US Electric Grid Heading Toward ‘Crisis’ Thanks to AI Data Centers

Brad Reed | Common Dreams

The massive energy needs of artificial intelligence data centers became a major political controversy in 2025, and new reporting suggests that it will grow even further in 2026.

CNBC reported on Thursday that data center projects have become political lightning rods among politicians ranging from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on the left to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on the right.

However, objections to data centers aren’t just coming from politicians but from ordinary citizens who are worried about the impact such projects will have on their local environment and their utility bills.

CNBC noted that data centers’ energy needs are so great that PJM Interconnection, the largest US grid operator that serves over 65 million people across 13 states, projects that it will be a full six gigawatts short of its reliability requirements in 2027.

Joe Bowring, president of independent market monitor Monitoring Analytics, told CNBC that he’s never seen the grid under such projected strain.

“It’s at a crisis stage right now,” Bowring said. “PJM has never been this short.”

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The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities

Nate Bear | ¡Do Not Panic!

 

AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.

The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.

The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.

Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen's firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.

And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.

According to my research almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the 'No Kings' protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.

In Miami, Skydio drones are being used to spy on spring breakers, and in Atlanta the company has partnered with the Atlanta Police Foundation to install a permanent drone station within the massive new Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Detroit recently spent nearly $300,000 on fourteen Skydio drones according to a city procurement report. Last month ICE bought an X10D Skydio drone, which automatically tracks and pursues a target. US Customs and Border Protection has bought thirty-three of the same drones since July. 

 

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With a 'wink', Israeli control over Google, Amazon cloud data exposed

Al Mayadeen

Leaked files reveal how Google and Amazon accepted secret terms granting the Israeli entity unprecedented control over cloud data and surveillance tools.

When Google and Amazon sealed a $1.2 billion cloud-computing contract with the Israeli government in 2021, they agreed to more than just technical terms. According to a leak-based investigation by The Guardian, "Israel" insisted on a clandestine addition, a covert signal system known as the “winking mechanism".

The unusual demand required the two tech giants to discreetly alert Israeli authorities whenever they were compelled to share Israeli data with foreign law enforcement agencies.

In practice, this meant finding a way to bypass global legal disclosure limits, a move that could place the companies in potential conflict with international law.

Secret signal hidden in the cloud

Governments worldwide routinely request access to customer data from major cloud firms to aid criminal investigations, often under strict gag orders. But for "Israel", the prospect of its data ending up in foreign hands posed an acute security concern. To address that, officials devised an encrypted warning system: whenever Google or Amazon complied with a foreign subpoena, they would covertly signal "Israel" through coded financial transactions.

The companies reportedly agreed to the scheme, dubbed the “winking mechanism”, to secure the lucrative Project Nimbus contract, according to leaked documents obtained by The Guardian in collaboration with Israeli outlet +972 Magazine and Israeli publication Local Call.

The leaked records detail how the two tech firms accepted a set of “stringent and unorthodox” conditions demanded by "Israel", which sought to retain absolute control over its data. Both Google and Amazon have denied violating any legal obligations.

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Faster Than Truth: Quantum-Enhanced AI and the Next Frontier of Information Warfare

Joshua Nieubuurt | Propaganda in Focus

In the very near future disinformation will target you autonomously in fractions of a second. As the quantum computing age draws near, Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality will coalesce with Edward Bernays’ notion of a crystalized public opinion: creating consensus through individualized reality creation. The methods of the deployment of the past will give way to an infrastructural inevitability: GenAI, guided by algorithmic troves of personalized information, will be weaponized into personally targeted mis/disinformation campaigns that cost pennies on the dollar. Propaganda will no longer be an international foxtrot of moving actors and action but will become an autonomous force plowing into the synapses of the masses on micro scales. As this occurs, humanity’s long-smoking gun will be turned back on the gunman — obliterating the boundary between the real and its simulation through recursive, accelerated, and increasingly personal targeted information operations.

Your Data Used on You

This process has already begun and – for the time being – is being spat forth into the world at the speed of an AI prompt. According to the findings of Goldstein et al. (2024), Generative AI is capable of “generating text that is nearly as persuasive for US audiences as content we sourced from real-world foreign covert propaganda campaigns.” In other words, the digital machines we have created to help us are already being used to persuade our ideas and actions. As public facing models increase their aptitude, more advanced private models will likely follow. This extends far beyond text-based modalities and into the realms of photo and video generated by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models.

