Last week, a Redditor named easyjet decided to (very belatedly) join the global party that is Facebook. He signed up with an email address he never, ever used. He lied about all of his personal information.

So he was rightly freaked out when Facebook still managed to predict and "recommend" a huge number of his real-life acquaintances - down to people whose names he barely knew and a woman he dated 19 years ago.

How does Facebook know who your friends are? It's a mystery that has nagged users since at least 2011, when the Irish Data Protection Commissioner conducted a full-scale investigation into the issue. But four years later, there's still a lot of confusion and misinformation about what Facebook's doing when it "finds" your friends.

Did it scrape your phone for names and numbers? Run a reverse-image search of your picture? Compile a "shadow" or "ghost" profile on you over a period of years, just waiting for you to log on and "confirm" its guesses?

Alas, Facebook's actual process isn't actually that sneaky or malicious. In fact, it involves this pretty complex academic field called ... network science.

In a nutshell, whenever you sign up for a Facebook account, Facebook asks permission to look at your email contacts if you're on a computer, or your phone contacts if you're on a smartphone. When you grant the site permission, it searches your contacts for users already on the network, and it searches other users' uploaded contacts for you. That gives it a very primitive outline of your social circles: who you know, but not how you know them or how well.

read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/how-facebook-knows-who-all-your-friends-are-even-better-than-you-do-20150406-1mf4sh.html

If you’re doing nothing wrong, and have nothing to hide from your government, then mass surveillance holds no fears for you. This argument might be the oldest straw man in the privacy debate, but it’s also a decent reflection of the state of the argument. In the UK’s first major election since the Snowden revelations, privacy is a nonissue.

This is a shame, because when it comes down to it, many of us who are doing nothing wrong have plenty we would prefer to hide.

One student learned that lesson in a hurry a few years ago. He had lent his lecturer – who happened to be me – his laptop to do an online demo as part of a presentation to his postgraduate class. All went well until a new Firefox tab was opened. When you do this, Firefox helpfully previews nine windows from your recent internet history. Unfortunately for the student concerned, five of these showed stills from hardcore porn videos. The material was legal, matched his stated sexual orientation, and was relatively vanilla – nothing he’d necessarily wish to hide – but it’s safe to say he’d rather it hadn’t been projected to his classmates.

The rest of the planned lesson had to be abandoned because of interruption (“What was the title of the one in the top left again? Was that the Busty Milf Teacher one?”) And instead the students got a crash course in internet privacy and anonymity. You have never seen a class so attentive.

We rarely care about our privacy in general terms; when it gets to specifics – can I read your text messages? – we tend to be more defensive. And when we get anywhere near the sexual realm, we get very defensive indeed.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/08/dick-pic-government-privacy-surveillance-gchq

Radio La Colifata - slang for loon, crazy person, has been on air from Hospital Jose Borda in Buenos Aires for 23 years and has since gone from AM, FM to online. The station wants to change the negative way people view mental illness and it is the patients who present the broadcasts – with shows on issues like politics and sports. While the radio was never intended as a serious journalistic endeavour, it is having an impact with around 50 stations across Latin America and Asia now set up based on the Colifatos model.

In this week's feature, The Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro heads to Buenos Aires to hear what the Colifatos has to say.

We close the show with an extended video of our End Note. Nearly two years ago, former Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the US National Security Agency, leaked all those documents exposing the extent of digital surveillance by spy agencies around the world. The UK's Guardian newspaper broke the Snowden story and the British government responded by sending a security team into the Guardian to destroy a laptop that held all that secret information. What was left of that Mac became the inspiration behind a new exhibit on the devices we use at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. We visited the exhibition and met with one of the curators who walks us through the exhibition. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2015/04/spain-gag-law-...

Radio La Colifata - slang for loon, crazy person, has been on air from Hospital Jose Borda in Buenos Aires for 23 years and has since gone from AM, FM to online. The station wants to change the negative way people view mental illness and it is the patients who present the broadcasts – with shows on issues like politics and sports. While the radio was never intended as a serious journalistic endeavour, it is having an impact with around 50 stations across Latin America and Asia now set up based on the Colifatos model.

In this week's feature, The Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro heads to Buenos Aires to hear what the Colifatos has to say.

We close the show with an extended video of our End Note. Nearly two years ago, former Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the US National Security Agency, leaked all those documents exposing the extent of digital surveillance by spy agencies around the world. The UK's Guardian newspaper broke the Snowden story and the British government responded by sending a security team into the Guardian to destroy a laptop that held all that secret information. What was left of that Mac became the inspiration behind a new exhibit on the devices we use at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. We visited the exhibition and met with one of the curators who walks us through the exhibition. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2015/04/spain-gag-law-...

Amidst the vociferous May Day demonstrations going on in the German capital and around the country this Friday, a sculpture was unveiled, dedicated to Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, that isn't looking for much noise at all, just an answer to one simple question: Anything to say? The sculptor is the Italian artist Davide Dormino.

DW: What is the atmosphere at Alexanderplatz right now, Mr. Dormino?

Davide Dormino: There are hundreds of people lined up here waiting to stand up on this fourth chair to say something. Anything.

What fourth chair?

Next to Snowden, Assange and Manning, who are all sculpted on chairs, there is a fourth one open to anyone here in Berlin who wants to get up and say anything they want. And it is fantastic. There are people getting up here and actually doing what we imagined when this idea came to being…

What are they saying?

Many different things. From politics to babbling to silence, from people who desperately are wanting to help Julian, Bradley and Edward to people who have no idea who they are, this chair is, I guess, a place of free speech.

