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Congress gave final approval on Friday to a bill extending the government’s power to intercept electronic communications of spy and terrorism suspects, after the Senate voted down proposals from several Democrats and Republicans to increase protections of civil liberties and privacy.

clearing it for approval by President Obama, who strongly supports it. Intelligence agencies said the bill was their highest legislative priority.

Congressional critics of the bill said that they suspected that intelligence agencies were picking up the communications of many Americans, but that they could not be sure because the agencies would not provide even rough estimates of how many people inside the United States had had communications collected under authority of the surveillance law, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

STRASBOURG, France — When Edward Snowden disclosed details of America’s huge surveillance program two years ago, many in Europe thought that the response would be increased transparency and stronger oversight of security services. European countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of more public scrutiny, we are getting more snooping.

France recently adopted a controversial law on surveillance that permits major intrusions, without prior judicial authorization, into the private lives of suspects and those who communicate with them, live or work in the same place or even just happen to be near them.

Meanwhile, Austria is set to discuss a draft law that would allow a new security agency to operate with reduced external control and to collect and store communication data for up to six years. The Netherlands is considering legislation allowing dragnet surveillance of all telecommunications, indiscriminate gathering of metadata, decryption and intrusion into the computers of non-suspects. And in Finland, the government is even considering changing the Constitution to weaken privacy protections in order to ease the adoption of a bill granting the military and intelligence services the power to conduct electronic mass surveillance with little oversight.

n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way

Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one

but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich

depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class

The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangemen

When Syracuse University freshmen walk into professor Jeff Rubin’s Introduction to Information Technologies class, seven small Bluetooth beacons hidden around the Grant Auditorium lecture hall connect with an app on their smartphones and boost their “attendance points.”

And when they skip class? The SpotterEDU app sees that, too, logging their absence into a campus database that tracks them over time and can sink their grade. It also alerts Rubin, who later contacts students to ask where they’ve been. His 340-person lecture has never been so full.“They want those points,” he said. “They know I’m watching and acting on it. So, behaviorally, they change.”

Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

recent advances in the speed and scope of digitization, connectivity, big data and artificial intelligence are now taking us “deep” into places and into powers that we’ve never experienced before — and that governments have never had to regulate before.

deep learning, deep insights, deep surveillance, deep facial recognition, deep voice recognition, deep automation and deep artificial minds.

how did we get so deep down where the sharks live?

The lack of widespread genetic sequencing means the window is closing to find and slow the spread of variants such as the one first spotted in Britain, which appears to be much more transmissible, and those initially detected in Brazil and South Africa. All have been discovered in small numbers in the United States.

Now is when genetic sequencing — a process that maps out the genetic code of the particular virus that infected someone so it can be compared with others — would do the most good, while such variants are less prevalent in the U.S. population and action can be taken against them.

“We are in a race against time because of these mutations. And in that race, we are falling behind,”

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Tuesday called for an investigation into the "disturbing" notion that she was under surveillance from associates of the President's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

The texts released by the House Democrats Tuesday show Connecticut Republican congressional candidate Robert Hyde berating Yovanovitch and suggest he was monitoring her while she was in Kiev and relaying her movements to Parnas. Hyde declined to comment to CNN when asked if he had surveilled Yovanovitch, who served as a key witness in the House impeachment probe.

Another retired ambassador said they had "never heard of anything like it.""It's common that terrorists and former communists do this to us. It's appalling and incomprehensible that somebody who is working for the President's personal lawyer would have been doing this to our ambassador," they told CNN.That ambassador explained that surveillance is a "real problem" that's "unfortunately pretty common" for diplomats. Embassies have "surveillance detection teams" -- normally locally hired staff -- "who actually are out there looking to see if anyone is showing unwarranted interest" in embassy operations, they said.

“We can forgive your politics and focus on your technical contributions as long as you don’t do something unforgivable, like speaking to the press.”

This was the parting advice given to me during my exit interview from Google after spending a month internally arguing, resignation letter in hand, for the company to clarify its ethical red lines around Project Dragonfly, the effort to modify Search to meet the censorship and surveillance demands of the Chinese Communist Party.

