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Paul Merrell

Technology News: Tech Law: Court Ruling Grants Email the Cloak of Privacy - 0 views

www.technewsworld.com/...71467.html

email privacy cloud computing SaaS 4th Amendment warrantless searches

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a ruling that delights privacy advocates and Fourth Amendment purists: In U.S. v. Warshak, it found that the government should have obtained a search warrant before seizing and searching defendant Stephen Warshak's emails, which were stored by email service providers.
  • It is an important ruling, because it is the first time a federal court of appeals has extended the Fourth Amendment to email with such careful consideration, and it is likely to be influential on both legal and practical levels
  • The decision is particularly important because the Stored Communications Act does allow the government to secretly obtain emails without a warrant in many situations, according to the EFF, which filed an amicus brief in the case.
Paul Merrell

American Surveillance Now Threatens American Business - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...382821

surveillance state NSA U.S. polls sense-of-privacy data privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • What does it look like when a society loses its sense of privacy? <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" title=""><img style="border:none;" src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" alt="" /></a></div>In the almost 18 months since the Snowden files first received coverage, writers and critics have had to guess at the answer. Does a certain trend, consumer complaint, or popular product epitomize some larger shift? Is trust in tech companies eroding—or is a subset just especially vocal about it? Polling would make those answers clear, but polling so far has been… confused. A new study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project last January and released last week, helps make the average American’s view of his or her privacy a little clearer. And their confidence in their own privacy is ... low. The study's findings—and the statistics it reports—stagger. Vast majorities of Americans are uncomfortable with how the government uses their data, how private companies use and distribute their data, and what the government does to regulate those companies. No summary can equal a recounting of the findings. Americans are displeased with government surveillance en masse:   
  • A new study finds that a vast majority of Americans trust neither the government nor tech companies with their personal data.
  • According to the study, 70 percent of Americans are “at least somewhat concerned” with the government secretly obtaining information they post to social networking sites. Eighty percent of respondents agreed that “Americans should be concerned” with government surveillance of telephones and the web. They are also uncomfortable with how private corporations use their data: Ninety-one percent of Americans believe that “consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies,” according to the study. Eighty percent of Americans who use social networks “say they are concerned about third parties like advertisers or businesses accessing the data they share on these sites.” And even though they’re squeamish about the government’s use of data, they want it to regulate tech companies and data brokers more strictly: 64 percent wanted the government to do more to regulate private data collection. Since June 2013, American politicians and corporate leaders have fretted over how much the leaks would cost U.S. businesses abroad.
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  • What does it look like when a society loses its sense of privacy? <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" title=""><img style="border:none;" src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" alt="" /></a></div>In the almost 18 months since the Snowden files first received coverage, writers and critics have had to guess at the answer. Does a certain trend, consumer complaint, or popular product epitomize some larger shift? Is trust in tech companies eroding—or is a subset just especially vocal about it? Polling would make those answers clear, but polling so far has been… confused. A new study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project last January and released last week, helps make the average American’s view of his or her privacy a little clearer. And their confidence in their own privacy is ... low. The study's findings—and the statistics it reports—stagger. Vast majorities of Americans are uncomfortable with how the government uses their data, how private companies use and distribute their data, and what the government does to regulate those companies. No summary can equal a recounting of the findings. Americans are displeased with government surveillance en masse:   
  • “It’s clear the global community of Internet users doesn’t like to be caught up in the American surveillance dragnet,” Senator Ron Wyden said last month. At the same event, Google chairman Eric Schmidt agreed with him. “What occurred was a loss of trust between America and other countries,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It's making it very difficult for American firms to do business.” But never mind the world. Americans don’t trust American social networks. More than half of the poll’s respondents said that social networks were “not at all secure. Only 40 percent of Americans believe email or texting is at least “somewhat” secure. Indeed, Americans trusted most of all communication technologies where some protections has been enshrined into the law (though the report didn’t ask about snail mail). That is: Talking on the telephone, whether on a landline or cell phone, is the only kind of communication that a majority of adults believe to be “very secure” or “somewhat secure.”
  • (That may seem a bit incongruous, because making a telephone call is one area where you can be almost sure you are being surveilled: The government has requisitioned mass call records from phone companies since 2001. But Americans appear, when discussing security, to differentiate between the contents of the call and data about it.) Last month, Ramsey Homsany, the general counsel of Dropbox, said that one big thing could take down the California tech scene. “We have built this incredible economic engine in this region of the country,” said Homsany in the Los Angeles Times, “and [mistrust] is the one thing that starts to rot it from the inside out.” According to this poll, the mistrust has already begun corroding—and is already, in fact, well advanced. We’ve always assumed that the great hurt to American business will come globally—that citizens of other nations will stop using tech companies’s services. But the new Pew data shows that Americans suspect American businesses just as much. And while, unlike citizens of other nations, they may not have other places to turn, they may stop putting sensitive or delicate information online.
Paul Merrell

