Edward Snowden

The X account belonging to the Securities and Exchange Commission was hacked on Tuesday, allowing a fake announcement to be posted to the web concerning a much-awaited happening in the crypto world: the first Bitcoin ETFs. The announcement claimed the ETFs had been approved but, as it turns out, that’s not true. When it became apparent that the announcement was, indeed, fake, all hell broke loose in the web3 community.He Tossed His Bitcoin, Now He Wants It BackOn X, the tenor of the conversation among crypto denizens was…

Last week, the U.S. government arrested a man accused of one the worst leaks of national security material in years. He’s not exactly Edward Snowden, though.According to federal prosecutors, the person responsible for leaking sensitive Pentagon material was none other than Jack Teixeira, a fresh-faced 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Despite his youth, Teixiera was given a clearance to handle “Top Secret” compartmented information, a responsibility federal officials say he abused to…

The Supreme Court here ruled that Google must disclose the list of personal information it has shared with third parties, including United States intelligence.In 2014, four South Korean activists filed a lawsuit against the global tech giant and its local affiliate, Google Korea, demanding to know whether their personal information had been shared with a third party.Under South Korean law, online service providers must respond to a customer's request to disclose any record of their personal data being shared with a third…

This week, the New York Times reported that a tranche of classified material had leaked to the web. The documents, which were purported to involve the Pentagon and NATO’s military stratagems to assist the Ukrainians in their war with the Russians, were found on Twitter and the chat app Telegram. Lower Drought Conditions In California | Extreme EarthOn Thursday, the Defense Department told the Gray Lady that it’s in the process of investigating how the apparently secret plans had ended up splashed across newsfeeds.Before…

Image shows a face being detected outside a subway. Screenshot: ACLUNew documents revealed by the ACLU and shared with Gizmodo show the lengths FBI and Pentagon officials went to develop “truly unconstrained” facial recognition capable of being deployed in public street cameras, mobile drones, and cops’ body cameras.The goal of the project, code-named “Janus” after the Roman god with two opposing faces, was to develop highly advanced facial scanning tech capable of scanning people’s faces across a vast swath of public…

Photo: Phillip Faraone (Getty Images)Edward Snowden, the United States’ most notorious surveillance whistleblower, now holds a Russian passport. In exchange for the document, Snowden, considered both a patriot and a traitor in the U.S. depending on who you ask, has reportedly sworn an oath of allegiance to the Russian state. The former NSA contractor’s lawyer, Anatoly Kucheren, reportedly confirmed the exchange in an interview with Russian state media TASS. The surprising turn of events comes around two months after…

Photo: Rosdiana Ciaravolo (Getty Images)Storied NSA whistleblower turned cybersecurity activist has a new credential to add to his name: Russian citizen.On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted the 39-year-old American whistleblower citizenship nearly 10 years after he blew the lid off the National Security Agency’svast domestic and international spying apparatus according to Reuters. Those revelations set off an international manhunt for the former intelligence contractor which eventually landed him in Russia…

A mural depicting writer George Orwell, in Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2022.Photo: Darko Vojinovic (AP) “If we begin to feel that we’re being surveilled all the time, our behavior changes. We begin to do less. We begin to think about things less. We begin to modify how we think.” - Tim CookThe English language, novelist George Orwell once observed, “is in a bad way.”The critic and notoriously “crabby” grammarian likened the destruction of the written word to the spiraling depression of one caught up in thrall of…

Swordfish (2001) Official Trailer - John Travolta, Halle Berry Movie HDSwordfish opens with a sequence in which John Travolta’s character forces Hugh Jackman’s to hack the Pentagon while receiving a blowjob from a woman at gunpoint. The movie doesn’t get much more intelligent from there. If you suspend all disbelief, the movie is almost enjoyable but, unfortunately, if you have any standards at all, it is tragically stupid.Jackman plays Stanley Jobson (Steve Jobs, anyone?), an ex-con who gets roped into a bizarre cyber…