May 20, 2015

Snowden Sees Some Victories, From a Distance

WASHINGTON — For an international fugitive hiding out in Russia from American espionage charges, Edward J. Snowden gets around.


May has been another month of virtual globe-hopping for Mr. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, with video appearances so far at Princeton and in a “distinguished speakers” series at Stanford and at conferences in Norway and Australia. Before the month is out, he is scheduled to speak by video to audiences in Italy, and also in Ecuador, where there will be a screening of “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning documentary about him.

But there have been far more consequential victories for Mr. Snowden’s cause two years after he flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong carrying laptops loaded with N.S.A. secrets.
Two weeks ago, a federal appeals court ruled that the first N.S.A. program he disclosed, which collects the phone call records of millions of Americans, is illegal. Last week, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to transform the program by keeping the bulk phone records out of government hands, a change President Obama has endorsed and the Senate is now debating. And Apple and Google have angered the F.B.I. by stepping up encryption, including on smartphones, to scramble communications and protect customers from the kind of government surveillance Mr. Snowden exposed.

The fallout has been deeply satisfying to Mr. Snowden, who at first feared that his revelations might be ignored, said Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represents him. But the debate about Mr. Snowden is far from over.
“His life is very, very rich and full,” Mr. Wizner said, eager to refute predictions by Mr. Snowden’s critics in 2013 that he would end up in bitter obscurity in Russia. “What a remarkable public citizen he’s become. How fitting that he has been able to use technology to defeat exile and participate in the debate he started.”

American intelligence officials tell a different story about the saga that began on May 20, 2013, the day Mr. Snowden flew to Hong Kong. Mr. Snowden’s decision to leak hundreds of thousands of highly classified N.S.A. documents to selected reporters still prompts fury from many in the Obama administration, who say his revelations taught terrorists and other adversaries how to dodge the agency’s eavesdropping. They note that his disclosures, some of which were printed in The New York Times, went far beyond the phone records collection, touching on many programs that target foreign countries and do not involve Americans’ privacy.

“The only debate we’re really having in the U.S. is about the very first document that Snowden produced,” said Stewart A. Baker, a former N.S.A. general counsel and outspoken critic of the leaks, referring to the secret court order authorizing the phone records program. “The rest of the documents have been used as a kind of intelligence porn for the rest of the world — ‘Oooh, look at what N.S.A. is doing.’ ”

In a new memoir, Michael J. Morell, former deputy director and acting director of the C.I.A., expresses the dark view of many intelligence veterans, even blaming Mr. Snowden’s leaks for empowering the Islamic State extremist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
“ISIS was one of the terrorist groups that learned from Snowden, and it is clear his actions played a role in the rise of ISIS,” Mr. Morell writes in “The Great War of Our Time,” offering no elaboration. “In short, Snowden has made the United States and our allies considerably less safe. I do not say this lightly: Americans may well die at the hands of terrorists because of Edward Snowden’s actions.”

Given such assessments, prosecutors have shown no inclination to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain he would accept. The Russian government granted him a three-year residency last summer, and he has no obvious prospect of leaving any time soon. Even if Mr. Snowden acquired some kind of travel documents — the United States has revoked his passport and he is not a citizen of Russia, so he has no Russian passport — he would face a high risk of arrest in any other country and a return to the United States for trial.
Some Russian commentators have remarked on the paradox of Mr. Snowden’s calls for liberty and privacy from President Vladimir V. Putin’s increasingly authoritarian country.
“All these months he’s been pretending successfully he was not in Russia, but just somewhere, in some limbo,” Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who runs an investigative website covering Russian intelligence, said in an email. Mr. Snowden has found asylum, he added, “in a country which is on a crusade against Internet freedoms.”

Mr. Snowden’s main source of income, his lawyer said, is speaking fees, which have sometimes exceeded $10,000 for an appearance. His American girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who represented him at the Academy Awards ceremony in February, has joined him in Moscow.

But Mr. Snowden’s standing, if complicated, is still a far cry from what it was after he first went public from Hong Kong in June 2013 as the source of the leaked N.S.A. archive. In Congress and on cable television at that time, there was much talk of treason, suggestions that Mr. Snowden must be an agent of Russia or China and even calls for killing him with a drone strike.

