Techmeme: Twenty years ago the NSA tried to protect you from spies, not spy on you (Charles Seife/PandoDaily)

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December 9, 2013, 7:30 AM

Top News

Reform Government Surveillance:

Global Government Surveillance Reform — The undersigned companies believe that it is time for the world's governments to address the practices and laws regulating government surveillance of individuals and access to their information. While the undersigned companies understand …

New York Times:

Tech Giants Issue Call for Limits on Government Surveillance of Users — Eight prominent technology companies, bruised by revelations of government spying on their customers' data and scrambling to repair the damage to their reputations, are mounting a public campaign to urge President Obama …

More: Digits, Microsoft Corporation, Washington Post, The Hill, ZDNet, BBC, Forbes, Bloomberg, Softpedia News, ABC News, Cult of Mac, Guardian and Mashable

Tweets: @ggreenwald, @dannyyadron, @mikeisaac, @zpez, @clairecm, @dannyyadron, @0xabad1dea and @jbrodkin

See also Mediagazer

Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:

NSA morale down after Edward Snowden revelations, former U.S. officials say — Morale has taken a hit at the National Security Agency in the wake of controversy over the agency's surveillance activities, according to former officials who say they are dismayed that President Obama has not visited the agency to show his support.

More: emptywheel, AllThingsD, TechEye, Gawker and Global Nerdy

Tweets: @manish_vij, @radleybalko, @ron_miller, @broodman, @grady_booch, @rsingel and @jerezim

Meghan Kelly / VentureBeat:

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more create the Reform Government Surveillance coalition

More: MacRumors, Softpedia News, Engadget and Guardian. Tweets: @tojiro

Janet Reitman / Rolling Stone:

Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets

More: Telegraph. Tweets: @kgcentral, @justinraimondo, @thomas_drake1 and @jaredbkeller

Tim Wu / The New Republic:

Binge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture — Given all the faces you see glued to computers, tablets, and cell phones, you might think that people watch much less television than they used to. You would be wrong.

More: Gigaom and VizWorld.com. Tweets: @simondingle, @vivwalt and @adamwestbrook

Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post:

Agencies collected data on Americans' cellphone use in thousands of ‘tower dumps’ — Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations collected data on cellphone activity thousands of times last year, with each request to a phone company yielding hundreds …

More: SocialTimes. Tweets: @jujueyeball and @csoghoian

USA Today:

Local police get metadata dumps from cellular providers, spoof towers using Stingray devices

More: Business Insider. Tweets: @mattblaze, @pchopl, @thomas_drake1, @megangeuss, @glennbeck, @mattblaze, @onekade and @csoghoian

Stephen Gandel / Fortune:

How to bet against the bitcoin megabubble — One reason the virtual currency has been soaring could that figuring out how to profit from its fall is tough. — FORTUNE — Can you bet on the likely eventual bitcoin crash? — You bet. But it's an expensive trade.

More: Bloomberg and Forbes. Tweets: @noupside and @bobmcmillan

Klint Finley / Wired:

New website ranks database popularity, shows continued growth for non-relational systems — New Site Tracks the Cracks in Oracle's Empire — Oracle is one of the most successful companies in the history of tech. But like any tech giant, it can be overturned.

Tweets: @billy_bosworth

Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:

“Hour of Code” Calls on Students to Program Computers, With Support From Obama (and the Republicans, Too!) — By now you may have heard about the United States' woeful lack of public coding classes, despite the economy's ever-growing need for technical workers.

More: VentureBeat, Gizmodo, Guardian, Digits, The Verge, TechCrunch, CNET, Electronista, MSDN Blogs, NYT Bits and Lifehacker

Charles Seife / PandoDaily:

Twenty years ago the NSA tried to protect you from spies, not spy on you — There's a crushing monotony to stories on how the National Security Agency has been bending and breaking every rule to crack open your mail. Each new revelation that hits the news — that the agency has tapped …

Tweets: @burritojustice

James Ball / Guardian:

Revealed: spy agencies' covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online games — NSA and GCHQ collect gamers' chats and deploy real-life agents into World of Warcraft and Second Life — Read the NSA document Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments

More: New York Times. Tweets: @jamesrbuk

Jada F. Smith / New York Times:

Slowly They Modernize: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks — WASHINGTON — The technology troubles that plagued the HealthCare.gov website rollout may not have come as a shock to people who work for certain agencies of the government — especially those who still use floppy disks, the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s.

More: Guardian, Daily Dot, Gawker and Business Insider

Elizabeth Dwoskin / Wall Street Journal:

Tracking Technology Sheds Light on Shopper Habits — Mall Operators, Retailers Monitor Patterns and Actions … This holiday season, Santa will have extra helpers at the mall: devices that track shoppers. — In dozens of U.S. shopping centers, small gadgets—perhaps tucked near the queue …

Tweets: @michael_mba and @gregbensinger

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