Paul Carr:

If we’ve learned anything in the past few days it’s that the NSA does precious little of its own spying, relying instead on companies like Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton. Indeed, Palantir is just one of dozens – hundreds? – of Silicon Valley companies developing and operating the tools used by intelligence agencies like the NSA. If the dystopian drama that Arrington imagines ever actually plays out, it’ll likely do so using tools created by a private company located within a dozen miles of Palo Alto.

As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.

A look at In-Q-Tel’s board of trustees shows how close the relationship between the geeks and the sneaks has become. The board is almost indistinguishable from that of a major Valley VC firm: Jim Barksdale former CEO and president of Netscape – sits next to Howard Cox of Greylock, sits next to Ted Schley of KPMG… sits across from David E. Jeremiah, the Chairman of Wackenhut Services Inc and A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, Former Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In-Q-Tel’s investment portfolio, at least on first glance, also seems remarkably similar to that of a regular Valley fund, with Web 2.0-y names like “illogic” and “Delphix” and “Connectify”. The only difference is that the companies on the list are all “focused on new and emerging commercial technologies that have the potential to give the CIA and broader U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) mission-advantage today and in the future.”

In-Q-Tel’s highest profile investment is Palantir – the data mining firm founded with additional money from Valley uber-Libertarian Peter Thiel – but In-Q-Tel’s entire portfolio includes over 100 companies, all reflecting the CIA’s current big obsessions: “big data”, video surveillance and encryption.

Glenn Greenwald:

I haven’t been able to write this week here because I’ve been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week’s NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency’s previously secret surveillance activities:

“What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can’t speak to what we learned in there, and I don’t know if there are other leaks, if there’s more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it’s the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it’s just broader than most people even realize, and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”

The Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is merely “the tip of the iceberg” of what the NSA is doing in spying on Americans and the world. She’s also right that when it comes to NSA spying, “there is significantly more than what is out in the media today”, and that’s exactly what we’re working to rectify.

Andrew Hill:

Harvard Business Review has dubbed the years between 1911 – when Frederick Winslow Taylor published his book The Principles of Scientific Management – and 2011 “The Management Century”. Taylor’s breakthrough was to see that production line productivity could be improved by using “scientific” methods of organisation.

The approach has been criticised for imposing a mechanistic regime on workers in the interests of pure efficiency, but it triggered more research into psychological and sociological ways to make manufacturing more productive.

Plenty of management techniques have helped to improve the ability of managers to fulfil their fundamental task. China-based car manufacturers, for example, are using the production line efficiency methods pioneered by Japan’s Toyota and others.

Jack Shafer:

Yet even as the insults pile up and the amateur psychoanalysis intensifies, keep in mind that Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered [7] the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint [8] about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column [9] by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” Cheney said. Later, Bush’s national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.

Kieran Healy:

I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”. I will show how we can use this “metadata” to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner.

The analysis in this report is based on information gathered by our field agent Mr David Hackett Fischer and published in an Appendix to his lengthy report to the government. As you may be aware, Mr Fischer is an expert and respected field Agent with a broad and deep knowledge of the colonies. I, on the other hand, have made my way from Ireland with just a little quantitative training—I placed several hundred rungs below the Senior Wrangler during my time at Cambridge—and I am presently employed as a junior analytical scribe at ye olde National Security Administration. Sorry, I mean the Royal Security Administration. And I should emphasize again that I know nothing of current affairs in the colonies. However, our current Eighteenth Century beta of PRISM has been used to collect and analyze information on more than two hundred and sixty persons (of varying degrees of suspicion) belonging variously to seven different organizations in the Boston area.

What might one do when a Citroen 2CV appears in the rear view mirror, particularly on a rather steep incline? A beautiful example: white and purple.

Related: The End of French Cars by Stephen Bayley.

I accelerated.

Ritchie King and David Yanofsky:

The revelation that major US technology companies are participating in a National Security Administration surveillance program was shocking enough. And that was before we saw the top-secret slides used by the government to describe the spying operation. They are, to put it mildly, heinously ugly…

A. Does the information that I place in iCloud servers ever leave Apple’s infrastructure?

B. Under what circumstances can my iCloud information be accessed by Apple and/or non Apple humans or systems?

C. Does Apple share iOS, OS X & Cloud/Software user data in any way? With whom and under what circumstances?

D. How do Apple’s current user data and privacy practices differ from those when Steve Jobs was CEO?

E. Is there a relationship between government iOS, OSX and cloud software system purchases and Apple’s user data access practices?

F. Do Apple’s policies still support it’s long ago “computer for the rest of us” vision?

G. Will Apple create and promote user experiences and services related to true data privacy control? Apple is in a great position to do this, but it will mean “saying no” [2] to a number of special interests such as governments, telco, insurance and financial firms.

I write as a citizen, long time Apple shareholder and customer.

[1] With apologies to Horace Dediu: http://www.asymco.com/2013/05/24/my-questions-for-tim-cook/

[2] http://zurb.com/article/744/steve-jobs-innovation-is-saying-no-to-1-0

A great point on the global implications for Silicon Valley.

The US Government concerns about Huawei will likely be repeated by others with respect to US tech firms.

Jack Shafer:

Bank records, credit history, travel records, credit card records, EZPass data, GPS phone data, license-plate reader databases, Social Security and Internal Revenue Service records, facial-recognition databases at the Department of Motor Vehicles and elsewhere, even 7-Eleven surveillance videos comprise information lodes that are of equal or greater value to the national security establishment than phone and Web files. It doesn’t sound paranoid to conclude that the government has reused, or will reuse, the interpretation of the Patriot Act it presented to the secret FISA court in its phone record and Prism data requests to grab these other data troves.

Lest I sound like a Fourth Amendment hysteric, I understand there’s nothing automatically sacrosanct about any of the digital trails we leave behind. Lawful subpoenas can liberate all sorts records about you, electronic or otherwise.

What’s breathtaking about these two government surveillance programs that the Guardian and the Washington Post have revealed is that they’re vast collections of data about hundreds of millions of people suspected of no wrongdoing and not part of any civil action. Defending the phone-record cull, National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper explained this week that smaller sets of information aren’t very useful in screening for and identifying “terrorism-related communications,” hence all must collected.

Besides, as the government and its supporters insist, phone-record metadata does not include the names of individuals or organizations connected to the phone numbers (and government eavesdropping isn’t part of the operation).

Pew Internet:

For the first time since the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project began systematically tracking smartphone adoption, a majority of Americans now own a smartphone of some kind. Our definition of a smartphone owner includes anyone who says “yes” to one—or both—of the following questions:

55% of cell phone owners say that their phone is a smartphone.
58% of cell phone owners say that their phone operates on a smartphone platform common to the U.S. market.1

Taken together, 61% of cell owners said yes to at least one of these questions and are classified as smartphone owners. Because 91% of the adult population now owns some kind of cell phone, that means that 56% of all American adults are now smartphone adopters. One third (35%) have some other kind of cell phone that is not a smartphone, and the remaining 9% of Americans do not own a cell phone at all.