To date, there has been no evidence that Mr. Snowden took the N.S.A. data on behalf of any other country or shared it except with journalists. (Mr. Morell, the former C.I.A. official, says he believes that Mr. Snowden would have rebuffed any offers from Russia or China, “given his mind-set and his clear dislike for intelligence services of any stripe.”)



And he has proved a far more lasting draw than many predicted. His gaunt visage, with the shaggy haircut, stylish glasses and thin beard, has appeared on T-shirts and posters worldwide.

He was edged out by Pope Francis as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2013, and a campaign on Facebook and by Norwegian politicians to put him forward for the Nobel Peace Prize fell short. But he has given a hip, young face to the abstract anxiety shared by many people in the United States and beyond about the menace posed by government snooping when it is fully empowered by technology.

At Princeton this month, the director of the university’s program in law and public affairs, Kim Lane Scheppele, introduced Mr. Snowden to a crowd that filled a large auditorium and two overflow rooms. She acknowledged that it was unusual for a program on law to feature as speaker someone facing serious criminal charges.
“But the very size of this audience today,” she said, “indicates that Edward Snowden has done something very important, by disclosing information that alerted the public to what was being done in our name.”

Then the huge, projected image of Mr. Snowden himself loomed over the stage. He laughed sheepishly, muttering about looking like Big Brother.
The next week, he spoke to the Nordic Media Festival in Bergen, Norway, a day after the court ruled against the N.S.A.’s phone data program. “This being struck down is really a radical sea change in the level of resistance that the United States government has faced thus far,” Mr. Snowden said, clearly excited. He predicted a ripple effect far beyond that program, saying, “It will affect every other mass surveillance program in the United States going forward.”

Last Friday, at Stanford, he fielded the inevitable question: Is he a hero or a traitor?
“It’s not about me,” he insisted. “It’s about us. I’m not a hero. I’m not a traitor. I’m an ordinary American like anyone else in the room.”

But he was not in that room in California, and he spoke a little wistfully about that.
“If the opportunity was presented, I would of course come home,” he said. “Because that’s where I live. That’s where my family is.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/world/europe/snowden-sees-some-victories-from-a-distance.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

May 14, 2015

Android Users: How to Stop Giving so Much Personal Information to Google

If you’re using an Android phone or tablet, Google is already tracking a lot of information about you.
They do make it easy to close your account entirely, but most of us probably aren’t looking to disconnect that much — especially since you need a Google account to download apps from Google Play.
So cutting Google out completely is not what this guide is about.We’ve already covered how to remove all your data from Google, but this is a guide for those of you who love your Android device but are already looking to dial back how much data you give Google. Frankly, there are a lot of places to check, and while this list may not be comprehensive, I hope to cover the big things.

Ads

The vast majority of Google’s offerings don’t cost users a thing. This is because the tech giant derives most of its income from ads, and these affect you whether you have a Google account or not. The company uses tracking cookies and other methods to build an advertising profile around you.
It’s difficult to avoid them while navigating the web, but you can use your account to see some of this information for yourself. On Google’s ad settings page, you can tweak certain details to make them more accurate and opt-out out of a interest-based ads.
RemoveGoogle-Ads

Search

Google’s primary business is search, so let’s address that next. The company not only saves a record of every webpage you visit, it keeps track of everything you type into the search bar, whether on the desktop or the Google Now app for Android.
On Android, this includes the seemingly local searches you perform to find apps saved on your phone. Fortunately, Google makes this information easily accessible at the top of its account history page, where you can opt not to save everything. So after you browse through Google’s record of your activity, feel free to turn it off. And adjust your search preferences while you’re at it.

Gmail

When you use Gmail, Google obviously stores a copy of everything you send on its servers. That’s simply an inherent part of how email works. But Google also scans your mail to send you ads. And not just text either — it scans images too. If you want out, your only option is to remove Gmail from your account and find a more secure email provider.
RemoveGoogle-Gmail

Contacts

One of the perks of using an Android device since the early days has been watching your contacts move smoothly from one device to another. This is because everything syncs to your Google account.
Of course, this means that the company stores all of this data. Considering that you’re saving phone numbers along with both email and street addresses, this is really personal information. You have the option to delete contacts one at a time if you wish, but we recommend you save the contacts to your device or in a good old-fashioned paper address book before you do.
For most Android devices, exporting your contacts to your SIM card involves going into the People app, selecting Settings, and then Export Contacts to SIM, though these instructions can vary from device to device thanks to heavily customized Android skins.