In fact, AI-generated propaganda is already being deployed en masse. The 2024 election in the United States was rife with examples flooding social media feeds and creating alternative narratives to not only the election, but also real-world events. In more recent world events, the conflict between Israel and Iran, and the infamous black bags being thrown from a window of the White House, have also produced increasingly potent misinformation across the web. There are currently varying degrees of virility with AI-generated propaganda. The newness of the technology and the experimentation of finding ways of making it effective to skulk into the minds of people still maintains a firehose approach. Meaning that it is created with a widespread in mind: reach as many people as possible and hope that it lands with some of them. If attempts at virility are stymied – it fails. But what if AI-generated propaganda were to be tailored to individual users en masse? One of the key elements in potentially deploying tailor-made propaganda at scale is already part of how the internet-connected world works: Surveillance Capitalism. 

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UK Rights Group’s Legal Challenge Shows MI5 Illegally Preserved Surveillance Data

Sputnik

The ongoing legal challenge of UK human rights group Liberty over data privacy breaches committed by MI5 has revealed new details about the violations, showing that the security service has been failing to remove collected bulk surveillance data on time and received surveillance warrants based on knowingly false information.

Under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), MI5 has the authority to collect, upon authorization, personal data of a large number of innocent people and store it for potential future investigations. Security services, however, cannot store such data indefinitely: they are obliged to delete it within certain time limits.

Documents released during a court hearing on Tuesday showed that the MI5 legal team said, as quoted by the Liberty, that there is “a high likelihood [of material] being discovered when it should have been deleted, in a disclosure exercise leading to substantial legal or oversight failure.”

Moreover, a senior official from the intelligence service said that people’s personal data was being kept in “ungoverned spaces,” the rights group said in a statement, published on its official website.
“These shocking revelations expose how MI5 has been illegally mishandling our data for years, storing it when they have no legal basis to do so. This could include our most deeply sensitive information – our calls and messages, our location data, our web browsing history,” Liberty lawyer Megan Goulding said, as quoted by the rights group.

Investigatory Powers Commissioner and Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, who is responsible for verifying that the security services respect data privacy provisions laid out in the IPA, described MI5’s actions as “undoubtedly unlawful.” 

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Bayer Apologises for Monsanto Collecting Personal Data Amid French Probe

Sputnik

The German giant acquired the US agrochemical firm in 2018 and inherited numerous problems, including lawsuits over the probable toxic effect of its weed killer Roundup. After shedding more than 30 billion euros from its market capitalisation, Bayer has had to deal with an investigation in France about data being collected on Monsanto’s critics.

German-based Bayer is commissioning an external law firm to investigate claims about its US agrochemical firm, Monsanto, assembling lists of influential journalists and lawmakers, criticising or making complaints about the company. 

The pharmaceutical giant purchased the weed killer producer for $63 billion in 2018 and recently announced the move after an internal probe into the allegations made by the outlet Le Monde, which has reportedly resulted in a preliminary investigation by French authorities.

Bayer has addressed the concerns raised over the practices of its subsidiary Monsanto in a statement. 

“This is not the way Bayer seeks dialogue with society and stakeholders. We apologise for this behavior”, the company stated, noting, however, that there was nothing illicit about the way Monsanto compiled such lists.

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Gallup: ‘Americans aren’t as pro-Israel as we’ve been saying’

Comment: Oh, the shock...

-----------------------

If Americans Knew

Gallup explains that its polling, which consistently shows high American sympathy for Israel, is the result of “priming” questions that influence respondents to falsely express pro-Israel leanings. Gallup buried this explosive admission.

 

by Grant Smith, reposted from AntiWar

[Editor’s note: Grans Smith reported in December 2018 that Gallup, the US government’s go-to for polling, is known to have falsified survey results for years, including in its measurement of support for Israel. Gallup’s poll results have declared “high and growing American sympathy for Israel,” while similarly and identically worded polls conducted by Pew Research and through Google Surveys revealed significantly lower numbers. Nevertheless, news outlets surveyed reveal that Gallup’s poll results are the most used.

