Following revelations earlier this week that the National Security Agency has accessed some 100,000 computers using secret radio waves, the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News report that U.S. spies have indiscriminately collected nearly 200 million text messages a day from people around the world.
The text message gathering operation is part of a program codenamed “Dishfire,” according to top-secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A document from UK spy agency GCHQ reveals that the NSA program collects “pretty much everything it can,” which includes metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” text communications sent by people in the UK.
Despite these descriptions, an NSA spokeswoman told the Guardian that characterizing Dishfire as “arbitrary and unconstrained is false,” and that the spy agency only used its powers of data collection against “valid foreign intelligence targets.” The spokeswoman added that “privacy protections for U.S. persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of SMS data in Dishfire.”
Rather than sifting through the contents of SMS text messages, NSA and GCHQ used a data analysis program known internally as “Prefer,” which could pull out information including missed call alerts or text sent by someone using international roaming, to bolster the agency’s intelligence about targets’ communication circles and travel locations. The documents, dated 2011, describe these bits of metadata as “gems,” and describes text messages overall as a “goldmine” for the agency.
As the Guardian writes, this is the intelligence the NSA collected from text messages each day, on average:
News of the dragnet text message collection comes just one day before President Obama is expected to announce his plans to curtail perceived overreach by the NSA. According to Bloomberg, the NSA’s controversial phone metadata collection program will remain mostly intact, though some changes are expected.
A virtual private network (VPN) encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server run by the VPN provider. Websites see the VPN server’s IP address instead of yours, and you can get around geo-blocks, censorship, and ISP throttling. The best VPN services are paid, but there are still a handful of free options that do the job well.
Most free VPNs come with a hidden cost, because running servers isn’t cheap and a company that doesn’t charge you has to make its money somewhere else. Many do so by logging your browsing activity and selling it to advertisers, while others flood you with ads and track you across apps.
There's nothing quite like curling up with a good book on a cold evening. As much as I love the feel of a physical book, books take up a lot of space, and carrying more than one on a trip quickly becomes a chore. That's where e-readers come in, and the Amazon Kindle remains one of the best options.
Amazon just refreshed its Kindle lineup with thinner, lighter designs, a new flush-front display, and colors that wrap from front to back. Add the Kindle Scribe and the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft to the mix, and you have more choices than ever before.
A good Android app should earn its place on your phone. It might make an everyday task easier, handle something the built-in software can't, or let you change an experience that never quite worked for you.
These 20 apps cover everything from quick notes and password management to automation and local file sharing. Some are free, others charge for advanced features, and a few take some effort to figure out. The point isn't to install them all. It's to find the ones that make your phone work better for you.