ForgotPassword?
Sign Up
Search this Topic:
Posts: 27156
Aug 27 15 6:40 PM
US National Security Agency feeds big appetite for security start ups
Skilled engineers charged with tracking weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, US government-backed cyber attackers and even the general who led the National Security Agency have all left the organisation to launch their own cyber security start-ups. Many former NSA employees are building businesses to protect the private sector from cyber attack, using their experience at probably the most sophisticated cyber organisation in the world to lure customers and investors. But while most see their backgrounds as a badge of honour, they face a challenge convincing some companies to trust their products after the Snowden revelations showed the NSA had conducted a mass surveillance programme. General Keith Alexander, who was the director of the NSA and led the US cyber command, left the agency last year and has founded IronNet Cyber Security, with former senior staff from the NSA and other state agencies. Mark Young worked at the NSA and the department of defence before joining General Alexander as managing director at IronNet. He said former NSA staff were particularly good at "finding small nuggets of wisdom in very, very large, big data sets". "It is certainly the pre-eminent agency for technical skill," he said. "Miracles occur there every day when it comes to technology."
Skilled engineers charged with tracking weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, US government-backed cyber attackers and even the general who led the National Security Agency have all left the organisation to launch their own cyber security start-ups.
Many former NSA employees are building businesses to protect the private sector from cyber attack, using their experience at probably the most sophisticated cyber organisation in the world to lure customers and investors.
But while most see their backgrounds as a badge of honour, they face a challenge convincing some companies to trust their products after the Snowden revelations showed the NSA had conducted a mass surveillance programme.
General Keith Alexander, who was the director of the NSA and led the US cyber command, left the agency last year and has founded IronNet Cyber Security, with former senior staff from the NSA and other state agencies.
Mark Young worked at the NSA and the department of defence before joining General Alexander as managing director at IronNet. He said former NSA staff were particularly good at "finding small nuggets of wisdom in very, very large, big data sets". "It is certainly the pre-eminent agency for technical skill," he said. "Miracles occur there every day when it comes to technology."
Read more @ http://www.afr.com/technology/us-national-security-agency-feeds-big-appetite-for-security-start-ups-20150816-gj01sh
New Edward Snowden documents revealed on Saturday in the New York Times detail a decade-long secret partnership between the NSA and AT&T, which provided the spy agency with metadata on billions of emails. Although the Times story has garnered a lot of attention, it offers few details about how the telecom conducted the siphoning and spying for the NSA. But two stories published almost decade ago by WIRED and Salon provide in-depth details about the secret rooms at AT&T facilities in San Francisco, Missouri, and other areas across the US that the NSA used to siphon internet data. AT&T isn’t identified by name in the Snowden documents, but the Times notes that “a constellation of evidence” points to AT&T as the primary company mentioned in them, which several intelligence officials have confirmed to the paper. According to the Times piece, the siphoning of internet data from AT&T began in 2003 and continued for a decade in a relationship that the NSA called “highly collaborative.” The telecom giant, according to one Snowden document, was extremely willing to help out the spy agency, and its engineers “were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.”
New Edward Snowden documents revealed on Saturday in the New York Times detail a decade-long secret partnership between the NSA and AT&T, which provided the spy agency with metadata on billions of emails. Although the Times story has garnered a lot of attention, it offers few details about how the telecom conducted the siphoning and spying for the NSA.
But two stories published almost decade ago by WIRED and Salon provide in-depth details about the secret rooms at AT&T facilities in San Francisco, Missouri, and other areas across the US that the NSA used to siphon internet data.
AT&T isn’t identified by name in the Snowden documents, but the Times notes that “a constellation of evidence” points to AT&T as the primary company mentioned in them, which several intelligence officials have confirmed to the paper.
According to the Times piece, the siphoning of internet data from AT&T began in 2003 and continued for a decade in a relationship that the NSA called “highly collaborative.” The telecom giant, according to one Snowden document, was extremely willing to help out the spy agency, and its engineers “were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.”