Grant continues:

“Gallup launches its annual results early each year under titillating headlines such as “Americans Remain Staunchly in Israel’s Corner” (2018 poll) and “Israel Maintains Positive Image in US” (2017 poll). Gallup’s polls are immediately splashed across newspapers such as the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post and have even been used by the Government Accountability Office as a proxy to assert that Americans support unconditional US foreign assistance to Israel, long the highest recipient of any foreign country.

“Many Israel lobby organizations and media outlets automatically recirculate Gallup polls in order to advance Israel’s public relations objectives. These include The Israel Project, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the American Jewish Committee, and pro-Israel scribes. Given the high value Gallup delivers to them through its impossibly inflated claims of American sympathy for Israel, it is reasonable to speculate that – consistent with its corporate culture – Gallup might have a long term contract or quid pro quo arrangement with one or more Israel lobby organizations, if not the Israeli government itself, conditioned on continually churning out highly positive results.

“Gallup leveraged its self-proclaimed acumen as “the most trusted name in polling” to issue just enough tantalizing polling data to keep US Mint contracts flowing. Gallup seems to be pursuing the [a strategy of providing same strategy with its longer running unverifiable polling on US sympathy for Israelis over Palestinians.”]

Pollster Gallup admitted on March 28 that three decades of polling data contain fundamental flaws “well beyond what we would attribute to normal sampling error.”

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Facebook expects up to $5 BILLION in fines from FTC over privacy violations

RT 

Facebook has told investors it's probably on the hook for up to $5 billion in fines - a record-high penalty for a tech company in the US - as a Federal Trade Commission probe continues into its violations of users' privacy.

Citing "a $3.0 billion legal expense accrued in the first quarter of 2019 related to the ongoing US FTC matter" in its quarterly financial statement, Facebook later admits the penalty might be higher: "We estimate that the range of loss in this matter is $3.0 billion to $5.0 billion," the statement reads, adding that "the matter remains unresolved, and there can be no assurance as to the timing or terms of any outcome."

The FTC is investigating Facebook on charges it repeatedly and catastrophically failed to safeguard users' data, from allowing Cambridge Analytica to scrape 85 million users' information to permitting corporations like Microsoft and Netflix to access users' messages and other personal info as part of secret data sharing partnerships. Investigators have reportedly found plentiful evidence that Facebook violated a 2011 FTC agreement requiring it to get permission from users before sharing their data with third parties - and to notify the FTC when third parties have misused this data. 

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See also: 5 social networks that can be used instead of manipulative Facebook

3 Reasons Why Facebook's Zuckerberg Wants More Government Regulation

Ryan McMaken
Activist Post

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants more government regulation of social media. In a March 30 op-ed for  the Washington Post, Zuckerberg trots out the innocent-sounding pablum we’ve come to expect from him:

I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.

But what sort of regulation will this be? Specifically, Zuckerberg concludes “we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.”
He wants more countries to adopt versions of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.

 

Needless to say, anyone hearing such words from Zuckerberg should immediately assume this newfound support for regulation is calculated to help Facebook financially. After all, this is a man who lied repeatedly to his customers (and Congress) about who can access users’ personal data, and how it will be used. He’s a man who once referred to Facebook users as “Dumb F-cks.” 

Facebook lied to customers (not be confused with the users) about the success of Facebook’s video platform. The idea that Zuckerberg now voluntarily wants to sacrifice some of his own power and money for humanitarian purposes is, at best, highly doubtful. (Although politicians like Mark Warner seem to take it at face value.)

Fortunately for Zuckerberg, thanks to the economic realities of government regulation, he can both support government regulation and enrich himself personally.

Those who are familiar with the effects of government regulation will not be surprised to hear a billionaire CEO throw his support behind it. Large firms with dominant market share have long made pace with government regulation because it often helps these firms create and solidify monopoly power for themselves.

Specifically, there are three ways that regulation will help Facebook.