Calendar

Just like contacts, your calendar events sync as well. Only in this case, you can’t remove them from your account without losing access to Google Calendar entirely. But if you have a third-party app that you would rather use instead, you can export your calendars before deleting all of your events.

Drive

Whether Google mines the files in your Drive account the way it does Gmail is unclear, but either way, any documents you save on their servers remain available to them if at any point in the future they change their minds. Even if this doesn’t concern you, you may still want to toggle which third-party apps have access to your data. You can manage this in Drive’s settings in a web browser.
RemoveGoogle-Drive-Apps
As for getting rid of your Drive documents (including content saved in Docs, Sheets, and Slides), that amounts to highlighting each file and selecting delete, followed by emptying the trash. Google may not immediately purge this data from its servers, but at least it won’t be visible to anyone who happens to gain access to your account, maliciously or otherwise.

Google+

Google+ has its own set of privacy concerns. Like any social network, you have to set things up so that posts only go out to the people you intend for them to. You have to also make sure you aren’t projecting your location out with everything that you send.
Who can invite you to join communities or tag you in photos? Did you want your Google+ profile to show up in Gmail? If this all seems like too much work, you can delete your Google+ account at the bottom of the settings page.
Google+ also is the service that can automatically backup your photos on Android, so you’ll probably want to open the app and go to Settings > Auto Backup and make sure that it is turned off.

Voice Searches & Commands

It’s very cool to say “OK Google” and have your phone answer any number of questions and obey commands. Sometimes it will respond regardless of which screen you’re on. But by default, Google saves a recording of everything you say.
Don’t believe me? Go have a listen. If you’re like me, you will probably want to erase those and tell Google not to keep making copies.

Location

Did you know Google tracks everywhere you go with your Android device? If not, then the information you see on this page might just freak you out.
Yup, that’s everywhere you’ve ever gone since buying your smartphone. If you find this more cool than creepy, carry on. Otherwise, you can tell Google to cut that out by toggling this setting off.
Just be careful. Certain apps, such as Google Now, try to turn this setting back on even when it isn’t a hard requirement. Keep a close eye on what prompts you say yes to.
RemoveGoogle-Location-History

Google Play

When you use Google Play to install content, Google has a list of everything you get. It’s part of the agreement, even if it’s just an implicit one. Unfortunately, this is just the nature of most cloud services. If you want out of the arrangement, your only real choice is to discontinue using the Play Store. That’s a big step, and I’m not saying you should go that far. But if you want to, here’s how to go back and clean your tracks.

Apps

There’s no fast way to erase all of the apps you’ve ever purchased, but you can delete items one at a time from the Play Store app. Select My apps from the navigation menu, switch to All, and tap the X on apps that you’ve uninstalled.
RemoveGoogle-Play-Apps

Books

To clear those novels and comics you’ve purchased over the years, just head to your Play Books library and select the three dots at the bottom of each book to download files to your hard drive and delete them from the web.
Note, some (if not most) are locked down with DRM, so you can’t use them elsewhere without your account (though, technically, you can strip them of DRM if you so choose). There’s no option to wipe your entire collection at once, so you will need to do things one item at a time.

Music

Google makes it easy to clear out the music in your library. Just go to Play Music settings and hit the Delete My Library button.

Movies & TV

There doesn’t seem to be anything you can do about this content. The most you can do is archive So if you don’t want a particular movie or show tied to your account for good, don’t buy it.

Newsstand

Just like with movies and TV shows, you’re stuck with your magazines and newspapers. If you don’t want Google keeping up with what you’re reading, subscribe elsewhere.

YouTube

YouTube settings are available on the account history page. There you can pull up a list of every video you search for, delete the inquiries you would prefer to keep quiet, and tell Google not to save all of your searches. You can also find all the clips you’ve watched and give them the same treatment. And if you have your own channel, you can get rid of the stuff up there too.
RemoveGoogle-YouTube

How Much Info Are You Giving Google?

If there’s one thing you take away from this post, know that you can access a great deal of information straight from the Google dashboard.
Out of the box, Android devices turn most of these features on. So does Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, and every other service that the company produces. Google does a relatively good job of giving you control over your account, including the ability to export and download most of your data. But unless you make an active choice to manage settings, it will save and track everything by default.
Hopefully this guide helps you take control of your Google account.

Source: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/android-users-stop-giving-much-personal-information-google/