Read more @ http://www.wired.com/2015/08/know-nsa-atts-spying-pact/
The technology is being deployed in secret by departments across the country, according to a recent investigative report. The storm trooper-level police response to protests in Ferguson last summer shocked many observers, and put a federal program that distributes surplus military weapons and equipment to local law enforcement under heavy scrutiny. But the creep of War on Terror technology into domestic police surveillance tactics, and the Orwellian legal bases upon which it stands, has been more subtle. One little understood tool is known as "stingray," a device that can locate a phone's location by posing as a cell tower. The system is good at tracking down criminal suspects but also intercepts the location of people who happen to be in the area. Secrecy has contributed to a disturbing lack of judicial review of stingray. In Baltimore, police are secretly employing the devices with great frequency to track down not only suspected murderers but small-time crooks, according to an important USA Today investigation published Monday. The upshot is that police nationwide have "quietly transformed a form of surveillance billed as a tool to hunt terrorists and kidnappers into a staple of everyday policing."
The technology is being deployed in secret by departments across the country, according to a recent investigative report.
The storm trooper-level police response to protests in Ferguson last summer shocked many observers, and put a federal program that distributes surplus military weapons and equipment to local law enforcement under heavy scrutiny. But the creep of War on Terror technology into domestic police surveillance tactics, and the Orwellian legal bases upon which it stands, has been more subtle.
One little understood tool is known as "stingray," a device that can locate a phone's location by posing as a cell tower. The system is good at tracking down criminal suspects but also intercepts the location of people who happen to be in the area.
Secrecy has contributed to a disturbing lack of judicial review of stingray.
In Baltimore, police are secretly employing the devices with great frequency to track down not only suspected murderers but small-time crooks, according to an important USA Today investigation published Monday. The upshot is that police nationwide have "quietly transformed a form of surveillance billed as a tool to hunt terrorists and kidnappers into a staple of everyday policing."
Read more @ http://www.citylab.com/crime/2015/08/youre-going-to-hear-a-lot-more-about-police-use-of-stingray/402283/
Read more @ http://www.ubergizmo.com/2015/08/police-reportedly-tracks-cellphones-regularly-to-solve-routine-crimes/
Read more @ https://news.vice.com/article/us-cops-arent-getting-warrants-to-spy-on-peoples-cellphones-for-petty-crimes
That journalism is embattled there is no doubt. Dwindling advertising profits have seen those who remain employed multitasking to cover for laidoff colleagues. It’s an undeniable industrial climate change. Andrew Fowler thinks there’s a war going on, with enemies of free journalism actively seeking to destroy it. “Revelatory and investigative journalism in the West is in a state of crisis,” he says. “Attacked from without, it is also attacked from within by journalists who long ago abandoned the core journalistic principle to question those in power.” He presents an array of examples in this breezy account of media battles over recent decades, prime among them the struggles of the newspapers chosen by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to filter and interpret their mass drops of digital documents. Snowden revealed that the NSA and its “Five Eyes” cohorts were collecting and storing data on the communications of vast numbers of people, blurring the distinction between their legally authorised snooping on foreigners with domestic surveillance. Journalism is collateral damage when the agencies set their computers to trace the source of leaks from reporters’ phones and emails.
That journalism is embattled there is no doubt. Dwindling advertising profits have seen those who remain employed multitasking to cover for laidoff colleagues. It’s an undeniable industrial climate change.
Andrew Fowler thinks there’s a war going on, with enemies of free journalism actively seeking to destroy it. “Revelatory and investigative journalism in the West is in a state of crisis,” he says. “Attacked from without, it is also attacked from within by journalists who long ago abandoned the core journalistic principle to question those in power.”
He presents an array of examples in this breezy account of media battles over recent decades, prime among them the struggles of the newspapers chosen by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to filter and interpret their mass drops of digital documents. Snowden revealed that the NSA and its “Five Eyes” cohorts were collecting and storing data on the communications of vast numbers of people, blurring the distinction between their legally authorised snooping on foreigners with domestic surveillance. Journalism is collateral damage when the agencies set their computers to trace the source of leaks from reporters’ phones and emails.
