the web’s big birthday, we’ve put together a list of its greatest pivotal moments. Come along for a fun, nostalgic throwback romp, and do tell us which moments you’d add to the list, via Facebook and Twitter . Related: 25 Years of the World Wide Web: What Surprised, Charmed and Changed Us 1. July 16, 1994: Amazon opens for business. With eyes for cashing in on the dot-com rush of the early 1990s, Jeff Bezos founded the web’s first online bookstore on July 5, 1994. He initially called it “Cadabra,” but changed its name to Amazon.com when a lawyer marosely mistook the title for “Cadaver.” We think Bezos settled on the right choice in the end, don’t you? The pioneering ecommerce hub officially went live 11 days later, when Bezos and his inaugural employees packed and shipped boxes of books out of his garage/recreation room in Bellevue, Wash. Our shopping habits and the world’s shipping fulfillment systems will never be the same. Neither will Bezos. He’s now worth an estimated $2.6 billion . Being relentless -- and shooting for the stars -- really does paid off. Related: Founders of AOL, Twitter and More Share the Best and Worst Moments in Internet History 2. Jan. 18, 1995: Yahoo.com goes live. Like so many other successful tech startups , Yahoo was born at Stanford University. Then graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo founded the early searchable index of web pages, which they originally called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Thank goodness no one has to say that mouthful anymore. Yang and Filo soon came to their senses and named the web crawler Yahoo. It’s faster and more fun to say, even if it might not be here to stay . The original Yahoo, short for “ Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle ,”forever altered how we sift through and make sense of the gobs of information floating around the information superhighway. The search engine paved the way for a crop of search-focused cousins, including Microsoft’s Bing (does anyone still Bing?) and that search engine giant (and verb ) we can’t live without called Google. Related: 15 Throwback Web Pages That Show Us How the Internet Has Changed 3. April 21, 1995: Match.com starts striking matches. When Silicon Valley electrical engineer Gary Kremen scooped up the domain name Match.com for $2,500, love, sweet love was on his mind, and apparently a lot of it. “Match.com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ,” he headily proclaimed in his first on-camera interview. The online dating service he launched, one of the first of its kind online, paved the way for a billion-dollar industry crammed with copycats. To date, Match.com claims to have facilitated more than a quarter billion matches . One thing’s for sure: The digital cupid forever changed how people fall in love and, yes, hookup, too. Related: Why the Internet Needs the WayBack Machine, the Site That Archives the Web 4. Sept. 3, 1995: eBay debuts. Pierre Omidyar singlehandedly launched eBay from his living room in San Jose, Calif. The ambitious self-taught computer designer created the site, originally called “ AuctionWeb ,” to help people buy and sell goods online. Today, eBay is the web’s largest auction marketplace. Not long after its inception, the site left an indelible imprint on how we sell second-hand goods, and, later, new goods as well. No longer are we dependant on combing through traditional print classifieds and trolling neighborhood garage sales for deals. Nudged along by eBay’s rise, the sharing economy would later open the world up to even more efficient and creative ways for people to part with stuff we no longer have use for. Related: 15 Internet Relics We Miss (and Some We Don't) 5. Fall 1996: “Baby Cha-Cha” digitally dances into our hearts. Viral videos are a dime a dozen today, but back in 1996, they were a strange, new phenomenon. A clip of the world’s first 3-D-rendered digital “Dancing Baby” was one of the first viral videos, and strange it was indeed. The famous snippet featured a bald, diapered and digitally animated babydoing the “cha cha.” It shimmied creepily to a Blue Swede cover of the song “Hooked on a Feeling.” Soon after its release, the freaky babe spread like wildfire online and eventually danced into several episodes of a then-popular TV show called Ally McBeal . The concept of “going viral” has been a great motivator for people, brands and causes ever since. 6. Jan. 17, 1998: The Drudge Report breaks the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Bill Clinton, our Commander in Chiefat the time, lied. He did have sexual relations with “ that woman, Miss Lewinsky .” Newsweek had the juicy “blue dress” scoop, but opted not to publish the exposé. Then MattDrudge got wind of the sex scandal and blew it wide open on his email-newsletter-turned-website, The Drudge Report . Newsrooms fell silent across the world, as reporters got a load of the embarrassing, sordid details of Clinton’s affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. How we first learned about the shocking revelation -- online and not from a traditional print or TV journalism organization -- was proof that the internet was changing how we received the news. The online news era was born. Today, approximately four in 10 Americans get their news online, reports the Pew Research Center. Somewhat surprisingly, TV news remains the most widely consumed news platform. Related: 10 Fascinating Facts About the World Wide Web on Its 25th Birthday 7. Sept. 7, 1998: Google incorporates. Google wasn’t always the world’s third most valuable brand . Long before it was a go-to verb, it was an obedient digital dog, finding and retrieving stuff, playing fetch for internet users over and over again. Eventually the little G -- which started in 1995 as a Stanford University Ph.D. research project and was originally named “ BackRub ” -- grew into the big, $367 billion-dollar big G (incorporated under Alphabet) we know and love-hate today. No longer satisfied to fetch links alone, the global tech colossus now chases meatier, more meaningful bones, like nailing the fastest internet speeds on the planet, rendering human drivers obsolete and, NBD, possibly ending death. The brainchild of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google drove reinvestment into the web in the shadow of the dot-com crash. It's now the gold standard not only for search, but also for innovation, human resources and host of other things you can, yep, Google. 8. Jan. 15, 2001: Wikipedia publishes its first entry. Who needs old-school encyclopedias when we have Wikipedia? The free online information hub, the name of which is derived from the Hawaiian word for “quick,” went from a scrappy upstart to the world’s sixth most-visited website in a few short years. Wikipedia is lauded and loathed because virtually anyone with an internet connection can add or edit entries to any of its topics, regardless of their expertise or lack of it. Finance expert Jimmy Wales , who co-founded Wikipedia with philosopher Larry Sanger , doesn’t recall their creation’s inaugural entry, apart from recalling the first two words he entered into the groundbreaking wiki software: “Hello world.” Fast forward to today and the number of Wikipedia pages in existence is staggering. Appropriatelyaccording to Wikipedia, there are now 39,889,681 . For better or for worse, Wikipedia has become how most people first learn about most topics. That’s why it’s important to take just about every word you read on it with a grain of salt. The general lack of credibility was enough to send Sanger packing in 2002. Related: 10 Ways to Make Millions on YouTube 9. April 23, 2005: The first YouTube video is uploaded. Former PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim came up with the idea for the world’s first video-sharing internet platform at a dinner party in San Francisco … or did they ? However the powerful platform got its start, there’s no denying that it democratized video content right from the start. Only one year after Karim uploaded its first video, a quick snippet of himself at the zoo , YouTube became a global sensation, redefining celebrity and putting the power to broadcast all manner of videos, amateur and professional, in the hands of anyone with a webcam. The TV industry would never be the same and, instead of resisting the innovative new medium, eventually came to embrace it. Today, YouTube has more than onebillion users and an estimated 400 of hours of content are uploaded to the service every minute. 