Utah lawmaker questions city water going to NSA - 0 views

www.rgj.com/...19438569

surveillance state NSA Bluffdale water data privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah lawmaker concerned about government spying on its citizens is questioning whether city water service should be cut off to a massive National Security Agency data storage facility outside Salt Lake City.Republican Rep. Marc Roberts, of Santaquin, said there are serious questions about privacy and surveillance surrounding the center, and several Utah residents who spoke at a legislative committee hearing Wednesday agreed.During the last legislative session, lawmakers opted to hold off on Roberts' bill to shut off the facility's water and decided to study it during the interim."This is not a bill just about a data center. This is a bill about civil rights," web developer Joe Levi said. "This is a bill that needs to be taken up and needs to be taken seriously."Pete Ashdown, founder of Salt Lake City-based Internet provider XMission, called the center a stain upon the state and its technology industry. "I do encourage you to stand up and do something about it," he said.Lawmakers said they aren't considering shutting down $1.7 billion facility, but the committee chair acknowledged the concerns and said there might be another way to get the point across. "We may look at some type of a strong message to give our representatives to take back to Congress," said Republican Sen. David Hinkins, of Orangeville.
  • The NSA's largest data storage center in the U.S. was built in Utah over 37 other locations because of open land and cheap electricity. The center sits on a National Guard base about 25 miles south of Salt Lake City in the town of Bluffdale.NSA officials said the center is key to protecting national security networks and allowing U.S. authorities to watch for cyber threats. Beyond that, the agency has offered few details.The center attracted much discussion and concern after revelations last year that the NSA has been collecting millions of U.S. phone records and digital communications stored by major Internet providers.
  • Cybersecurity experts say the nondescript Utah facility is a giant storehouse for phone calls, emails and online records that have been secretly collected.Outside the computer storehouses are large coolers that keep the machines from overheating. The coolers use large amounts of water, which the nearby city of Bluffdale sells to the center at a discounted rate.City records released earlier this year showed monthly water use was much less than the 1 million gallons a day that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicted the center would need, causing some to wonder if the center was fully operational.NSA officials have refused to say if the center is up and running after its scheduled opening in October 2013 was stalled by electrical problems.City utility records showed the NSA has been making monthly minimum payments of about $30,000 to Bluffdale. The city manager said that pays for more water than the center used.The state of Nevada shut off water to the site of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in 2002, after months of threats.The project didn't run dry because the Energy Department built a 1-million-gallon tank and a small well for the site. Department officials said the stored water, plus 400,000 gallons stored in other tanks at the Nevada Test Site, provided time for scientists to continue experiments and design work at the site.
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  • SALT LAKE CITY – A Utah lawmaker concerned about government spying on its citizens is questioning whether city water service should be cut off to a massive National Security Agency data storage facility outside Salt Lake City.Rep
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Nov 14
     
    Hey, go for their electricity too! But what do we do with the Bluffdale facility after we abolish the NSA? Turn it over to Internet Archives, with a $1 billion endowment for maintenance? Free and permanent web sites for everyone?  
Paul Merrell

