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We at Walking In The Desert would like to let our readers know about a documentary that a friend and I are working on. This is our first documentary but we hope that this documentary will be a success and will promote the usage of the Tridentine Mass (Extraordinary Form) A friend and I are in the process to create a documentary that will promote the usage of the Latin Mass. We want to be able to do a video documentary that will interview priests and lay people who attend or celebrate the Latin Mass. We want to ask them...

The Washington Post’s privacy story on Apple and how they got it wrong Posted on Monday, October 20th, 2014 at 6:36 pm. PT Written by Jim Dalrymple The Washington Post ran a sensationalistic story this morning that claimed Apple would have user’s location, unique identifying codes and search terms when using Spotlight in OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. The function is part of Spotlight search, which was updated with last week’s launch of new Mac computers and Apple’s latest operating system, Yosemite OS X, which also is available for download to owners of older machines. Once Yosemite is...

The six-strikes Copyright Alert System has been active for one and a half years now and warnings are being sent out at an increasing rate. The program will double in size this year, according to its executive director, in the hope that it will eventually change people's norms toward piracy. February last year, five U.S. Internet providers started sending Copyright Alerts to customers who use BitTorrent to pirate movies, TV-shows and music.These efforts are part of the Copyright Alert System, an anti-piracy plan that aims to educate the public. Through a series of warnings suspected pirates are informed that their...

Facebook said Thursday that future research on its 1.3 billion users would be subjected to greater internal scrutiny from top managers, especially if they focused on “deeply personal topics” or specific groups of people. But no outside body will review Facebook’s research projects, and the company declined to disclose what guidelines it would use to decide whether research was appropriate. Nor did it indicate whether it will get consent from users for projects like its emotion manipulation study, which set off a global furor when it was disclosed this summer. In essence, Facebook’s message is the same as it has...

The Seattle City Council passed a new ordinance Monday that could mean $1 fines for people who toss too many table scraps into the trash. Under current Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) rules, people living in single-family homes are encouraged but not required to dispose of food waste and compostable paper products in compost bins. Apartment buildings must have compost bins available, but residents of apartment buildings aren’t required to use them. And businesses aren’t subject to any composting requirements. Under the new rules, collectors can take a cursory look each time they dump trash into a garbage truck. If they...

Via the Lars Larson Radio Show, yesterday: The federal government spent $1 million to create a database to track hate speech and “misinformation” on Twitter. The National Science Foundation is behind the creation of the online government monitoring project. The database will reportedly include searches for “suspicious memes,” “false and misleading ideas” and will place particular focus on online political activity.

The U.S. Department of Justice wants new authority to hack and search remote computers during investigations, saying the new rules are needed because of complex criminal schemes sometimes using millions of machines spread across the country. Digital rights groups say the request from the DOJ for authority to search computers outside the district where an investigation is based raises concerns about Internet security and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “By expanding federal law enforcement’s power to secretly exploit ‘zero-day’ vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us,” Nathan...

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

WASHINGTON — Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday. But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to...

The NSA orchestrated Internet vulnerabilities against the directive of Congress Every child learns not to touch a neighbor’s mailbox. “That’s a federal crime,” he’s told, and for good reason. However, the transactions and love-hate letters that used to go through physical mailboxes now go through electronic ones. The U.S. government cannot protect their privacy. What the laws and customs that surround the U.S. mail once did is now done by encryption. Government’s own role is problematic, because many of its various agencies want to look into our mailboxes by defeating encryption. We can understand how serious a matter this is...

The secret court that oversees the nation’s intelligence activities renewed its approval of the National Security Agency’s telephone-records program on Friday, granting the government a new three-month window to collect data on all Americans’ phone calls. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s office announced the court’s ruling in a statement, though officials didn’t make the ruling itself public, saying it was going through declassification procedures. The decision marks the 36th time the program has been approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “It is the administration’s view, consistent with the recent holdings of the United States District Courts for...

Senior figures behind efforts to curtail the powers of American spy agencies have seized on the decision by the world’s largest tech companies to call for radical surveillance reform, saying the unexpected intervention is a potential “game-changer”. In an open letter published jointly on Monday, eight tech giants, including Apple, Google and Facebook, said disclosures by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that basic rights and freedoms were being undermined. The companies – which also include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn and Twitter, and have a combined value of $1.4tn – called for widespread changes that, if enacted, would...

An even split of Democratic and Republican legislators back a bill supported by Rep. Justin Amash, aiming to end the country's domestic surveillance programs. The legislation, titled The USA Freedom Act, would, if signed into law, curb the National Security Agency's ability to conduct communications sweeps and close a "back door" to information by requiring a court order when performing searches of Americans in data already collected without warrants. The Hill reported during the weekend that the bill has at least 102 cosponsors, including 51 Democrats and 51 Republicans... According to The Hill, members of Congress are placing increased pressure...

Google says it's facing a rapidly increasing number of data requests from national governments, and particularly the United States government... Google says that, in the six-month period between January and June 2013, the United States government made almost 11,000 requests for information related to Google's users.... Overall, this means Google faced twice as many data requests between January and June 2013 than it did over the same period last year. Google added that this remarkable total "only include[s] the requests we're allowed to publish." Google says that, in most cases where data was requested, it handed over the information. That...

........there’s no shortage of shockingly invasive tactics our government is employing to keep track of its servants … er, citizens. In fact, it seems that more and more of what our government is doing is keeping track – close track – of what we’re all up to. Our traveling is monitored through license plates and GPS systems. Our credit card purchases are monitored. Our phone calls are monitored. Our social media sites are monitored. Our search engines and online meanderings are monitored. In short, there is very little the government doesn’t know about everyone. Even the occasional hermit living unplugged...

A new leak published by The Guardian reveals more details about the NSA's Marina metadata program, including the program's ability to look back at a full year of metadata for millions of web users, regardless of whether the users are the target of an investigation. The metadata can include anything from browsing history to more detailed account activity in the case of web-based email, including contact lists and potentially even account passwords. The Marina program had been mentioned in previous leaks, but the new revelations, pulled from an NSA training document, show how the data was centrally stored and managed....

The National Security Agency isn't just snooping into phone and online communications. It also appears to be keeping a close eye on credit card transactions. Why? And what can they see? The presumed purpose of NSA's credit card tracking is to help it stop terrorism. Agents hope to ferret out terrorists who are buying bomb ingredients, visiting hotbeds of radicalism, and moving funds illicitly. But the program's reach is so broad, some say it will inevitably sweep up purchases made by innocent American citizens, as well.... Technically, there are safeguards in place to keep American citizens out of the NSA's...

This is how the New York Times describes a telephone surveillance program carried out by federal drug enforcement agencies: For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans' phone calls -- parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency's hotly disputed collection of phone call logs. Sounds ominous, but is it? The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an...

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President Barack Obama's national security has team acknowledged for the first time that... If a person called 40 people, the analysis would allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating a suspect