10. Aug. 23, 2005: The world witnesses Hurricane Katrina online. When the deadly wrath of Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, the power went dark and so did most communications. Armed with diesel power generators , Michael Barnes and other eyewitnesses in the area turned to the internet to update the world about the natural disaster and the devastation it wreaked as it happened over a five-day period. With each update, the bloggers made history, marking one of the first times people on the scene of a major news event self-reported via the World Wide Web. Today, thanks to ubiquitous camera-equipped smartphones, live-tweeting and other social media-driven phenomenon, we take online eyewitness reports for granted. We watch events unfold live, in real-time, births and deaths included. Facebook has even rolled out a special alert system to help people let their friends and family know they are OK after a terrorist attack, natural disaster or other major event. 11. Oct. 28, 2003:Facebook rears its face. Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard classmates originally designed Facebook, first called Facemash, as a “hot or not”-style game that shallowly ranked undergraduates based on their looks. The social media platform has since mushroomed into an all-out global phenomenon. It’s transformed not only how we connect with friends and family (and those other “friends” we don’t really know), but also how we discover videos, news and information. The popular platform is now the largest social networking entity in the world, clocking an average of 1.13 billion active users per day. Some two-thirds of American Facebook users now get their news from the site, per recent Pew Research Center data, and that estimate is only expected to grow as Zuck does his damndest to connect everyone on earth . Yes, everyone. 12. Jan. 27, 2006: Western Union dispatches its last-ever telegram. Along with phone books and road maps, telegrams are also at the top of the list of things the internet rendered obsolete. The legacy company, founded in 1851 in the heyday of the Pony Express, stopped dispatching the iconic yellow-enveloped messages as a result of rise of email and instant messaging, both byproducts of the internet, yet more proof that digital communication won. Western Union’s money transfer arm is still chugging along. However, if certain Bitcoin boosters’ predictions ring true, it could very well go kaput, too -- that is if cryptocurrency ever really catches on. Related: Why the Rich and Famous are on Fire for Emojis, and Why Brands Should Care 13. Nov. 12, 2014: Kim Kardashian West breaks the internet with her backside. Love her or hate her, social media mogul Kim Kardashian West is a true mobile millionaire. From her infamous nude Paper magazine shoot, to her popular apps, to her fashion line, Kim K's entire career has been fueled by the way she cultivatesher following online. Many see her rise to fame as a possibility for themselves, no particular tech talent required. The 35-year-old star shows how virtually anyone can leverage (and monetize) their personality in ways that weren’t possible before the internet.
Cross-sectional data Cross-sectional data are data on one or more variables collected at a single point in time. For example, the data might be on: ● A poll of usage of Internet stockbroking services ● A cross-section of stock returns on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ● A sample of bond credit ratings for UK banks. Problems that could be tackled using cross-sectional data: ● The relationship between company size and the return to investing in its shares ● The relationship between a country’s GDP level and the probability that the government will default on its sovereign debt.
If you think you are tech savvy all because you know what "LOL" means, let me test your coolness. Any idea what "IWSN" stands for in Internet slang? It's a declarative statement: I want sex now. If it makes you feel any better, I had no clue, and neither did a number of women I asked about it. Acronyms are widely popular across the Internet, especially on social media and texting apps, because, in some cases, they offer a shorthand for communication that is meant to be instant. READ: Chances are, your teen has sexted So "LMK" -- let me know -- and "WYCM" -- will you call me? -- are innocent enough. But the issue, especially for parents, is understanding the slang that could signal some dangerous teen behavior, such as "GNOC,'" which means "get naked on camera." And it certainly helps for a parent to know that "PIR" means parent in room, which could mean the teen wants to have a conversation about things that his or her mom and dad might not approve of. Katie Greer is a national Internet safety expert who has provided Internet and technology safety training to schools, law enforcement agencies and community organizations throughout the country for more than seven years. She says research shows that a majority of teens believe that their parents are starting to keep tabs on their online and social media lives. "With that, acronyms can be used by kids to hide certain parts of their conversations from attentive parents," Greer said. "Acronyms used for this purpose could potentially raise some red flags for parents." READ: 10 signs you might be addicted to your smartphone But parents would drive themselves crazy, she said, if they tried to decode every text, email and post they see their teen sending or receiving. "I've seen some before and it's like 'The Da Vinci Code,' where only the kids hold the true meanings (and most of the time they're fairly innocuous)," she said. Still, if parents come across any acronyms they believe could be problematic, they should talk with their kids about them, said Greer. But how, on earth, is a parent to keep up with all these acronyms, especially since new ones are being introduced every day? "It's a lot to keep track of," Greer said. Parents can always do a Google search if they stumble upon an phrase they aren't familiar with, but the other option is asking their children, since these phrases can have different meanings for different people. "Asking kids not only gives you great information, but it shows that you're paying attention and sparks the conversation around their online behaviors, which is imperative." READ: Teen 'like' and FOMO anxiety Micky Morrison, a mom of two in Islamorada, Florida, says she finds Internet acronyms "baffling, annoying and hilarious at the same time." She's none too pleased that acronyms like "LOL" and "OMG" are being adopted into conversation, and already told her 12-year-old son -- whom she jokingly calls "deprived," since he does not have a phone yet -- that acronym talk is not allowed in her presence. But the issue really came to a head when her son and his adolescent friends got together and were all "ignoring one another with noses in their phones," said Morrison, founder of BabyWeightTV. "I announced my invention of a new acronym: 'PYFPD.' Put your freaking phone down." LOL! But back to the serious issue at hand, below are 28 Internet acronyms, which I learned from Greer and other parents I talked with, as well as from sites such as NoSlang.com and NetLingo.com , and from Cool Mom Tech's 99 acronyms and phrases that every parent should know. After you read this list, you'll likely start looking at your teen's texts in a whole new way. 1. IWS N - I want sex now 2. GNOC - Get naked on camera 3. NIFO C - Naked in front of computer 4. PIR - Parent in room 5 CU46 - See you for sex 6. 53X - Sex 7. 9 - Parent watching 8. 99 - Parent gone 9. 1174 ' - Party meeting place 10. THOT - That hoe over there 11. CID - Acid (the drug) 12. Broken - Hungover from alcohol 13. 420 - Marijuana 14. POS - Parent over shoulder 15. SUGARPIC - Suggestive or erotic photo 16. KOTL - Kiss on the lips 17. (L)MIRL - Let's meet in real life 18. PRON - Porn 19. TDTM - Talk dirty to me 20. 8 - Oral sex 21. CD9 - Parents around/Code 9 22. IPN - I'm posting naked 23. LH6 - Let's have sex 24. WTTP - Want to trade pictures? 25. DOC - Drug of choice 26. TWD - Texting while driving 27. GYPO - Get your pants off 28. KPC - Keeping parents clueless