When a prototype circulated internally of a system that would ostensibly allow the Chinese government to surveil Chinese users’ queries by their phone numbers, Google executives argued that it was within existing norms

Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, disregarding Justice Department warnings that their actions would be “extraordinarily reckless,” voted Monday evening to release a contentious secret memorandum said to accuse the department and the F.B.I. of misusing their authority to obtain a secret surveillance order on a former Trump campaign associate.

Under the obscure House rule invoked by the committee, President Trump now has five days to review the document and decide whether to try to block it from going public. The White House has repeatedly indicated that it wants the memo out, but Mr. Trump’s Justice Department had been working to slow or block its release.

Speaking to reporters after the closed-door vote, Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the committee, said it has been a “sad day” for the committee and that Republicans had voted “to politicize the intelligence process.

Web’s biggest snoop of all: Google. Seen from the inside, its Chrome browser looks a lot like surveillance software.

It turns out, having the world’s biggest advertising company make the most popular Web browser was about as smart as letting kids run a candy shop.

In a week of Web surfing on my desktop, I discovered 11,189 requests for tracker “cookies” that Chrome would have ushered right onto my computer

These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.

All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.

Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future.

The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.”

The smartphone has become a repository of the self, recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are. In a 2015 Gallup survey, more than half of iPhone owners said that they couldn’t imagine life without the device.

So what happens to our minds when we allow a single tool such dominion over our perception and cognition?

 Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.

Denmark, which has invested in genetic surveillance, discovered the variant afflicting Britain in multiple Danish regions and recently tightened restrictions. The health minister compared it to a storm surge, predicting that it would dominate other variants by mid-February.

And as countries go looking, they are discovering other variants, too.

With the world stumbling in its vaccination rollout and the number of cases steeply rising to peaks that exceed those seen last spring, scientists see a pressing need to immunize as many people as possible before the virus evolves enough to render the vaccines impotent.

Ms. Merkel herself angrily demanded assurances from President Obama that her cellphone was not the target of an American intelligence tap

“If that is true, what we hear, then that would be really bad,” Mr. de Maizière told ARD, Germany’s leading state television channel. America is Germany’s best friend, he noted, adding: “It really can’t work like this.” He suggested that there would be consequences. “We can’t simply go back to business as usual,” he said. Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the leader of the Greens, shared the indignation, noting that America is a close ally but that normal business could not be conducted “if we go about suspecting one another.” Her consternation was mixed with an element of “we told you so.” The Greens had argued since the first disclosures last summer of mass American surveillance that Ms. Merkel needed to be more vigorous and not simply accept American assurances that no German laws had been broken.

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has ex

panded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

Israel's Prime Minister has agreed to 24-hour video surveillance at a disputed Jerusalem holy site -- a move that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said could be "a game-changer" to reduce regional bloodshed.

"Today I hope that we could begin to turn the page on this very difficult period," Kerry added.

Tensions have been brewing for weeks in and around Israel and Palestinian territories, erupting into deadly violence

In the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly criticized President George W. Bush for his “war on terror,” including the use of torture, indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, secrecy and expansive presidential power. Yet after nearly seven years of the Obama administration, many (though not all) of these Bush-era policies remain in effect.

Why was there no greater change?

Charlie Savage addresses that question exhaustively, describing how President Obama, his top aides and, above all, his lawyers grappled again and again with the many questions about counterterrorism they inherited when they took office.

Though the AfD may be emboldened by its boost in the polls following the events in Chemnitz, it might still encounter trouble elsewhere. This week, the AfD has faced calls by some of its political opponents for the party to be put under domestic surveillance for its links to radical groups. Although such surveillance has been imposed on two of AfD’s youth groups over concerns of right-wing extremism, calls to impose surveillance on the entire party have been rejected by Interior Minister Hoorst Seehofer, who cited insufficient grounds for such a move.

Though the AfD has attempted to distance itself from groups like Pegida in the past, some within the party have called for making common cause with them in order to mobilize more supporters. In Chemnitz, Dirusus said, “it seems the radical wing of the AfD won out.” Indeed, one of AfD’s lawmakers, Björn Höcke, was pictured last week marching alongside Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann.

what happened in Chemnitz was largely unprecedented—and not just because of the scale of the riots. “What is interesting about this is you obviously had a mix of people on the far-right side,” Marcel Dirsus, a political scientist at the University of Kiel, told me, noting the confluence of AfD supporters with more extreme groups such as the far-right, anti-Islam nationalist movement Pegida.