Loss of Privacy

From Democracy Now! You can read the transcript while watching the video.

Investors at the CIA and Google are backing a company called “Recorded Future” that monitors tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts in real time in order to find patterns, events and relationships that may predict the future. The news comes amidst Google’s so-called “Wi-Spy” scandal, that refers to revelations that Google’s Street View cars operating in some thirty countries snooped on private Wi-Fi networks over the last three years.

You can read a detailed description of what happened to Robert Phillips and the weird disappearance of Dave Vasey’s charges.

The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart’s take on the recent Wikileaks leak of thousands of military documents regarding Afghanistan.

If you live outside the USA, this link or this link might allow you to watch The Daily Show clips.

We spend the hour with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, talking about the biggest leak in US history: the release of more than 91,000 classified military records on the war in Afghanistan. As the Pentagon announces it is launching a criminal probe into who leaked the documents, Assange asks what about investigating the “war crimes” revealed in the leaked military records? He also talks about the media, why he isn’t coming to the US anytime soon, and what gives him hope. “What keeps us going is our sources. These are the people, presumably, who are inside these organizations, who want change,” Assange says. “They are both heroic figures taking much greater risks than I ever do, and they are pushing and showing that they want change in, in fact, an extremely effective way.”

Transcript here.

If you’re running windows, you’re vulnerable to the .lnk exploit. Sophos has a patch that will protect you as Microsoft has a workaround that doesn’t quite work.

You can read more about the Sophos patch here and download it here.