(CNN) -- North Koreans' ability to surf the Internet -- for the few in the isolated nation who could ever really go online anyway -- is rockier than ever. Dyn Research reported on Monday that the country's Internet was down, after 24 hours of "increasing instability." It stayed dead for more than nine hours, then came back to life -- but not for long. Half a day later Dyn said it was down again. Then it was back up, at about 1 a.m. Wednesday Pyongyang time (11 a.m. Tuesday ET), the company said. How to hack Sony Making fun of Kim is 'path to death' Experts: N. Korea's Internet disrupted But the assessment of Dyn, a company that monitors Internet performance worldwide, made earlier Tuesday, did not change: "North Korea continues its struggles to stay online." The timing of North Korea's latest Internet issues makes them significant. They come days after the U.S. government blamed Pyongyang for being behind the hacking of Sony Pictures over that company's production of "The Interview" -- a comedy depicting the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un -- as well as threats against anyone who dared watch the movie. North Korea denied any responsibility, even as it blamed the U.S. government for being behind the making of the Seth Rogen-James Franco film. Its totalitarian government went on to officially make its own threat, warning the United States that its "citadels" will be attacked, dwarfing the hacking attack on Sony. Pyongyang hasn't leveled any blame or threats about its latest Internet outage. But experts are skeptical that the American government had any involvement. That's almost irrelevant, said Mike Chinoy, a frequent traveler to North Korea and former CNN correspondent. "The issue ... is not whether it was or it wasn't (the United States that knocked out North Korea's Internet). The issue is what the North Koreans think it was," said Chinoy , a U.S.-China Institute senior fellow. "And I think it's safe to assume -- unless they themselves took their system offline for their own security, which is not impossible -- they'll be looking to respond." Cyber conflict with North Korea is 'dangerous uncharted territory' Expert: Could be 'a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask' So who is behind North Korea's Internet problems? Unlike the Sony cyberattack and threats, which were linked to a group called "Guardians of Peace," the latest issues haven't been tied to any group or government. It's possible they have nothing to do with the Sony dust-up and are simply an internal matter. Another possibility: North Korea's Internet traffic is routed through China, so issues or officials there may be to blame. Another option: it could be a deliberate move by the country's own government. "North Korea may have disconnected themselves, either preemptively to prevent that movie from being distributed, but also, probably more likely, in a defensive posture," said Shawn Henry, a cybersecurity expert and former executive assistant director of the FBI. Talking when North Korea's Internet was totally down, Dyn Research's Doug Madory said "usually there are isolated blips" anyway in the country's service. But he thinks what happened here was different. "I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack," Madory said. What are military options for N. Korea? New North Korea threats to attack U.S. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf deflected a question about the disruption. "We aren't going to discuss -- you know -- publicly, operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way, except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen," she said. No one is saying the U.S. government couldn't have carried out such an attack. But tech experts say it might not have needed to, given the ability of anyone, anywhere to do something like this. What happened with Sony, especially the studio's decision to shelve -- at least temporarily -- the release of "The Interview," got a lot of people upset. Matthew Prince, president of the performance and security company CloudFlare , told CNN he couldn't say definitively that there was an attack at all. But if there was, he said it's possible a lone individual, not an entire government, was behind it. "If it is an attack, it's highly unlikely it's the United States. More likely it's a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask," said Prince, tying the prospective attackers to those connected to or inspired by the hacktivist movement Anonymous. Limited technology, but not when it comes to hacking Do these outages equal outrage, leaving North Koreans unable to view "Gangnam Style" for the 2-billionth-plus time? Have they been frustrated when they tried to check on the latest NBA results for their fantasy teams or engage in heated debates about local, national and international politics? No. There's a reason the Committee to Protect Journalists ranks North Korea second on its list of "Most Censored Countries." Only a smattering of "ruling elites" can go online freely, leaving the public limited to a "heavily monitored and censored (intranet) network with no connections to the outside world," according to the advocacy group. Widespread computer technology overall isn't a reality in one of the world's poorest and, according to many outsiders, most antiquated countries. Defector: N. Korea running hacker network North Korea slams U.S. government Hacking: Did we underestimate N. Korea? A 2012 report from KISA , South Korea's Internet development agency, noted North Korea then had only 1,024 IP addresses -- unique numbers assigned to every device that logs on to the Internet -- in a country of about 25 million people. That figure may not exactly reflect the current usage since, for example, people can use one IP address for several items, but it's still paltry by any modern measure. The United States has more than 1.5 billion IP addresses. Still, even if most North Koreans aren't Web-savvy by design, a dangerous handful of them may be. Jang Se-yul, who claims he worked as a computer expert for North Korea's government before defecting seven years ago, told CNN he thinks that Pyongyang has 1,800 cyberwarriors stationed around the world. He says even the agents themselves don't know how many others work for the secretive group -- called Bureau 121 -- whose mission is to "conduct cyberattacks against overseas and enemy states." An FBI investigation linked the malware, infrastructure and techniques used by the Guardians of Peace in the Sony attack to previous North Korean cyberattacks. After that, U.S. President Barack Obama called the hack "an act of cybervandalism that was very costly, very expensive," though he stopped sort of calling it an act of war. The next question is: Will Kim, in Pyongyang, say the same about his country's Internet issues? CNN's Dana Ford, Ralph Ellis, Samuel Burke, Jose Pagliery, Jethro Mullen, Hala Gorani and Catherine E. Shoichet contributed to this report.