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Christchurch Terror Attack: Mass Censorship, Mystery Shooters, And The Globetrotting Lone Gunman

Niall Bradley
Sott.net

Censorship has been put into effect like never before in the aftermath of the multi-site terror attacks in Christchurch last Friday. There's no other word for what governments and Internet corporations have instituted. New Zealand and Australian Internet Service Providers have been blocking access to video-hosting sites, forums and other websites that mirrored, in part or whole, the 17-minute long video footage 'lone gunman' Brenton Tarrant recorded from a GoPro camera attached to his head-gear, along with footage of the aftermath of the shooting at the Linwood mosque, and copies of Tarrant's 'manifesto'. Media outlets and social media platforms globally have followed suit. The Internet has effectively been 'bleached' of this evidence (though it's not entirely gone, if you're prepared to look hard enough for it).

Tarrant's video in particular has been "classified by the Chief Censor's Office as objectionable," under a 1993 New Zealand law, meaning Kiwis face prison time and a $10,000 fine for 'downloading a copy of it' or 'distributing' it. The government has been leaning heavily on ISPs to block websites until they have removed it while, globally, several million iterations (including just links to it) have been removed by all media outlets and all social media platforms - and not just by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter; it's also gone from BitChute and similar lesser-known video-hosting platforms. New Zealand Police have also been demanding personal data on users who even discuss Tarrant's 'manifesto' or video.

Though ostensibly done out of consideration for the victims of the attacks and their families, to 'protect children and the vulnerable from seeing these images', and to not 'give the attacker the attention he wants', no such 'clean sweeps' have previously been conducted following the many gruesome mass shootings and bombings in terror attacks around the world, particularly those in non-Western countries. All these years 'ISIS' and affiliated terrorists have enjoyed full use of Western social media platforms to share footage of their crimes - footage which is then typically shown by corporate media outlets, complete with running commentary (just search 'Charlie Hebdo massacre' or 'ISIS beheadings' on YouTube) - but now suddenly it's imperative that all "objectionable materials" relating to this event be excised from global consciousness. Why would that be the case? 

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The European Union's MANDATORY National Biometric ID Card Will Affect 512 Million People

 

Mass Private I

A recent European Union (EU) announcement about national ID's will destroy millions of people's privacy and create a near global biometric database.

An article in State Watch News revealed that the EU has agreed to create a MANDATORY national biometric ID card.

"Measures being negotiated as part of the EU's 'Security Union' are moving ahead swiftly, with the Council and Parliament reaching provisional agreements on new rules for immigration liaison officers, the EU's Visa Code and the introduction of mandatory biometric national identity cards; and the Council agreeing its negotiating position on the new Frontex Regulation."

Earlier this week the Nepal government announced their plans to roll-out a national biometric ID card that will affect 30 million people.

Last month, I wrote an article warning people about the global effort to restrict everyone's right to travel. But what is happening across Europe and Asia should send chills down everyone's back.

If you combine what is happening in Europe with America's national biometric ID card, Real-ID it becomes painfully obvious that everyone's right to travel freely is in jeopardy.

512 million people will be forced to give up their privacy.

A European national biometric ID card is all but a certainty.

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France and Germany just cut a deal to save the EU's #CopyrightDirective -- and made it much, much worse

Cory Doctorow
BoingBoing

The EU's on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who understand that the CEOs of multinational entertainment companies won't stand for any compromise, or even the appearance of compromise, and so the process fell apart. 

That is until Chancellor Merkel and President Macron sat down to broker a deal, in which Merkel caved on every single measure that even looked like it might protect small businesses, co-operatives, nonprofits, and individuals, ending up with a deal that guarantees that every existing small platform will be destroyed and no new ones can be started, leaving Europe in the hands of US Big Tech -- forever. 

Under the new deal, any platform where the public can communicate will have to buy copyright filters to intercept all public communications and compare them to a database of so-called "copyrighted works" (which anyone, anywhere, can add anything to), and then block anything that appears to be a match.
 
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One Of The Biggest At-Home DNA Testing Companies Is Secretly Sharing Data With The FBI

Zero Hedge

Just one week ago, we warned that the government — helped by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), President Trump (who signed the Rapid DNA Act into law), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget) — was embarking on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

As it turns out we were right, but we forgot one key spoke of the government's campaign to collect genetic information from as many individuals as possible: "innocent", commercial companies, who not only collect DNA from willing clients, but are also paid for it.

FamilyTreeDNA, one of the pioneers of the growing market for "at home", consumer genetic testing, confirmed a report from BuzzFeed that it has quietly granted the Federal Bureau of Investigation access to its vast trove of nearly 2 million genetic profiles.

