Assange: Google, Facebook run “side projects” for US spooks

[struggle4progress]

Labels Facebook “undreamt of even by the worst spying nation”
By Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor
4th December 2012 02:42 GMT

... Chatting with RT, Assange has outlined his belief that nations now conduct surveillance on a massive scale, because “it is cheaper to intercept every individual rather that it is to pick particular people to spy upon.”

French company AMESYS' 'EAGLE' product is nations' weapon of choice, Assange said, going on to add a quote from Bill Binney, whom he describes as a National Security Agency whistleblower, to the effect that nations now posses “turnkey totalitarianism”. Assange himself says “all the infrastructure has been built for absolute totalitarianism.”

“And then you also have Google and Facebook, who started up predominantly serving the public, but also have developed side projects to service the US intelligence complex,” Assange says in the interview. “And individuals are constantly pushing their thoughts into Google as each thing that they want to research; it is pushed via emails, and on Facebook, through their social relationships. That's an undreamt of spy database.”

“Facebook is completely undreamt of even by the worst spying nation, given the richness and sophistication of relationships expressed” ...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/04/assange_says_google_facebook_pass_data_to_us_intelligence/

[Coyotl]

1. "precious little evidence, if you're willing to endure about 13 minutes of Assange in full flight."

video

[Selatius]

2. Well, electronic surveillance is the wave of the future.

You don't need a massive network of informants flooding the countryside like it's East Germany's STASI. You just need access to Google's and Facebook's internal servers. Twitter wouldn't hurt as well.

Then, you can pretty much piece together what happens in a community. If the folks want to organize a march or a protest, you'll see the folks organizing on things like Twitter and Facebook. Then you can deploy police forces ahead of time or block off entire streets and plazas to kettle a protest.

The good people protesting the dictatorship in Tehran back in 2009 had to deal with compromised social networks when they protested blatantly rigged elections. The government monitored their activities and actively tried to stop protests from being organized. A lot of people got imprisoned or beaten for just trying to join the protests.

Of course, it also helps to have telephone companies monitoring calls for you as well, like when the government formally granted amnesty to telephone companies engaging in Bush's warrantless wiretapping program.

[green for victory]

3. facebook grew from nothing to billions pretty fast`

obviously. Did they have "help"? what happens to this data if facebook does a myspace?


Austrian student Max Schrems with 1222 pages worth of his personal data that Facebook provided to him (1 yr memberships worth). Photo: AP
(see the data:http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html)

In the course of his research, he discovered that Facebook’s dossiers on individual users are hundreds of pages long and include information users thought had been deleted...

Facebook has its European headquarters in Ireland — a common practice among the tech titans, including Google and Microsoft, allowing them to avoid paying U.S. income tax on foreign profits. (Google saved $3.1 billion over the past 3 years this way, though the IRS isn’t thrilled about that.)

“Having a headquarters in Europe makes Facebook vulnerable, though,” says Schrems. “That means all of its European users have contracts with that Dublin office and makes the company subject to Ireland’s strict privacy law.”

One aspect of that law is a “right to access.” This entitles Europeans to know exactly what a company knows about them..>>
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/07/the-austrian-thorn-in-facebooks-side/