(CNN) -- North Korea's Internet was back up Tuesday after a more than nine-hour outage, according to Dyn Research, a company that monitors Internet performance. The disruption came amid an escalating war of words between the United States and North Korea over a massive cyberattack on Sony Pictures. "Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn't be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently," Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, said when the Internet was down. Experts: N. Korea's Internet disrupted What are military options for N. Korea? Reports: North Korea's Internet is down Photos: Kim Jong Un's military Matthew Prince, president of CloudFlare, a performance and security company, described the disruption as if "all the routes to get to North Korea just disappeared. "It's as if North Korea got erased from the global map of the Internet," he said. Prince, who also spoke when the Internet was down, told CNN it's well within the realm of possibility that a single individual could have been behind the interruption but said he can't conclude at this point that an attack took place. "If it is an attack, it's highly unlikely it's the United States. More likely it's a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask," he said. The outage brought down sites run by the Korean Central News Agency and the Rodong Sinmun -- major mouthpieces for the regime -- according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap. There were no problems accessing pro-Pyongyang pages that have servers abroad, Yonhap reported. The United States blames North Korea for the Sony hack; North Korea denies it was involved. The regime is upset over Sony's controversial comedy, "The Interview," which follows a plot to assassinate its leader, Kim Jong Un. The studio decided to pull the film amid threats to moviegoers. U.S. President Barack Obama told CNN on Sunday that the hack was "an act of cybervandalism that was very costly, very expensive" but that he didn't consider it an act of war. He had previously said that the United States would "respond proportionally" to the attack on Sony, without giving specifics. A spokeswoman for the National Security Council declined to comment on the reported outage. A State Department spokeswoman similarly deflected a question about the disruption. "We aren't going to discuss -- you know -- publicly, operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way, except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen," Marie Harf told reporters. CNN's Samuel Burke, Jose Pagliery and Jethro Mullen contributed to this report.
The Internet Is Now Weaponized, And You Are The Target Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/15/2013 22:19 -0500 Belgium China Exxon France Google in Share 0 By now, thanks to Edward Snowden, it is common knowledge and not just conspiracy theory, that every bit of information sent out into the wired or wireless ether is scanned, probed, intercepted and ultimately recorded by the NSA and subsequently all such information is and can be used against any US citizen without a court of law (because the president's pet secret NISA "court" is anything but). Sadly, in a country in which courtesy of peak social networking, exhibitionism has become an art form, the vast majority of Americans not only could not care less about Snowden's sacrificial revelations, but in fact are delighted the at least someone, somewhere cares about that photo of last night's dinner. However, it turns out that far from being a passive listener and recorder, the NSA is quite an active participant in using the internet. The weaponized internet. Because as Wired reports , "The internet backbone — the infrastructure of networks upon which internet traffic travels — went from being a passive infrastructure for communication to an active weapon for attacks." And the primary benefactor: the NSA - General Keith Alexander massive secret army - which has now been unleashed against enemies foreign, but mostly domestic. Enter the QUANTUM program.... According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.” If the NSA can hack Petrobras, the Russians can justify attacking Exxon/Mobil. If GCHQ can hack Belgacom to enable covert wiretaps, France can do the same to ATT. If the Canadians target the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the Chinese can target the U.S. Department of the Interior. We now live in a world where, if we are lucky, our attackers may be every country our traffic passes through except our own. Which means the rest of us — and especially any company or individual whose operations are economically or politically significant — are now targets . All cleartext traffic is not just information being sent from sender to receiver, but is a possible attack vector. ... which is basically packet injection: The QUANTUM codename is deliciously apt for a technique known as “packet injection,” which spoofs or forges packets to intercept them. The NSA’s wiretaps don’t even need to be silent; they just need to send a message that arrives at the target first. It works by examining requests and injecting a forged reply that appears to come from the real recipient so the victim acts on it. The technology itself is actually pretty basic. And the same techniques that work on on a Wi-Fi network can work on a backbone wiretap. I personally coded up a packet-injector from scratch in a matter of hours five years ago, and it’s long been a staple of DefCon pranks. Traditionally, packet injections has been used mostly for censorship purposes: The most infamous use of packet injection prior to the Snowden leaks was censorship, where both internet service providers (ISPs) and the Great Firewall of China injected TCP reset packets (RST) to block undesired traffic. When a computer receives one of these injected RST packets, it closes the connection, believing that all communication is complete. Although public disclosure forced ISPs to stop this behavior, China continues to censor with injected resets. It also injects the Domain Name System (DNS) — the system all computers use to turn names such as “ www.facebook.com ” into IP addresses — by inserting a fake reply whenever it sees a forbidden name. (It’s a process that has caused collateral damage by censoring non-Chinese internet traffic). And user identification, especially in making Tor obsolete. That's right: all users of Tor believing they hide behind the veil of anonymity - you aren't. User cookies, those inserted by both advertising networks and services, also serve as great identifiers for NSA targeting . Yet a web browser only reveals these cookies when communicating with such sites. A solution lies in the NSA’s QUANTUMCOOKIE attack, which they’ve utilized to de-anonymize Tor users. A packet injector can reveal these cookies by replying to an unnoticed web fetch (such as a small image) with a HTTP 302 redirect pointing to the target site (such as Hotmail). The browser now thinks “hey, should really go visit Hotmail and ask it for this image”. In connecting to Hotmail, it reveals all non-secure cookies to the wiretap. This both identifies the user to the wiretap, and also allows the wiretap to use these cookies. So for any webmail service that doesn’t require HTTPS encryption, QUANTUMCOOKIE also allows the wiretap to log in as the target and read the target’s mail. QUANTUMCOOKIE could also tag users, as the same redirection that extracts a cookie could also set or modify a cookie, enabling the NSA to actively track users of interest as they move across the network — although there is no indication yet that the NSA utilizes this technique. But all of the above are largely passive interception and surveillance strategies. Where it gets interesting is when the NSA's mission is... User Attack The NSA has a collection of FOXACID servers, designed to exploit visitors. Conceptually similar to Metasploit’s WebServer browser autopwn mode, these FOXACID servers probe any visiting browser for weaknesses to exploit. All it takes is a single request from a victim passing a wiretap for exploitation to occur. Once