Germany Fires Verizon Over NSA Spying - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...193184

surveillance-state Germany Verizon NSA-blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Germany announced Thursday it is canceling its contract with Verizon Communications over concerns about the role of U.S. telecom corporations in National Security Agency spying. “The links revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms after the N.S.A. affair show that the German government needs a high level of security for its essential networks,” declared Germany’s Interior Ministry in a statement released Thursday. The Ministry said it is engaging in a communications overhaul to strengthen privacy protections as part of the process of severing ties with Verizon. The announcement follows revelations, made possible by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that Germany is a prime target of NSA spying. This includes surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone communications, as well as a vast network of centers that secretly collect information across the country. Yet, many have accused Germany of being complicit in NSA spying, in addition to being targeted by it. The German government has refused to grant Snowden political asylum, despite his contribution to the public record about U.S. spying on Germany.
Paul Merrell

How to Encrypt the Entire Web for Free - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-plans-encrypt-entire-web-free

surveillance state encryption https let's-encrypt nsa-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • If we’ve learned one thing from the Snowden revelations, it’s that what can be spied on will be spied on. Since the advent of what used to be known as the World Wide Web, it has been a relatively simple matter for network attackers—whether it’s the NSA, Chinese intelligence, your employer, your university, abusive partners, or teenage hackers on the same public WiFi as you—to spy on almost everything you do online. HTTPS, the technology that encrypts traffic between browsers and websites, fixes this problem—anyone listening in on that stream of data between you and, say, your Gmail window or bank’s web site would get nothing but useless random characters—but is woefully under-used. The ambitious new non-profit Let’s Encrypt aims to make the process of deploying HTTPS not only fast, simple, and free, but completely automatic. If it succeeds, the project will render vast regions of the internet invisible to prying eyes.
  • Encryption also prevents attackers from tampering with or impersonating legitimate websites. For example, the Chinese government censors specific pages on Wikipedia, the FBI impersonated The Seattle Times to get a suspect to click on a malicious link, and Verizon and AT&T injected tracking tokens into mobile traffic without user consent. HTTPS goes a long way in preventing these sorts of attacks. And of course there’s the NSA, which relies on the limited adoption of HTTPS to continue to spy on the entire internet with impunity. If companies want to do one thing to meaningfully protect their customers from surveillance, it should be enabling encryption on their websites by default.
  • Let’s Encrypt, which was announced this week but won’t be ready to use until the second quarter of 2015, describes itself as “a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit.” It’s the product of years of work from engineers at Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, Electronic Frontier Foundation, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan. (Disclosure: I used to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and I was aware of Let’s Encrypt while it was being developed.) If Let’s Encrypt works as advertised, deploying HTTPS correctly and using all of the best practices will be one of the simplest parts of running a website. All it will take is running a command. Currently, HTTPS requires jumping through a variety of complicated hoops that certificate authorities insist on in order prove ownership of domain names. Let’s Encrypt automates this task in seconds, without requiring any human intervention, and at no cost.
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  • The benefits of using HTTPS are obvious when you think about protecting secret information you send over the internet, like passwords and credit card numbers. It also helps protect information like what you search for in Google, what articles you read, what prescription medicine you take, and messages you send to colleagues, friends, and family from being monitored by hackers or authorities. But there are less obvious benefits as well. Websites that don’t use HTTPS are vulnerable to “session hijacking,” where attackers can take over your account even if they don’t know your password. When you download software without encryption, sophisticated attackers can secretly replace the download with malware that hacks your computer as soon as you try installing it.
  • The transition to a fully encrypted web won’t be immediate. After Let’s Encrypt is available to the public in 2015, each website will have to actually use it to switch over. And major web hosting companies also need to hop on board for their customers to be able to take advantage of it. If hosting companies start work now to integrate Let’s Encrypt into their services, they could offer HTTPS hosting by default at no extra cost to all their customers by the time it launches.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14
     
    Don't miss the video. And if you have a web site, urge your host service to begin preparing for Let's Encrypt. (See video on why it's good for them.)
Paul Merrell

The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle - 0 views

firstlook.org/...great-sim-heist

surveillance state NSA GCHQ SIM-card-keys mobile-devices decryption

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania. In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
  • With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.
  • Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”
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  • According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access. We “believe we have their entire network,” the slide’s author boasted about the operation against Gemalto. Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”
  • The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 15
     