Read more @ https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2015/08/31/the-war-journalism/14401656002270
Fifteen months ahead of the presidential election, a number of the 17 Republicans vying for their party’s nomination have invested considerable energy courting Silicon Valley. These candidates are boldly attempting to articulate a coherent understanding of the issues facing the technology industry. This makes sense: what’s been seen traditionally as a Democratic stronghold ought to be ripe for the Republican taking. After all, it’s easy to frame the success of the Internet as an excellent manifestation of the conservative ideology that free markets and limited regulation spur economic growth and upward mobility. Yet none of the Republican candidates has demonstrated a coherent technology-policy agenda. Despite all the overtures, the latest quarter’s financial filings revealed “most tech industry bigwigs are throwing cash at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.” This isn’t because Hillary Clinton has a better tech agenda or better tech instincts than Republicans. Her comparative fundraising success is likely attributable primarily to the tech community’s own instinct that it’s better to trust the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
Fifteen months ahead of the presidential election, a number of the 17 Republicans vying for their party’s nomination have invested considerable energy courting Silicon Valley. These candidates are boldly attempting to articulate a coherent understanding of the issues facing the technology industry.
This makes sense: what’s been seen traditionally as a Democratic stronghold ought to be ripe for the Republican taking. After all, it’s easy to frame the success of the Internet as an excellent manifestation of the conservative ideology that free markets and limited regulation spur economic growth and upward mobility.
Yet none of the Republican candidates has demonstrated a coherent technology-policy agenda. Despite all the overtures, the latest quarter’s financial filings revealed “most tech industry bigwigs are throwing cash at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.”
This isn’t because Hillary Clinton has a better tech agenda or better tech instincts than Republicans. Her comparative fundraising success is likely attributable primarily to the tech community’s own instinct that it’s better to trust the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
For the NSA, Phones Were Only the Beginning With the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June, Americans may think that the sprawling and unchecked surveillance apparatus that was secretly erected after 9/11 has finally been reined in. But the fight over government surveillance is far from over. For all the late-night filibusters and political brinkmanship that ultimately produced the USA Freedom Act, the legislation barely touched on many of the government’s most troubling spying programs—the ones aimed at the Internet. Two years ago, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, then a government contractor, exposed the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. That program is now being wound down, but phone records were just the tip of the surveillance iceberg. More and more, our daily communications take place over the Internet—and there the NSA’s dragnet surveillance continues unabated. Putting an end to what some have called “the golden age of surveillance” requires protecting our online communications from government spying, too. Over the past 15 years, the NSA has embedded itself in the infrastructure of the Internet, often by secretly collaborating with telecommunications companies that operate the Internet “backbone.” This backbone is the global network of high-capacity cables and routers that carries communications across countries and between continents. From outposts both inside and outside the United States, the NSA continuously monitors vast streams of Internet traffic as they flow past the agency’s surveillance devices. The NSA uses those devices to siphon off huge quantities of communications, often in bulk, copying them and then searching their contents for information of interest. This is the new surveillance paradigm. It is one in which the government examines everyone’s e-mails, browsing activities, and online chats in real time, not just the communications of suspected spies and criminals. The old paradigm, in which surveillance had to be targeted to be technically and economically feasible, is being supplanted by population-level surveillance, where everyone’s communications and metadata are fair game. This new paradigm animated the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ call records, and it continues to animate its pervasive monitoring of Internet traffic. The breadth of this surveillance allows intelligence agencies to use “big data” techniques—such as sophisticated algorithms and analytic tools—to mine the flow of private communications and store large chunks of that data for later use. In short, today’s surveillance system is set up to search and collect as much data as possible now, so that intelligence agencies can figure out how to exploit it later. There are two key legal authorities that govern the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of our Internet communications. Inside the United States, this surveillance is conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (better known as FISA), and it principally affects Americans’ international communications. Outside the United States, the