the QUANTUM wiretap identifies the victim, it simply packet injects a 302 redirect to a FOXACID server. Now the victim’s browser starts talking to the FOXACID server, which quickly takes over the victim’s computer. The NSA calls this QUANTUMINSERT. The NSA and GCHQ used this technique not only to target Tor users who read Inspire (reported to be an Al-Qaeda propaganda magazine in the English language) but also to gain a foothold within the Belgium telecommunication firm Belgacom, as a prelude to wiretapping Belgium phones. One particular trick involved identifying the LinkedIn or Slashdot account of an intended target. Then when the QUANTUM system observed individuals visiting LinkedIn or Slashdot, it would examine the HTML returned to identify the user before shooting an exploit at the victim. Any page that identifies the users over HTTP would work equally well, as long as the NSA is willing to write a parser to extract user information from the contents of the page. Other possible QUANTUM use cases include the following. These are speculative, as we have no evidence that the NSA, GCHQ, or others are utilizing these opportunities. Yet to security experts they are obvious extensions of the logic above. HTTP cache poisoning. Web browsers often cache critical scripts, such as the ubiquitous Google Analytics script ‘ga.js’. The packet injector can see a request for one of these scripts and instead respond with a malicious version, which will now run on numerous web pages. Since such scripts rarely change, the victim will continue to use the attacker’s script until either the server changes the original script or the browser clears its cache. Zero-Exploit Exploitation. The FinFly “remote monitoring” hacking tool sold to governments includes exploit-free exploitation, where it modifies software downloads and updates to contain a copy of the FinFisher Spyware. Although Gamma International’s tool operates as a full man-in-the-middle, packet injection can reproduce the effect. The injector simply waits for the victim to attempt a file download, and replies with a 302 redirect to a new server. This new server fetches the original file, modifies it, and passes it on to the victim. When the victim runs the executable, they are now exploited — without the need for any actual exploits. Mobile Phone Applications. Numerous Android and iOS applications fetch data through simple HTTP. In particular, the “Vulna” Android advertisement library was an easy target, simply waiting for a request from the library and responding with an attack that can effectively completely control the victim’s phone. Although Google removed applications using this particular library, other advertisement libraries and applications can present similar vulnerabilities. DNS-Derived Man-in-the-Middle. Some attacks, such as intercepting HTTPS traffic with a forged certificate, require a full man in the middle rather than a simple eavesdropper. Since every communication starts with a DNS request, and it is only a rare DNS resolver that cryptographically validates the reply with DNSSEC, a packet injector can simply see the DNS request and inject its own reply. This represents a capability upgrade, turning a man-on-the-side into a man-in-the-middle. One possible use is to intercept HTTPS connections if the attacker has a certificate that the victim will accept, by simply redirecting the victim to the attacker’s server. Now the attacker’s server can complete the HTTPS connection. Another potential use involves intercepting and modifying email. The attacker simply packet-injects replies for the MX (Mailserver) entries corresponding to the target’s email. Now the target’s email will first pass through the attacker’s email server. This server could do more than just read the target’s incoming mail, it could also modify it to contain exploits. Amplifying Reach. Large countries don’t need to worry about seeing an individual victim: odds are that a victim’s traffic will pass one wiretap in a short period of time. But smaller countries that wish to utilize the QUANTUMINSERT technique need to force victims traffic past their wiretaps. It’s simply a matter of buying the traffic: Simply ensure that local companies (such as the national airline) both advertise heavily and utilize in-country servers for hosting their ads. Then when a desired target views the advertisement, use packet injection to redirect them to the exploit server; just observe which IP a potential victim arrived from before deciding whether to attack. It’s like a watering hole attack where the attacker doesn’t need to corrupt the watering hole. Can anything be done to prevent the NSA's internet army from running over a world that spends the bulk of its time in its reaches? Not much: The only self defense from all of the above is universal encryption. Universal encryption is difficult and expensive, but unfortunately necessary. Encryption doesn’t just keep our traffic safe from eavesdroppers, it protects us from attack. DNSSEC validation protects DNS from tampering, while SSL armors both email and web traffic. There are many engineering and logistic difficulties involved in encrypting all traffic on the internet, but its one we must overcome if we are to defend ourselves from the entities that have weaponized the backbone. Alas, in the battle against the NSA, the biggest enemy is not the authoritarian state's Super Big Brother, but apathy itself. It is that war that is by far the most important one, and which America has already lost. 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14 Facts About The Absolutely Crazy Internet Stock Bubble That Could Crash And Burn In 2014 By Michael Snyder, on November 5th, 2013 Shouldn't Internet companies actually "make a profit" at some point before being considered worth billions of dollars? A lot of investors laugh when they look back at the foolishness of the "Dotcom bubble" of the late 1990s, but the tech bubble that is inflating right in front of our eyes today is actually far worse. For example, what would you say if I told you that a seven-year-old company that has a long history of not being profitable and that actually lost 64 million dollars last quarter is worth more than 13 billion dollars ? You would probably say that I was insane, but the company that I have just described is Twitter and Wall Street is going crazy for it right now. Please don't get me wrong - I actually love Twitter. On my Twitter account I have sent out thousands of "tweets". Twitter is a lot of fun, and it has had a huge impact on the entire planet. But is it worth 13 billion dollars? Of course not. When it comes to the Internet, what is hot today will probably not be hot tomorrow. Do you remember MySpace? At one time, MySpace was considered to be the undisputed king of social media. But then something better came along (Facebook) and killed it. It is important to keep in mind that Facebook did not even exist ten years ago. Yes, almost everybody is using it today, but will everybody still be using it a decade from now? Maybe. But the way that the financial markets are valuing these firms can only be justified if they are going to make absolutely massive profits for many decades to come. Will Twitter eventually make a little bit of money? Probably, as long as they get their act together. In fact, Twitter should be making significant amounts of money right now if it was being run correctly. But will Twitter ever make 13 billion dollars? No, that simply is not going to happen. But that is what Wall Street says that Twitter is worth. The utter foolishness that we are witnessing on Wall Street right now is so similar to what we saw back in the late 1990s. It is almost as if we have learned nothing from our past mistakes. These days I keep having flashbacks of the Pets.com sock puppet. For those too young to remember, the following is a brief summary from Investopedia about what happened to Pets.com... It's impossible to think of the first Internet era without thinking of the Pets.com sock puppet. He was everywhere and was nearly as well-known as the Geico gecko is today. That familiarity, in