In honor of those three people standing next to them who are no longer physically free?

Yes. Absolutely. But it doesn't mean that you have to stand up and give thanks to them. It doesn't matter what you say. You can say whatever you want, anything you want. Children are even standing up here.

read more: http://www.dw.de/a-fourth-chair-for-freedom-at-berlins-alexanderplatz/a-18423832

My reservation is in regard to Chelsea Manning. The Sculptor should have been more aware. 

I was told by the third cousin to a statue that the speeches last night at the Annual Media Freedom Dinner at the Ivy ballroom, Sydney was a warming about the way the new "Metadata" laws in Australia are designed to shut up whistleblowers as well as journalists. Beware where you glean your info from. As waste-bin marked with an X or a park bench is preferable to the internet. 

A conversation to have... People have no idea of the power of the government spying on citizens until one mentions the dick-pics... This is the interview by John Oliver of Edward Snowden in Moscow, finally attached to a Last Week Tonight show on "GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE" and posted on YouTube which was not accessible to Australians for a while.  Fascinating:

watch at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_2269232605&feature=iv&src_vid=yzGzB-yYKcc&v=XEVlyP4_11M

Read from top.

The internet is not for businesses, governments, or spies. It's for users—and it's up to the independent web engineers to keep it safe for them.

That was the most recent message from National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, who surprised a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Prague, Czech Republic on Monday with a webcast Q&A.

"Who is the Internet for, who does it serve, who is the IETF's ultimate customer?" Snowden asked of the roughly 170 engineers in the audience, referring to users. He added that current safety protocols on the web make too much private user data available to NSA and other intelligence agencies and businesses. "We need to divorce identity from persona in a lasting way," Snowden said.

The IETF is one of the primary bodies creating voluntary standards of use, design and management of the internet, and Monday's meeting gave Snowden a welcome platform to promote a freer and safer web.

As the Register UK reports, IETF members "have a strong independent streak, and many are still embarrassed by the fact that the NSA managed to crack a number of key internet protocols developed by the IETF and even subvert some of its working groups in their bid to develop new standards that would give the spooks easy access."

Snowden's 2013 revelations that the NSA was collecting bulk telephone and internet metadata prompted an ongoing global debate over the role of government surveillance and the nature of individual privacy—a phenomenon termed by media critic Jay Rosen as "the Snowden Effect." For its part, the IETF responded to the leaks by developing a memorandum, known as a Request for Comment (RFC), entitled "Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack."

In his Q&A with the engineers on Monday, Snowden reiterated the dangers of invasive collection of information. "People are being killed based on metadata, this is real," he said.

The webcast came after IETF members screened the documentaryCitizenfour, which chronicles Snowden's 2013 leak of NSA files and his experience living in exile. While the session was not recorded, many attendees tweeted out some of Snowden's key points during the address, including the need for reduced "middleboxes," or networking devices that filter internet traffic on its way to its final destination.

"Every middlebox is an increased attack surface," Snowden said. "The NSA will want to subvert internet security, this is what they do."

The Register continues:

He also argued that having identifiable "long lasting" hardware addresses was "extremely dangerous," as it connects people to, say, a MAC address when they use wireless internet connections, which can put an immediate flag on their identity and location.

Snowden connected the role of internet engineers to the fight for civil liberties and the essential right to privacy. "It is our duty to pass on the human rights we have inherited," Snowden said. "Technologists are at the vanguard of that."

"We need not only to think what the problems are today, but how we preserve the internet for the future," he continued. "Everybody should be safe all the time, else we let others choose who will be safe or not."

Snowden's speech was met with a standing ovation. As one attendee wroteduring the session, "Before, I was impressed by the courage and what Snowden did. Hearing his thoughtful detailed Q&A, I am overwhelmed [by] his intelligence."

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/21/snowdens-plea-top-technologists-build-internet-people

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Lauded as heroes by some, denounced as traitors by others, they're the "digital dissidents" whose revelations have made headlines around the world.

"Criticise me, hate me, but think about what matters in the issues. Right? Think about the world you want to live in."Edward Snowden

The decision by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to reveal covert US surveillance programs exposed the massive capabilities of the US spy agency to monitor communications around the globe.

"The way in which these disclosures happened have been damaging to the United States and damaging to our Intelligence capabilities." US President Barack Obama

In speaking out, Snowden's joined the ranks of self-declared intelligence whistleblowers who have risked imprisonment.

"There was a moment where he said very clearly, very distinctly, that I showed him the right way. I had always hoped that a Snowden would come along." Thomas Drake, NSA Whistleblower

In this documentary from German broadcaster WDR, Snowden, along with other whistleblowers from the NSA and Britain's MI5 talk about their motivations for speaking out:

"Once you lose that sense of privacy and you start to self-censor, you stop to be an effective and fully integrated citizen of that country, so privacy in my view is the last defence against the slide towards a police state or totalitarianism." Annie Machon, Former MI5 agent

"If you let go your rights for a moment, you have lost them for a lifetime. And that's why this matters: It's because it happened and we didn't know about that. We weren't told about it." Edward Snowden

Digital Dissidents, from German broadcaster WDR and presented by Kerry O'Brien, goes to air on Monday 26th of October at 8.30pm. It is replayed on Tuesday 27th of October at 10.00am and Wednesday 28th at midnight. It can also be seen on ABC News 24 on Saturday at 8.00pm, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2015/10/26/4337020.htm