While concerns about unrestricted access to genetic information gathered by testing companies had swelled since April, when police used a genealogy website to ensnare a suspect in the decades-old case of the Golden State Killer, that site, GEDmatch, was open-source, meaning police were able to upload crime-scene DNA data to the site without permission. However, the latest arrangement marks the first time a commercial testing company has voluntarily given law enforcement access to user data.

Worse, it did so secretly, without obtaining prior permission from its users.

The move is of significant concern to much more than just privacy-minded FamilyTreeDNA customers. As Bloomberg notes, one person sharing genetic information also exposes those to whom they are closely related. That’s how police caught the alleged Golden State Killer. And here is a stunning statistics - according to a 2018 study, only 2% of the population needs to have done a DNA test for virtually everyone’s genetic information to be represented in that data.

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Surveillance Guinea pigs? Facebook paying teens $20/month for unfettered access to mobile data

RT

Facebook has been paying users $20 a month to install an app which monitors their phone and web activity and sends it back to the social media giant, a report has revealed. The app may run afoul of Apple’s privacy guidelines. 

Launched in 2016, the “research app,” first uncovered by TechCrunch, allows Facebook to continuously collect a user’s private data, including chats from instant messaging apps, photos and videos, emails, web browsing activity, and more. Aimed at people aged 13 to 25, the app, according to Facebook, is designed to study mobile usage habits. Users were also asked to take screenshots of their Amazon order history page.

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Australia Becomes First Western Nation to Ban Secure Encryption

extremetech.com

 

Australia is now the first Western nation to ban security, following a decision by its parliament to pass a bill forcing companies to hand over encrypted data to police upon demand. The government will be allowed to demand this without judicial review or oversight of any kind, beyond the requirement to get a warrant in the first place. Furthermore, the law requires corporations to build tools to give them the ability to intercept data sought by police when such tools do not already exist. 

While the bill has only passed Australia’s lower chamber, the upper chamber has indicated it will pass the legislation provided there are later votes on unspecified amendments to the current bill.

Australia has become the first nation to enact into legislation what both the UK and US governments very much want — government-mandated backdoors into encryption systems that require corporations to hand over data on demand. The response of the tech industry has been straightforward: There is no way to perform this task that does not fundamentally weaken security. 

And for all that journalism is often the process of laying out multiple sides to an argument or debate, there’s no actual debate to be had, here — not, at least, as far as the security principles are concerned. We can certainly debate whether people should be entitled to privacy, or if the governments of nominally free countries should have access to this information in the first place. But as to whether it’s actually possible to build secret backdoors into security systems without fundamentally weakening them, the evidence is simple: No.

As Cindy Cohn wrote in a recent post on Lawfare Blog:

Even without compromising the cryptography, there is no way to allow access for only the good guys (for instance, law enforcement with a Title III warrant) and not for the bad guys (hostile governments, commercial spies, thieves, harassers, bad cops and more). The NSA has had several incidents in just the past few years where it lost control of its bag of tricks, so the old government idea called NOBUS—that “nobody but us” could use these attacks—isn’t grounded in reality. Putting the keys in the hands of technology companies instead of governments just moves the target for hostile actors. And it’s unrealistic to expect companies to both protect the keys and get it right each time in their responses to hundreds of thousands of law enforcement and national security requests per year from local, state, federal and foreign jurisdictions. History has shown that it’s only a matter of time before bad actors figure out how to co-opt the same mechanisms that good guys use—whether corporate or governmental—and become “stalkers” themselves. 

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Homeland Security to Compile Database of Journalists, Bloggers

Bloomberg Government 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”

It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.

The data to be collected includes a publication’s “sentiment” as well as geographical spread, top posters, languages, momentum, and circulation. No value for the contract was disclosed.

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The Price of Google's New Conveniences? Your Data

Nitasha Tiku
wired.com

For the past 20 years, Google’s mission has been to organize the world’s information. Increasingly, the information it serves up is ordered around you—your browsing habits, where you go, who you talk to, what you say, and what you search for.

The trend came into stark relief Tuesday at Google’s annual developer conference, where the company introduced a suite of new services that, frankly, sound awfully convenient. Take Google Lens, a visual search tool that “proactively” surfaces information about the objects around you, or Google Assistant, which thanks to its new “continued conversation” feature, doesn’t need a wake word every time.