part, persuaded many investors to lay down money in the company's February 2000 IPO (which was backed by Amazon.com). Pets.com raised $82.5 million – but nine months later it folded, due to major recurring losses. Part of the reason for that was aggressive advertising, but the company also lost money on virtually every item it sold. In the third quarter of 2000, Pets.com reported negative gross margins of $277,000. (The second quarter had seen a $1.7 million margin loss.) That same quarter (its last full quarter as an operating entity), the company lost $21.7 million on $9.4 million in revenue. As for the puppet, he went on to shill for BarNone, which helps people with bad credit histories get car loans. He's still there today, front and center on that website. Everyone loves to laugh at the poor little sock puppet, but the truth is that the tech bubble that is inflating right now is far worse than the Dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. The following are 14 facts about the current tech bubble that will blow your mind... #1 In just a few days, the Twitter IPO is expected to raise close to 2 billion dollars even though Twitter actually lost 64.6 million dollars last quarter and has a long history of not being profitable. #2 It is being projected that after the IPO Twitter could have a market valuation of more than 13 billion dollars . #3 Twitter is not expected to make a profit until 2015 at the earliest. #4 According to CNBC, Pinterest is currently valued at 3.8 billion dollars even though it has never earned a profit. #5 Yahoo paid more than a billion dollars for Tumblr even though Tumblr's revenues are so small that Yahoo is not even required to report them on financial statements. #6 Snapchat, an Internet service that allows people to send out messages that "self-destruct", is supposedly worth 4 billion dollars . But it actually has zero revenue coming in, and many believe that it is essentially worthless as a money making enterprise. For one extensive analysis by a tech blogger, please see this article . #7 The stock of Rocket Fuel, an online advertising company, is trading at about 60 dollars a share and it has a market valuation of about 2 billion dollars even though it has never made a profit. #8 The stock of local business review website Yelp is up 241 percent this year even though it has never earned a quarterly profit. #9 Fab.com just raised 165 million dollars from investors even though it recently laid off 44o employees. #10 LinkedIn stock has risen in price by 136 percent since the 2011 IPO, and it is now supposedly worth more than 18 billion dollars . #11 The head of engineering at Twitter, Chris Fry, got a 10.3 million dollar pay package when he joined Twitter last year. #12 Facebook's VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, earned 24.4 million dollars in 2011. #13 Office rents in San Francisco (where many of these tech companies are based) are now 23 percent higher than they were at the peak of the real estate market in 2008. #14 Facebook stock is up close to 140 percent over the past 12 months and the company is now worth more than 120 billion dollars . And I am certainly not the only one that is concerned that we are repeating the mistakes of the late 1990s... “When you look at valuations and look at the lack of earnings and revenue, it seems to me much like the dot-com bubble,” said Matt McCormick, a money manager at Cincinnati-based Bahl Gaynor Inc. who helps oversee $10.2 billion. “This market looks a little frothy and Twitter is the personification of a risky trade.” In fact, as the Wall Street Journal recently noted , we have seen some of these tech stocks crash more than once during the Internet age... "It's fascinating to me that today's mini-mania includes shares of Amazon, Netflix and Priceline that have previously peaked and crashed before—in some cases they've peaked and crashed twice before," says Darren Pollock, portfolio manager at Cheviot Value Management. "Stocks like these have again captured the imagination of speculators. We're skeptical that there is enough underlying intrinsic value to many of the highfliers to support today's prices." So how long will it be until the current tech bubble implodes?
If asked whether we could still enjoy our comfortable,convenient and contended modern life without the Internet ,we would definitely answer “no” .The Internet has been such an integral component in our life that we can’t picture the life without it . Many factors contribute to it .Firstly ,our insatiable appetite for information fosters our dependence on the Internet .What’s more , the convenience of the Internet suits our desire for an easy way of life .Who would want to wait in line for half an hour at the bank if he could deposit money online with several clicks ? However, our dependence on the Internet leads to many problems .First ,the Internet addicts tend to live in a fantasy world rather than communicate with real persons .Furthermore ,our dependence on the Internet keeps us indoors ,making many of us suffer from a decline in the physical condition . In view of all the above analysis ,I suggest we make good use of the Internet .on the one hand ,we should take full advantage of it to perfect ourselves .on the other hand ,it’s advised to keep it at a safe distance and never get indulged it
NSA Spying Directly Harms Internet Companies, Silicon Valley, California … And the Entire U.S. Economy Submitted by George Washington on 07/31/2013 13:47 -0400 Apple Brazil China European Union fixed France Germany Golden Goose GOOG Google Japan Nancy Pelosi national security New York Times None Obama Administration Securities and Exchange Commission SPY Transparency Twitter United Kingdom Mass surveillance by the NSA may directly harm the bottom of line of Internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire national economy. Money News points out : The company whose shares you own may be lying to you — while Uncle Sam looks the other way. Let’s step through this. I think you will see the problem. Fact 1: U.S. financial markets are the envy of the world because we have fair disclosure requirements, accounting standards and impartial courts. This is the foundation of shareholder value. The company may lose money, but they at least told you the truth. Fact 2: We now know multiple public companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB) and other, gave their user information to NSA. Forget the privacy implications for a minute. Assume for the sake of argument that everything complies with U.S. law. Even if true, the businesses may still be at risk. Fact 3: All these companies operate globally. They get revenue from China, Japan, Russia, Germany, France and everywhere else. Did those governments consent to have their citizens monitored by the NSA? I think we can safely say no. Politicians in Europe are especially outraged. Citizens are angry with the United States and losing faith in American brand names. Foreign companies are already using their non-American status as a competitive advantage. Some plan to redesign networks specifically to bypass U.S. companies. By yielding to the NSA, U.S. companies likely broke laws elsewhere. They could face penalties and lose significant revenue. Right or wrong, their decisions could well have damaged the business. Securities lawyers call this “materially adverse information” and companies are required to disclose it. But they are not. Only chief executives and a handful of technical people know when companies cooperate with the NSA. If the CEO can’t even tell his own board members he has placed the company at risk, you can bet it won’t be in the annual report. The government also gives some executives immunity documents, according to Bloomberg. Immunity is unnecessary unless someone thinks they are breaking the law. So apparently, the regulators who ostensibly protect the public are actively helping the violators. This is a new and different investment landscape. Public companies are hiding important facts that place their investors at risk. If you somehow find out, you will have no recourse because