surveillance is carried out under Executive Order 12,333—a Reagan-era spying regulation written for the pre-Internet era. This order is even more permissive than Section 702 and lacks judicial review of any kind, not to mention meaningful congressional oversight. John Napier Tye, a whistleblower and former State Department official, has warned that the collection and storage of communications under Executive Order 12,333 is staggering in its scope and far broader than the surveillance programs that have thus far come to public attention. Last March, I was part of a team of lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union who sued the government to stop Internet backbone surveillance conducted under Section 702. The ACLU’s clients in the case—Wikimedia Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Rutherford Institute, and six other civil society organizations—argue that this warrantless surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, which provides core safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, the First Amendment, and the text of Section 702 itself. In searching through virtually all international communications entering or leaving the United States, the NSA invades the plaintiffs’ privacy and harms their ability to engage in speech, advocacy, and other activities essential to their work. Public disclosures over the past two years—including new revelations about the NSA’s monitoring of Internet backbone traffic with the help of AT&T and Verizon—substantiate the plaintiffs’ claims. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently pursuing a similar, long-running challenge, which the government has sought to have the courts dismiss on the grounds of state secrets. Because intelligence officials often claim that these programs are directed only at foreigners abroad (as though mass surveillance of the rest of the world is justified), many Americans believe that they aren’t vulnerable to the NSA’s dragnet spying. But the reality is far different.
With the passage of the USA Freedom Act in June, Americans may think that the sprawling and unchecked surveillance apparatus that was secretly erected after 9/11 has finally been reined in. But the fight over government surveillance is far from over. For all the late-night filibusters and political brinkmanship that ultimately produced the USA Freedom Act, the legislation barely touched on many of the government’s most troubling spying programs—the ones aimed at the Internet.
Two years ago, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, then a government contractor, exposed the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. That program is now being wound down, but phone records were just the tip of the surveillance iceberg. More and more, our daily communications take place over the Internet—and there the NSA’s dragnet surveillance continues unabated. Putting an end to what some have called “the golden age of surveillance” requires protecting our online communications from government spying, too.
Over the past 15 years, the NSA has embedded itself in the infrastructure of the Internet, often by secretly collaborating with telecommunications companies that operate the Internet “backbone.” This backbone is the global network of high-capacity cables and routers that carries communications across countries and between continents. From outposts both inside and outside the United States, the NSA continuously monitors vast streams of Internet traffic as they flow past the agency’s surveillance devices. The NSA uses those devices to siphon off huge quantities of communications, often in bulk, copying them and then searching their contents for information of interest.
This is the new surveillance paradigm. It is one in which the government examines everyone’s e-mails, browsing activities, and online chats in real time, not just the communications of suspected spies and criminals. The old paradigm, in which surveillance had to be targeted to be technically and economically feasible, is being supplanted by population-level surveillance, where everyone’s communications and metadata are fair game. This new paradigm animated the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ call records, and it continues to animate its pervasive monitoring of Internet traffic. The breadth of this surveillance allows intelligence agencies to use “big data” techniques—such as sophisticated algorithms and analytic tools—to mine the flow of private communications and store large chunks of that data for later use. In short, today’s surveillance system is set up to search and collect as much data as possible now, so that intelligence agencies can figure out how to exploit it later.
There are two key legal authorities that govern the NSA’s warrantless surveillance of our Internet communications. Inside the United States, this surveillance is conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (better known as FISA), and it principally affects Americans’ international communications. Outside the United States, the surveillance is carried out under Executive Order 12,333—a Reagan-era spying regulation written for the pre-Internet era. This order is even more permissive than Section 702 and lacks judicial review of any kind, not to mention meaningful congressional oversight. John Napier Tye, a whistleblower and former State Department official, has warned that the collection and storage of communications under Executive Order 12,333 is staggering in its scope and far broader than the surveillance programs that have thus far come to public attention.
