Google's hired eyes in the sky will soon be able to make out “manholes and mailboxes.- What else? Google will soon have an unprecedented ability to spy on you from space. Theoretically, at least. How? Two months ago, after much lobbying by the biggest satellite company in North America, DigitalGlobe, the US government relaxed restrictions to allow for commercially available satellit [...]

The White House is tracking visitors to its website, despite proudly promising that WhiteHouse.gov complies with federal privacy laws and does not use cookies. The AddThis tracker is present on every page on the site, according to EFF. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) studied the White House site for the new type of online tracking system after a new report by ProPublica found that the [...]

The 2014 Global Peace Index, compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace, provides a ranking of over 160 countries according to their peacefulness. The index includes 22 country-specific indicators such as dealing with external or internal conflicts, organized crime, refugees, political instability, terrorism, homicides, incarceration levels, police and military personnel levels, and the [...]

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, talks exclusively to Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, and reporter Ewen MacAskill in Moscow. The 31-year-old former intelligence analyst discusses whether he is a Russian spy, his likely fate if he returns to the US and the relevance of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in the age of Google. [...]

Facial recognition surveillance software being tested by British cops that allows "faster than ever" data searching and tracking of subjects is raising concerns among privacy activists. NeoFace software analyses dozens of facial features from digital CCTV images or police body cameras and matching them with the 90,000 photos stored on Leicestershire Police's database, which had become the first un [...]

Surveillance drones haven't started hovering outside and above the homes of Americans en masse just yet, but former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura claims he's left the United States just in case. Ventura, a 62-year-old professional wrestler-turned-politician, says his new Ora TV program 'Off the Grid' is being filmed in secret somewhere in Mexico where the all-seeing eye of American unmanned [...]