regulators gave the offender a “get out of jail free” card. The regulatory structure that theoretically protects you knowingly facilitates deception that may hurt you, and then silences any witnesses. This strikes to the very heart of the U.S. financial system. Our markets have lost any legitimate claim to “full and fair disclosure.” Every prospectus, quarterly report and news release now includes an unwritten NSA asterisk. Whenever a CEO speaks, we must assume his fingers are crossed. *** Every individual investor or money manager now has a new risk factor to consider. Every disclosure by every company is in doubt. The rule of law that gave us the most-trusted markets in the world may be just an illusion. In a subsequent article, Money News wrote : Executives at publicly traded companies are lying to shareholders and probably their own boards of directors. They are exposing your investments to real, material, hard-dollar losses and not telling you. The government that allegedly protects you, Mr. Small Investor, knows all this and actually encourages more of it. Who lies? Ah, there’s the problem. We don’t know. Some people high in the government know. The CEOs themselves and a few of their tech people know. You and I don’t get to know. We just provide the money. Since we don’t know which CEOs are government-approved liars, the prudent course is to assume all CEOs are government-approved liars. We can no longer give anyone the benefit of the doubt. If you are a money manager with a fiduciary responsibility to your investors, you are hereby on notice. A CEO may sign those Securities and Exchange Commission filings where you get corporate information with his fingers crossed. Your clients pay you to know the facts and make good decisions. You’re losing that ability. For example, consider a certain U.S. telecommunications giant with worldwide operations. It connects American businesses with customers everywhere. Fast-growing emerging markets like Brazil are very important to its future growth. Thanks to data-sharing agreements with various phone providers in Brazil, this company has deep access to local phone calls. One day someone from NSA calls up the CEO and asks to tap into that stream. He says OK, tells his engineers to do it and moves on. A few years later, Edward Snowden informs Brazilian media that U.S. intelligence is capturing these data. They tell the Brazilian public. It is not happy. Nor are its politicians, who are already on edge for entirely unrelated reasons. What would you say are this company’s prospects for future business in Brazil? Your choices are “slim” and “none.” They won’t be the only ones hurt. If the U.S. government won’t identify which American company cheated its Brazilian partners, Brazil will just blame all of them. The company can kiss those growth plans good-bye. This isn’t a fantasy. It is happening right now. The legality of cooperating with the NSA within the United States is irrelevant. Immunity letters in the United States do not protect the company from liability elsewhere. *** Shouldn’t shareholders get to know when their company’s CEO takes these risks? Shouldn’t the directors who hire the CEO have a say in the matter? Yes, they should. We now know that they don’t. The trust that forms the bedrock under U.S. financial markets is crumbling. If we cannot believe CEOs when they swear to tell the truth, if companies can hide material risks, if boards cannot know what the executives they hire are actually doing, any pretense of “fair markets” is gone. When nothing is private, people and businesses soon cease to trust each other. Without trust, modern financial markets cannot function properly. If U.S. disclosure standards are no better than those in the third world, then every domestic stock is overvalued. Our “rule of law” premium is gone. This means a change for stock valuations — and it won’t be bullish. CNN reports : Officials throughout Europe, most notably French President Francois Hollande, said that NSA spying threatens trade talks. *** For the Internet companies named in reports on NSA surveillance, their bottom line is at risk because European markets are crucial for them. It is too early assess the impact on them, but the stakes are clearly huge. For example, Facebook has about 261 million active monthly European users, compared with about 195 million in the U.S. and Canada, and 22% of Apple’s net income came from Europe in the first quarter of 2013. *** In June 2011, Microsoft admitted that the United States could bypass EU privacy regulations to get vast amounts of cloud data from their European customers. Six months later, BAE Systems, based in the United Kingdom, stopped using the company’s cloud services because of this issue. *** The NSA scandal has brought tensions over spying to a boil. German prosecutors may open a criminal investigation into NSA spying. On July 3, Germany’s interior minister said that people should stop using companies like Google and Facebook if they fear the U.S. is intercepting their data. On July 4, the European Parliament condemned spying on Europeans and ordered an investigation into mass surveillance. The same day, Neelie Kroes, the EU’s chief telecom and Internet official, warned of “multi-billion euro consequences for American companies” because of U.S. spying in the cloud. *** Transparency is an important first step. Its absence only exacerbates a trust deficit that companies already had in Europe. And trust is crucial. Google’s chief legal officer recognized this on June 19 when he said, “Our business depends on the trust of our users,” during a Web chat about the NSA scandal. Some companies have been aggressive in trying to disclose more, and others have not. But unless the U.S. government loosens strictures and allows greater disclosure, all U.S. companies are likely to suffer the backlash. *** The Obama administration needs to recognize and mitigate the serious economic risks of spying while trying to rebuild its credibility on Internet freedom. The July 9 hearing of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a start, but much more is needed. More disclosure about the surveillance programs, more oversight, better laws, and a process to work with allied governments to increase privacy protections would be a start. The European customers of Internet companies are not all al Qaeda or criminals, but that is essentially how U.S. surveillance efforts treat them. If this isn’t fixed, this may be the beginning of a very costly battle pitting U.S. surveillance against European business, trade, and human rights. The Atlantic notes : Most communications flow over the Internet and a very large percentage of key Internet infrastructure is in the United States. Thus, foreigners’ communications are much more likely to pass through U.S. facilities even when no U.S. person is a party to a particular message. Think about a foreigner using Gmail, or Facebook, or Twitter — billions of these communications originate elsewhere in the world but pass through, and are stored on, servers located in the U.S. *** Foreigners … comprise a growing majority of any global company’s customers . *** From the perspective of many foreign individuals and governments, global Internet companies headquartered in the U.S. are a security and privacy risk. And that means foreign governments offended by U.S. snooping are already looking for ways to make sure their citizens’ data never reaches the U.S. without privacy concessions. We can see the beginnings of this effort in the statement by the vice president of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, who called in her June 20 op-ed in the New York Times for new EU data protection rules to “ensure that E.U. citizens’ data are transferred to non-European law enforcement authorities only in situations that are well defined, exceptional and subject to judicial review.” While we cheer these limits on government access, the spying scandal also puts the U.S. government and American companies at a disadvantage in ongoing discussions with the EU about upcoming changes to its law enforcement and consumer-privacy-focused data directives, negotiations critical to the Internet industry’s ongoing operations in Europe. Even more troubling, some European activists are calling for data-storage rules to thwart the U.S. government’s surveillance advantage. The best way to keep the American government from snooping is to have foreigners’ data stored locally so that local governments – and not U.S. spy agencies — get to say when and how that data may be used. And that means nations will force U.S.