Edward Snowden. Widespread NSA surveillance. Mass metadata collection. Direct taps into private Google and Yahoo server connections--and the backbone of the Internet itself. Broken illusions and broken encryption and secret court orders abound.
Tech companies are playing a power grab and increasingly turning to lobbyists for a competitive edge.
A federal grand jury in Texas has indicted Barrett Brown, a putative spokesman for the hacker collective known as Anonymous and co-author of a book-in-progress about the group, in connection with a massive data breach of Stratfor Global Intelligence, a geopolitical risk analysis organization.