Mainstream News has become the Band on the Titanic.... Alternative, Breaking, World News that Reports what the Mainstream Media Ignores. Welcome to "The Honest Intelligence" Please see Copyright information at bottom of page...
WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange says he has had indirect communication with Edward Snowden - the former CIA contractor who has divulged details of the scope and breadth of U.S. cyber spying operations. Full Story: Fugitive WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange on Monday (June 10) spoke to Australian television from London and said he had been in indirect contact with former CIA contractor Edward Snowden. Snowden, an outside contractor for the NSA, announced in a video on Sunday (June 9) from Hong Kong that he was the source of leaks about the ultra-secret agency's surveillance programs. By Monday, he had dropped out of sight and was expected to be at the centre of an extradition battle to face U.S. legal charges. [Julian Assange, Wikileaks Founder] "We have had indirect communication with his people.I don't think it's appropriate at this time that I go into further details." Later, speaking to CNN, Assange said he believed Snowden should take refuge in Latin America, rather than look to Iceland, which has earned a reputation as a safe haven and acts as the home base for the fundraising efforts of Assange's anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. The 41-year-old backed demands by Green lawmakers in Australia that the government there reveal whether its own electronic intelligence agencies had aided the clandestine U.S. data mining programme known as PRISM, revealed by Snowden. [Julian Assange, Wikileaks Founder] "We must ask the question and the Australian government must answer the question how many Australians have been intercepted? In the relationship between the Defense Signals Directorate and ASIO (Australian Security and Intelligence Organization) and U.S. intelligence has the Australian government been puling that information about Australians, has it been pulling that information about Americans?," he said. Assange has formed a political party in Australia, the WikiLeaks Party, and is personally running for a seat in the Senate in September elections. source Julian Assange: "Edward Snowden, Prism Leaker Is A Hero"
Home Depot Co-Founder: We Should Throw Edward Snowden a Party - We Ought to Be Grateful...
'World's most private search engine' won't betray you to Obama
The federal government may be secretly accessing Americans’ online
videos, emails, photos and search histories – with the help of
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube, PalTalk, AOL and
Skype – but “the world’s most private search engine” is staunchly
defending its users’ privacy and civil liberties. StartPage.com and its sister search engine,Ixquick.com, were
launched in 2006 to provide a private way for Americans to conduct
Internet searches. StartPage provides a private portal to Google
results, and Ixquick allows users to retrieve private results from other
search engines. WND reported in 2010
when Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard-trained privacy expert who helped
develop StartPage, warned, “It would blow people’s minds if they knew
how much information the big search engines have on the American public.
In fact, their dossiers are so detailed they would probably be the envy
of the KGB.” It happens every day, Albrecht explained. When an unfamiliar topic
crosses people’s minds, they often go straight to Google, Yahoo or Bing
and enter key terms into those search engines. Every day, more than a
billion searches for information are performed on Google alone. “If you get a rash between your toes, you go into Google,” she said.
“If you have a miscarriage, you go into Google. If you are having
marital difficulties, you look for a counselor on Google. If you lose
your job, you look for unemployment benefit information on Google.”
Albrecht said Americans unwittingly share their most private thoughts
with search engines, serving up snippets of deeply personal information
about their lives, habits, troubles, health concerns, preferences and
political leanings.
“We’re essentially telling them our entire life stories – stuff you
wouldn’t even tell your mother – because you are in a private room with a
computer,” she said. “We tend to think of that as a completely private
circumstance. But the reality is that they make a record of every single
search you do.”
The search engines have sophisticated algorithms to mine data from
searches and create very detailed profiles about Americans. She said
those profiles are stored on servers and may fall into the wrong hands –
for example, the federal government’s detailed files on unwitting U.S.
citizens.
Just recently, the Washington Post reported
it obtained a top-secret document on a government program in which the
NSA and FBI are “tapping directly into the central servers of nine
leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats,
photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable
analysts to track foreign targets.”
The program, code-named PRISM,
was utilized to obtain information that has become a critical part of
President Obama’s daily briefing, according to the Post, which added,
“NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM as its leading source of raw
material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.”
And McClatchy recently reported, “Privacy policies for Google, Yahoo!
and other Internet service providers explicitly state that the
companies collect users’ data, such as names, email addresses, telephone
numbers, credit cards, IP addresses, search queries, purchases, time
and date of calls, duration of calls and physical locations.
“The policies say that companies may use that information to send you
targeted advertising or, if necessary, to comply with requests from
government authorities.”
In a December 2009 interview with CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt
divulged that search engines may turn over citizens’ private information
to the government.
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you
shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt said. “But if you
really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines,
including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s
important, for example, that we are all subject to the United States
Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to
the authorities.” However, StartPage and Ixquick say they have neither participated in
PRISM nor shared Americans’ data with the federal government.
“The privacy of our users rests on three important foundations,”
explained StartPage and Ixquick CEO Robert Beens. “We are based in the
Netherlands, we use encrypted connections, and – most importantly – we
don’t store or share any of our users’ personal search data.”
A statement from StartPage and Ixquick explained:
No user data stored: StartPage and Ixquick never
store user data, including IP addresses and search queries, so
government agencies have no incentive to ask for these. This privacy is
so complete; the company doesn’t even know who its customers are, so it
can’t share anything with Big Brother.
Encrypted (HTTPS) connections: StartPage and
Ixquick were the first search engines to use automatic encryption on all
connections to prevent snooping. When searches are encrypted, third
parties like ISPs and the NSA can’t eavesdrop on Internet connections to
see what people are searching for.
Not under U.S. jurisdiction: StartPage and Ixquick
are based in the Netherlands, so they are not directly subject to U.S.
regulations, warrants, or court orders. They can’t be forced to
participate in spying programs like PRISM. The company has never turned
over a single bit of user data to any government entity in the 14 years
it has been in business, which is not surprising since there is no
data in the first place.
“Unfortunately, it takes a scandal like PRISM to wake people up
to the erosion of privacy, ” Albrecht said. “As people get fed up with
being spied on, they look for alternatives. We already serve nearly 3
million private searches each day, and we expect that number to grow as
people seek shelter from search engines that store and share their
private information.”