Last March, I was part of a team of lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union who sued the government to stop Internet backbone surveillance conducted under Section 702. The ACLU’s clients in the case—Wikimedia Foundation, Human Rights Watch, the Rutherford Institute, and six other civil society organizations—argue that this warrantless surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment, which provides core safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures, the First Amendment, and the text of Section 702 itself. In searching through virtually all international communications entering or leaving the United States, the NSA invades the plaintiffs’ privacy and harms their ability to engage in speech, advocacy, and other activities essential to their work. Public disclosures over the past two years—including new revelations about the NSA’s monitoring of Internet backbone traffic with the help of AT&T and Verizon—substantiate the plaintiffs’ claims. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is currently pursuing a similar, long-running challenge, which the government has sought to have the courts dismiss on the grounds of state secrets.
Because intelligence officials often claim that these programs are directed only at foreigners abroad (as though mass surveillance of the rest of the world is justified), many Americans believe that they aren’t vulnerable to the NSA’s dragnet spying. But the reality is far different.
Meet the Whistleblower Who Exposed the Secret Room AT&T Used to Help the NSA Spy on the Internet
Jeff Klein blew the whistle on AT&T’s cooperation with the National Security Agency in 2006. As documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden expose how AT&T aided the NSA’s vast spying operations, we speak to former AT&T technician Mark Klein, who worked at the company for 22 years. In 2006, he blew the whistle on AT&T’s cooperation with the National Security Agency by leaking internal documents that revealed the company had set up a secret room in its San Francisco office to give the NSA access to its fiber-optic Internet cables. Below is an interview with Klein and Jeff Larson, followed by a transcript:
Jeff Klein blew the whistle on AT&T’s cooperation with the National Security Agency in 2006.
As documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden expose how AT&T aided the NSA’s vast spying operations, we speak to former AT&T technician Mark Klein, who worked at the company for 22 years. In 2006, he blew the whistle on AT&T’s cooperation with the National Security Agency by leaking internal documents that revealed the company had set up a secret room in its San Francisco office to give the NSA access to its fiber-optic Internet cables.
Below is an interview with Klein and Jeff Larson, followed by a transcript:
Speaking at an Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security forum at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on August 18, former Florida Governor and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush (shown) was critical of the very modest restrictions on the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records that were enacted into law in June. He advocated reversing those restrictions to increase the NSA’s snooping powers. “There’s a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job,” Bush asserted. “I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way.” Bush maintained that the increased NSA surveillance powers are necessary to combat “evildoers” — presumably terrorists such as those who participated in the 9/11 attacks in 2001. In response to those attacks, Bush’s brother, President George W. Bush, signed the PATRIOT Act into law, which authorized a wide range of government surveillance activities. With the passage of time, however, even the PATRIOT Act’s lead sponsor, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who introduced the act in the House on October 23, 2001, developed severe reservations about how that legislation has been applied. “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation,” Sensenbrenner wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder on June 6, 2013. He continued: “The [FBI’s] broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.” Because of these reservations, Sensenbrenner introduced a bill called the USA Freedom Act on April 28, and posted a message about the act on his website, claiming that it would end the bulk collection of Americans’ communications records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and eliminate other abuses, as well. The USA Freedom Act was passed by the House on May 13, the Senate on June 2, and signed into law that same day by President Obama. Obama’s haste in signing the bill was prompted by the fact that it extended key provisions of the PATRIOT Act that expired on June 1, until 2017. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposed the act because he believed that trading a four-year extension of the PATRIOT Act’s intrusive powers for a very modest limitation of those powers was a poor exchange. (It still allows for the collection of bulk metadata, but by the phone companies instead of the government.)
Speaking at an Americans for Peace, Prosperity and Security forum at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on August 18, former Florida Governor and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush (shown) was critical of the very modest restrictions on the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records that were enacted into law in June. He advocated reversing those restrictions to increase the NSA’s snooping powers.
“There’s a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job,” Bush asserted. “I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way.”
Bush maintained that the increased NSA surveillance powers are necessary to combat “evildoers” — presumably terrorists such as those who participated in the 9/11 attacks in 2001. In response to those attacks, Bush’s brother, President George W. Bush, signed the PATRIOT Act into law, which authorized a wide range of government surveillance activities.