    Remember all those NSA claims that no evidence of their misbehavior has emerged? That one should never take wing again. Monitoring call content without the involvement of any court? Without a warrant? Without probable cause?  Was there even any Congressional authorization?  Wiretapping unequivocally requires a judicially-approved search warrant. It's going to be very interesting to learn the government's argument for this misconduct's legality. 
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Yes, the NSA Worried About Whether Spying Would Backfire | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...-whether-spying-would-backfire

nsa worries spying citizens backfire wired

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 16 Nov 15
     
    ""For all the time I worked on all of these issues, this was a constant discussion," Olsen says. "How do we calibrate what we're trying to do for the country with how to protect civil liberties and privacy?""
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15
     
    NSA can't credibly claim surprise at how people reacted to the Snowden disclosures. NSA's spying on U.S. citizens was first uncovered by the Senate's Church Committee in about 1976. Congress enacted legslation unequivocally telling NSA and the Defense Department that spying on Americans was not to happen again (and that the CIA was to immediately cease spying within the territorial boundaries of the U.S.). Then came the Total Information Awareness scandal, when Congress discovered that DoD was right back at it again, this time operating from under the cover of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Congress responded by abolishing the program and eliminating the job position of its director, former Admiral John Poindexter of Iran/Contra scandal fame. But rather than complying with the abolition order, most of the TIA program's staff, hardware, software, and data was simply transferred to NSA. NSA, of course, persuaded the Justice Department to secretly reinterpret key provisions of the Patriot Act more broadly than a First Grade preschooler would allow to continue spying on U.S. citizens. Indeed, anyone whose college education included the assignment to read and discuss George Orwell's 1984 would have known that NSA's program had drastically outgrown the limits of what a free society would tolerate. So this is really about deliberate defiance of the limits established by the Constitution and Congressional enactments, not about anything even remotely legal or morally acceptable. The fact that Congress did not react strongly after the Snowden disclosures, as it had after the Church Committee's report and discovery of the TIA program raises a strong suspicion that members of Congress have been blackmailed into submission using information about them gathered via NSA surveillance. We know from whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Russell Tice that members of Congress were surveilled by NSA, yet not even that violation has been taken up by Congress. Instead
Paul Merrell

Microsoft pledges to tell email customers of state-sponsored hacking in future - Techno... - 0 views

www.cbc.ca/...osoft-hotmail-attack-1.3386823

internet-security email Microsoft penetration-attempts

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Microsoft Corp. has agreed to change its policies and always tell email customers when it suspects there has been a government hacking attempt after widespread hacking by Chinese authorities was exposed. Microsoft experts concluded several years ago that Chinese authorities had hacked into more than a thousand Hotmail email accounts, targeting international leaders of China's Tibetan and Uighur minorities in particular — but it decided not to tell the victims, allowing the hackers to continue their campaign, according to former employees of the company. On Wednesday, after a series of requests for comment from Reuters, Microsoft said it would change its policy on notifying customers. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said the company was never certain of the origin of the Hotmail attacks.
  • The company also confirmed for the first time that it had not called, emailed or otherwise told the Hotmail users that their electronic correspondence had been collected. The company declined to say what role the exposure of the Hotmail campaign played in its decision to make the policy shift. The first public signal of the attacks came in May 2011, though no direct link was immediately made with the Chinese authorities.
  • That's when security firm Trend Micro Inc announced it had found an email sent to someone in Taiwan that contained a miniature computer program. The program took advantage of a previously undetected flaw in Microsoft's own web pages to direct Hotmail and other free Microsoft email services to secretly forward copies of all of a recipient's incoming mail to an account controlled by the attacker. Trend Micro found more than a thousand victims, and Microsoft patched the vulnerability before the security company announced its findings publicly
Paul Merrell

