James Ball

Russia’s disconnection from the online services of the West has been as abrupt and complete as its disconnection from real-world global trade routes. The moves have raised fears of a “splinternet” (or Balkanized internet), in which instead of the single global internet we have today, we have a number of national or regional networks that don’t speak to one another and perhaps even operate using incompatible technologies. That would spell the end of the internet as a single global communications technology—and perhaps not only temporarily.

Aiming to tackle well-defined harms such as hate crime, stalking, and terrorist activity alongside issues such as trolling and disinformation, the United Kingdom government proposes combining work done across eight or more separate regulators into one. This new "super-regulator" could have powers to fine technology companies according to their revenue, or even to block them. It could also be able to prosecute individual executives. The proposed body could be funded either by an industry levy or from the proceeds of any enforcement fines it imposed.

President Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal" tells the tale of how some newspaper stories get written. When Trump Tower was under construction, Trump, according to the book, called up a gossip reporter to claim that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were about to buy an apartment in the building. Buckingham Palace, as a matter of policy, never comments for this type of story—meaning that for a certain kind of reporter keen on a certain kind of story, the tip is a tempting one even if they suspect it’s almost certainly not true.

The United Kingdom intelligence agency GCHQ has developed sophisticated tools to manipulate online polls, spam targets with SMS messages, track people by impersonating spammers and monitor social media postings, according to newly-published documents leaked by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents -- which were published on First Look Media with accompanying analysis from Glenn Greenwald -- disclose a range of GCHQ "effects" programs aimed at tracking targets, spreading information, and manipulating online debates and statistics.

Among the programs revealed in the document are:

• Gateway, the "ability to artificially increase traffic to a website".
• Clean Sweep, which "masquerade[s] Facebook wall posts for individuals or entire countries".
• Scrapheap Challenge, for "Perfect Spoofing Of Emails From Blackberry Targets".
• Underpass, to "change outcome of online polls".
• Spring Bishop, to find "private photos of targets on Facebook".

When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual.

You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.

Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian's inbox in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.

The Guardian has no form of appeal against parts of its journalism being made all but impossible for most of Europe's 368 million to find. The strange aspect of the ruling is all the content is still there: if you click the links in this article, you can read all the "disappeared" stories on this site. No one has suggested the stories weren't true, fair or accurate. But still they are made hard for anyone to find.

US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a "backdoor" in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications.

The NSA's collection programs are ostensibly targeted at foreigners, but in August the Guardian revealed a secret rule change allowing NSA analysts to search for Americans' details within the databases. Now, in a letter to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has confirmed for the first time this backdoor had been used in practice to search for data related to “US persons.”

“There have been queries, using US person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-US persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States,” Clapper wrote in the letter. “These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court and consistent with the statute and the fourth amendment.”

The legal authority to perform the searches, revealed in top-secret NSA documents provided to the Guardian by Edward Snowden, was denounced by Sen Wyden as a “backdoor search loophole.” Clapper did not disclose how many such searches had been performed by the NSA.