Techmeme: N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens (New York Times)

Open Links In New Tab

Mobile Archives Advertise Site News Contact Editors

September 28, 2013, 9:00 PM

Top News

New York Times:

N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens — WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times …

More: TechCrunch, New York Times, Ars Technica, AllThingsD, Gothamist, Quartz, Engadget, The Verge, Gizmodo, NPR, Gawker, Boing Boing and Mashable

Tweets: @dannysullivan, @d_seaman, @pierre, @csoghoian, @rsingel, @cjchivers, @carr2n, @declanm, @xor and @mikeisaac

Wall Street Journal:

NSA Internet Spying Sparks Race to Create Offshore Havens for Data Privacy — Firms Tout ‘Email Made in Germany’ as More Secure; Brazil Wants Its Own Servers — Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and other American technology companies were put on the defensive when Edward Snowden's allegations …

More: Digits

Mike Masnick / Techdirt:

Dianne Feinstein Accidentally Confirms That NSA Tapped The Internet Backbone — It's widely known that the NSA has taps connected to the various telco networks, thanks in large part to AT&T employee Mark Klein who blew the whistle on AT&T's secret NSA room in San Francisco.

More: Schneier on Security and Boing Boing. Tweets: @dangillmor, @pierre and @ggreenwald

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

Feds Targeted Snowden's Email Provider the Day After NSA Whistleblower Went Public

More: The Verge and SlashGear. Tweets: @kpoulsen

Globe and Mail:

Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt — This investigative report reveals that: — Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.

More: New York Times, The Next Web, MobileSyrup.com, CrackBerry.com and iPhone in Canada Blog

Tweets: @amir, @amir, @amir, @amir, @stevesi, @mathewi, @cdixon, @levie, @stevesi, @iainmarlow and @metromorning

Nilay Patel / The Verge:

Exclusive video: Steve Ballmer's intense, tearful goodbye to Microsoft — Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has always been a speaker and performer like no other — his absolute enthusiasm for his company is electric in person, turning ordinary corporate events into raw displays of emotion …

More: AllThingsD, ABC News, Mashable, I4U News, WinBeta, iClarified, Softpedia News, GeekWire, Los Angeles Times, SiliconBeat and Datamation.com

Tweets: @markgurman, @rahulsood, @zseward, @tomwarren and @jbenton

Marco Arment / Marco.org:

In an App Store filled with free alternatives, it's over for paid-up-front apps — Underscore Price Dynamics — Every iOS developer needs to listen to _DavidSmith's most recent podcast episode, Real World Price Dynamics with Lauren Smith (it's just 22 minutes).

More: iMore. Tweets: @viticci and @eugenewei

Jason Calacanis / LinkedIn Today:

Jason Calacanis touts power of AngelList Syndicates, boasts that his own now exceeds $300k — The Great Venture Capital Rotation — A couple of years ago, I was chatting with a guy named Naval, who had a site called AngelList. He had a fiery passion for helping founders and an outsider's chip on his shoulder.

More: Hunter Walk. Tweets: @cdixon, @hunterwalk, @stilenius, @nihalmehta, @tedr, @joshelman, @jess, @davemcclure, @jason, @kittukolluri and @davemcclure

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

JustFab's Checkout Tactics Are JustShady — This Hacker News complaint about JustFab scamming a user's girlfriend — which gets resubmitted whenever JustFab raises money — is a little off, because JustFab is not a scam in the traditional sense. — The company is, however, abusing a tricky UI …

More: Valleywag and Gawker

Farhad Manjoo / Co.Design:

How Google Taught Itself Good Design — “I had just assumed that Google was hostile to designers,” says Matias Duarte one afternoon this summer. We're in a drab Google conference room at the Plex, and Duarte sports a red-and-yellow floral-print shirt, skinny khaki pants, and a pair of white sunglasses.

Tweets: @stevesi, @benedictevans and @benchestnut

Ryan Faas / CITEworld:

Apple's new licensing for apps gives it a huge enterprise advantage — One of the biggest iOS 7 advances for enterprise environments is Apple's new volume licensing model. The new model is a massive step forward and arguably is the most significant enterprise advance that Apple has made in iOS 7.

More: iMore. Tweets: @drbarnard, @monkbent and @orege. Thanks:@ryanfaas

Phone Arena:

ABI Research: Android taking over the tablet market from iOS — According to ABI Research, there has been a change in the global tablet market. The Apple iPad, which has been credited with creating the tablet category with the launch of the OG version in 2010, has “passed the baton to the Android ecosystem …

More: AppleInsider, ABI Research, NBCNews, Electronista, Ubergizmo and WebProNews

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:

Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.

Cape:

Most carriers track everything. Cape doesn't. — Unlimited talk, text & data, 24-hr metadata deletion, network ID rotation, SIM-attack defense, and more. Switch today and get 29% off for life.

Equals:

Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into auditable spreadsheet models and dashboards. Build once, iterate for years.

Zoho:

Pro tips: 5 ways to close WhatsApp leads in Zoho CRM — This is a guest post by Orkhan Jafarli, Growth PM at TimelinesAI.More buyers now reach out on WhatsApp before they ever fill out a form.

IDrive:

Protecting your Cloud Applications Data — Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Sponsor Techmeme

Featured Podcasts

Big Technology Podcast:

What Happens If AI Fails?, Subprime Data Center Crisis, How Bad Can SpaceX Get?

The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.

Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.

Hard Fork:

OpenAI Models Go Rogue + Kimi K3 Freakout + A.I. Superforecasting

The future is already here. Each week, journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explore and make sense of the latest in the rapidly changing world of tech.

Subscribe to Hard Fork.

The Talk Show With John Gruber:

'A Scam Held Together With Patriotism and Golden Paint', With Quinn Nelson

The director's commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.

Subscribe to The Talk Show With John Gruber.

The Upstarts Podcast:

Abridge's Shiv Rao: The Doctor Founder Taking On Microsoft In Healthcare AI

Veteran tech reporter Alex Konrad sits down with breakout entrepreneurs taking on the status quo to shake up their fields in AI, design, nuclear energy, space, and more.

Subscribe to The Upstarts Podcast.

Great Chat:

Too big to laugh: how tech lost its sense of humor

A podcast mostly about tech. Brought to you weekly by Angela Du, Sally Shin, Mac Bohannon, Helen Min, and Ashley Mayer.

Subscribe to Great Chat.

Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith:

Connecting the Unconnected: Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith speaks with leaders in government, business, and culture to explore the most critical challenges at the intersection of technology and society.

Subscribe to Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith.

Add your podcast here

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 9:00 PM ET, September 28, 2013.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.