The New Snowden? NSA Contractor Arrested Over Alleged Theft Of Classified Data - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...221187

surveillance state NSA zero-day-exploits leak arrest prosecution Martin

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • A contractor working for the National Security Agency (NSA) was arrested by the FBI following his alleged theft of “state secrets.” More specifically, the contractor, Harold Thomas Martin, is charged with stealing highly classified source codes developed to covertly hack the networks of foreign governments, according to several senior law enforcement and intelligence officials. The Justice Department has said that these stolen materials were “critical to national security.” Martin was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, the company responsible for most of the NSA’s most sensitive cyber-operations. Edward Snowden, the most well-known NSA whistleblower, also worked for Booz Allen Hamilton until he fled to Hong Kong in 2013 where he revealed a trove of documents exposing the massive scope of the NSA dragnet surveillance. That surveillance system was shown to have targeted untold numbers of innocent Americans. According to the New York Times, the theft “raises the embarrassing prospect” that an NSA insider managed to steal highly damaging secret information from the NSA for the second time in three years, not to mention the “Shadow Broker” hack this past August, which made classified NSA hacking tools available to the public.
  • Snowden himself took to Twitter to comment on the arrest. In a tweet, he said the news of Martin’s arrest “is huge” and asked, “Did the FBI secretly arrest the person behind the reports [that the] NSA sat on huge flaws in US products?” It is currently unknown if Martin was connected to those reports as well.
  • It also remains to be seen what Martin’s motivations were in removing classified data from the NSA. Though many suspect that he planned to follow in Snowden’s footsteps, the government will more likely argue that he had planned to commit espionage by selling state secrets to “adversaries.” According to the New York Times article on the arrest, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are named as examples of the “adversaries” who would have been targeted by the NSA codes that Martin is accused of stealing. However, Snowden revealed widespread US spying on foreign governments including several US allies such as France and Germany. This suggests that the stolen “source codes” were likely utilized on a much broader scale.
Paul Merrell

Alexa and Siri Can Hear This Hidden Command. You Can't. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...den-command-audio-attacks.html

smartphone-security audio vulnerabilities

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 May 18 - No Cached
  • Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio.
  • Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.
Paul Merrell

Google Engineer Leaks Nearly 1,000 Pages of Internal Documents, Alleging Bias, Censorship - 0 views

www.theepochtimes.com/g-bias-censorship_3042234.html

Google censorship elections

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A former Google engineer has released nearly 1,000 pages of documents that he says prove that the company, at least in some of its products, secretly boosts or demotes content based on what it deems to be true or false, while publicly claiming to be a neutral platform. The software engineer, Zach Vorhies, first provided the documents to Project Veritas, a right-leaning investigative journalism nonprofit, as well as the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which has been investigating Google for potentially anti-competitive behavior.
  • When he returned to work, however, Google sent him a letter demanding, among other things, that he turn over his employee badge and work laptop, which he did, and “cease and desist” from disclosing “any non-public Google files.” Afraid for his safety, he posted on Twitter that if something would happen to him, all the documents he took would be released to the public.Google then did a “wellness check” on him, he said. The San Francisco police received a call that Vorhies may be mentally ill. A group of officers waited for him outside his house and put him in handcuffs. “This is a large way in which they intimidate their employees that go rogue on the company,” he said.Vorhies then decided that it would be safer for him to go public.
  • One of the goals of the effort was a “clean & regularly sanitized news corpus,” it reads.
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  • Robert Epstein, a psychologist who has spent years researching Google’s influence on its users, has published research showing that just by deciding the sequence of top search results, the company can sway undecided voters.Epstein determined that this has led to 2.6 million votes shifting in the 2016 presidential election to Trump’s opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He warned that in 2020, if companies such as Google and Facebook all support the same candidate, they will be able to shift 15 million votes—well beyond the margin most presidents have won by.
Paul Merrell

Amazon will pay $62 million over deceptive delivery tips claims - Protocol - The people... - 2 views

www.protocol.com/amazon-62-million-tips

Amazon litigation Flex-drivers

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Amazon will pay almost $62 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it avoided handing over the full pay and tips it promised to delivery drivers, according to the agency.The company is giving back the amount it kept, according to a complaint released earlier this year by the agency, after it told Amazon Flex drivers and customers in 2015 it would pay $18 to $25 hourly plus tips. Instead, beginning the following year, it used tips to supplement lower base pay rates, and tried to hide the changes, according to the FTC."For a period of over two and a half years, without consumers' permission, Amazon secretly used nearly a third of customer tips to subsidize its own pay to drivers," the FTC had found.Under the 20-year settlement, Amazon will also need consent from drivers to change their pay scheme. All commissioners voted unanimously to approve the settlement.
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