“You open the camera and you start to see [Google] Lens surface proactively all the information instantly and it even anchors that information to the things that you see,” said vice president Aparna Chennapragada, demonstrating how the feature, which will soon be built in to phones from other manufacturers, can identify everything in your friend’s apartment, down to the Zadie Smith book on her coffee table. The company told WIRED that Lens begins working when you open the camera app.

Want to catch up on the news? “What’s cool is that I didn’t have to tell the app that I follow politics, love to bike, or want information about the Bay Area, it works right out of the box,” Google’s Trystan Upstill told the crowd, while introducing personalized recommendations in Google News.

Looking to go out? “With zero work, [Google] Maps is giving me ideas to kick me out of my rut and inspire me to try something new,” said vice president Jen Fitzpatrick, introducing new restaurant recommendations that automatically pop up in Google Maps, along with a score called “Your Match” that combines Google’s machine learning “with the information that I’ve added—restaurants I’ve rated, cuisines I’ve liked, and places I’ve been to.”

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NSA triples spying rate on Americans’ phone calls, collects 530mn records in 2017

RT

 

The NSA has tripled its surveillance of Americans’ phone chatter, collecting over 534mn phone call records and text messages last year, despite pressure for more restrictions and transparency, a new official report has revealed.

Over the course of 2017, the National Security Agency (NSA) collected some 534,396,285 call detail records (CDRs), representing a dramatic increase over the previous year when, the agency gathered details of 151,230,968 calls, according to the report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

A call detail record contains various attributes of the call, such as the source number, destination number, and the call duration, but does not include the “content of any communication, the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer, or cell site location or global positioning system information,” the report states. The data is collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The report also noted that the NSA collected records from some 129,080 'non-US persons' which is a rather minor increase from 106,469 records collected the year before, under FISA Section 702. The highly controversial Section 702 does not require that an individual surveilled be a suspected terrorist, spy or foreign agent, nor does it demand judicial approval to target someone. Information gleaned by such data collection can be kept for years and may be used for purposes that do not have to be related to national security.

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Early Facebook Investor And Zuckerberg Mentor: "I Feel My Baby Has Turned Out To Be Something Horrible"

Zero Hedge

Even if Facebook's stellar Q1 earnings report hadn't helped erase some of the losses that Facebook shares incurred in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanderberg would still believe that the company's troubles are largely behind them and that the company had essentially repaired the damage done to its reputation.

That was the assessment delivered by early Facebook investor and one-time Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee, who warned during an appearance at an event organized by Quartz in Washington DC last week that the company's leaders are deeply complacent and still haven't accepted the fact that Facebook has badly mislead its users about how the company profits off their data.

Despite Zuckerberg's warning, embedded in his opening statement to Congress earlier this month, that the company planned to make changes that could "significantly impact" profitability, McNamee believes it's likely Facebook is "going to get away" with the bad things that it has done, which is "particularly dangerous" considering the 2018 midterm elections are only months away. McNamee said he's deeply disappointed in how Zuckerberg and Sandberg have responded to the crisis by refusing to accept responsibility.

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The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data

Gavin Hanson
Activist Post

Like it or not, you are your data. In this day and age, your receipts, social media activity, public records, GPS data, and Internet search history are the proof of who you are. And while you may have thought you had secrets, the Federal Government would like the rest of them.

The seemingly innocuous pieces of information we trade away every day create a detailed mosaic of our lives used to target advertising and create personality profiles that are exploited by the FBI, political operatives like Cambridge Analytica, and Russian propagandists.

And those are just the legal shenanigans! Instances of malicious hacking that jeopardize social security numbers and other important data are on the rise as well.

But all hope is not lost! There is but one meaningful defense against such intrusions, one used by whistleblowers, banks, the government (often poorly), and college students: encryption.

Encryption, to oversimplify, is the process of putting your data in a combination locked safe, and it’s becoming more popular. Like all passcodes, these combinations are best stored non-electronically.

Automatically encrypted search engines and Internet services simplify the process for users. They protect individuals’ data from hacking, theft, and even the government, but they also retain a repository for all the combinations they use to lock data up.
But that may soon change.

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