-based Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to store their user data in-country, or will redirect users to domestic businesses that are not so easily bent to the American government’s wishes. So the first unintended consequence of mass NSA surveillance may be to diminish the power and profitability of the U.S. Internet economy. America invented the Internet , and our Internet companies are dominant around the world. The U.S. government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive golden goose. San Diego Union-Tribune writes : California and its businesses have a problem. It’s called the National Security Agency. *** The problem for California is not that the feds are collecting all of our communications. It is that the feds are (totally unapologetically) doing the same to foreigners, especially in communications with the U.S. California depends for its livelihood on people overseas — as customers, trade partners, as sources of talent. Our leading industries — shipping, tourism, technology, and entertainment — could not survive, much less prosper, without the trust and goodwill of foreigners . We are home to two of the world’s busiest container ports, and we are a leading exporter of engineering, architectural, design, financial, insurance, legal, and educational services. All of our signature companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Chevron, Disney — rely on sales and growth overseas. And our families and workplaces are full of foreigners; more than one in four of us were born abroad, and more than 50 countries have diaspora populations in California of more than 10,000. *** News that our government is collecting our foreign friends’ phone records, emails, video chats, online conversations, photos, and even stored data, tarnishes the California and American brands. *** Will tourists balk at visiting us because they fear U.S. monitoring? Will overseas business owners think twice about trading with us because they fear that their communications might be intercepted and used for commercial gain by American competitors? Most chilling of all: Will foreigners stop using the products and services of California technology and media companies — Facebook, Google, Skype, and Apple among them — that have been accomplices (they say unwillingly) to the federal surveillance? The answer to that last question: Yes. It’s already happening. Asian governments and businesses are now moving their employees and systems off Google’s Gmail and other U.S.-based systems, according to Asian news reports. German prosecutors are investigating some of the American surveillance. The issue is becoming a stumbling block in negotiations with the European Union over a new trade agreement. Technology experts are warning of a big loss of foreign business. John Dvorak, the PCMag.com columnist, wrote recently, “Our companies have billions and billions of dollars in overseas sales and none of the American companies can guarantee security from American spies. Does anyone but me think this is a problem for commerce?” *** It doesn’t help when our own U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is backing the surveillance without acknowledgment of the huge potential costs to her state. It’s time for her and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has been nearly as tone-deaf on this issue, to be forcefully reminded that protecting California industry, and the culture of openness and trust that is so vital to it, is at least as important as protecting massive government data-mining. Such reminders should take the force not merely of public statements but of law. California has a robust history of going its own way — on vehicle standards, energy efficiency, immigration, marijuana. Now is the time for another departure — this one on the privacy of communications. *** We need laws, perhaps even a state constitutional amendment, to make plain that California considers the personal data and communications of all people, be they American or foreign, to be private and worthy of protection. And see this . The bigger picture is that a country’s economic health is correlated with a strong rule of law more than any other factor . Yet America has rapidly fallen into a state of lawlessness , where fundamental rights – such as protection against mass spying by the government – have been jettisoned . The government is spying on just about everything we do . Even the government’s attempted denials of this fact confirm it . BONUS: Cheat-Sheet On Spying Average: 5 Your rating: None Average: 5 ( 18 votes)
How The NSA Collects Your Internet Data In Four Charts Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/30/2013 03:37 -0400 PrISM When it blew the lid open on the NSA domestic spying scandal in conjunction with the Guardian, the Washington Post released the first batch of slides revealing the preliminary details of which Internet firms cooperate in secret with the NSA, unleashing a firestorm of lies and denials by these same private companies (not to mention the administration), whose collaboration with the US government was subsequently revealed to be of symbiotically and mutually beneficial (think massive government contracts and classified data kickbacks in exchange for confidential customer data ). Last night, WaPo released the latest batch of slides given to it by Edward Snowden who appears to have been very busy downloading as much internal NSA info as he could, during his three months at Booz. This time we learn all about the PRISM "tasking" process - or the detail of how the NSA goes about "incidentally" spying on America's citizens (because as much as it is a headline grabber, the NSA spying on the EU, the G-20, and other non-US entities , is after all its job). From the WaPo : Acquiring data from a new target This slide describes what happens when an NSA analyst "tasks" the PRISM system for information about a new surveillance target. The request to add a new target is passed automatically to a supervisor who reviews the "selectors," or search terms. The supervisor must endorse the analyst's "reasonable belief," defined as 51 percent confidence, that the specified target is a foreign national who is overseas at the time of collection. Analyzing information collected from private companies After communications information is acquired, the data are processed and analyzed by specialized systems that handle voice, text, video and "digital network information" that includes the locations and unique device signatures of targets. Each target is assigned a case notation The PRISM case notation format reflects the availability, confirmed by The Post's reporting, of real-time surveillance as well as stored content. Searching the PRISM database On April 5, according to this slide, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in PRISM's counterterrorism database . The slide does not show how many other Internet users, and among them how many Americans, have their communications collected "incidentally" during surveillance of those targets . Average: 4.77778 Your rating: None Average: 4.8 ( 9 votes) Login or register to post comments 7640 reads Printer-friendly version Send to friend Similar Articles You Might Enjoy: "You Should Use Both" - How America's Internet Companies Are Handing Over Your Data To Uncle Sam Meet PRISM / US-984XN - The US Government's Internet Espionage Super Operation Shoot The PRISM-Gate Messenger: Obama To Launch Criminal Probe Into NSA Leaks The NSA's "Boundless Informant" Collects 3 Billion Intelligence Pieces From US Computer Networks In One Month Internet Companies Begin Revealing Extent Of Government Snooping