With the passage of time, however, even the PATRIOT Act’s lead sponsor, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), who introduced the act in the House on October 23, 2001, developed severe reservations about how that legislation has been applied.
“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the FBI’s interpretation of this legislation,” Sensenbrenner wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder on June 6, 2013. He continued: “The [FBI’s] broad application for phone records was made under the so-called business records provision of the Act. I do not believe the broadly drafted FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act. Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”
Because of these reservations, Sensenbrenner introduced a bill called the USA Freedom Act on April 28, and posted a message about the act on his website, claiming that it would end the bulk collection of Americans’ communications records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and eliminate other abuses, as well.
The USA Freedom Act was passed by the House on May 13, the Senate on June 2, and signed into law that same day by President Obama. Obama’s haste in signing the bill was prompted by the fact that it extended key provisions of the PATRIOT Act that expired on June 1, until 2017. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposed the act because he believed that trading a four-year extension of the PATRIOT Act’s intrusive powers for a very modest limitation of those powers was a poor exchange. (It still allows for the collection of bulk metadata, but by the phone companies instead of the government.)
Read more @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/21430-jeb-bush-would-expand-nsa-spy-powers-at-expense-of-civil-liberties
As Bezos and Kaspersky rush to the media to deny accusations about their respective firms we dive around in the vault and offer some great CEO denials of the very recent and not so recent past. 1) We're not buying our parent - we're happy with the family structure, Pat Gelsinger, CEO VMware (2015) VMware CEO denies interest in buying parent firm EMC. It was reported that EMC may come under the ownership of VMware as it sought strategic options. This was then denied by Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware who told Calcalist, an Israeli news outlet that everyone what happy with the current structure. Analysts described any potential deal which would see VMware take over EMC or be sold off by same as 'suboptimal' 2) We don't help governments to snoop Zuckerberg, Page, others...(2013) Facebook and google and others deny anything to do with NSA Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page denying any knowledge of PRISM. Back in 2013 after the Guardian and Washington Post revealed NSA snooping based on Edward Snowden's revelations web based firms and software companies were quick to deny any involvement. Zuckerberg wrote: "I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM," Zuckerberg wrote in a post published to his Facebook profile. "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't heard of PRISM before yesterday." Larry Page from google said something similar and Apple, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft Linkedin and Yahoo cried shame on governments for snooping and formed the Reform Government Surveillance group
As Bezos and Kaspersky rush to the media to deny accusations about their respective firms we dive around in the vault and offer some great CEO denials of the very recent and not so recent past.
1) We're not buying our parent - we're happy with the family structure, Pat Gelsinger, CEO VMware (2015)
VMware CEO denies interest in buying parent firm EMC.
It was reported that EMC may come under the ownership of VMware as it sought strategic options. This was then denied by Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware who told Calcalist, an Israeli news outlet that everyone what happy with the current structure.
Analysts described any potential deal which would see VMware take over EMC or be sold off by same as 'suboptimal'
2) We don't help governments to snoop Zuckerberg, Page, others...(2013)
Facebook and google and others deny anything to do with NSA
Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page denying any knowledge of PRISM. Back in 2013 after the Guardian and Washington Post revealed NSA snooping based on Edward Snowden's revelations web based firms and software companies were quick to deny any involvement.
Zuckerberg wrote: "I want to respond personally to the outrageous press reports about PRISM," Zuckerberg wrote in a post published to his Facebook profile. "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information or metadata in bulk, like the one Verizon reportedly received. And if we did, we would fight it aggressively. We hadn't heard of PRISM before yesterday."
Larry Page from google said something similar and Apple, Twitter, AOL, Microsoft Linkedin and Yahoo cried shame on governments for snooping and formed the Reform Government Surveillance group
Read more @ http://www.cbronline.com/news/social-media/management/five-other-huge-ceo-denials-porn-buyouts-phones-bankruptcy-government-snooping-4648549
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
Interact