Guardian, The

A new lawsuit alleges that the US Department of Justice intentionally conducts inadequate searches of its records using a decades-old computer system when queried by citizens looking for records that should be available to the public. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) researcher Ryan Shapiro alleges “failure by design” in the DoJ’s protocols for responding to public requests. The FOIA law states that agencies must “make reasonable efforts to search for the records in electronic form or format”.

In an effort to demonstrate that the DoJ does not comply with this provision, Shapiro requested records of his own requests and ran up against the same roadblocks that stymied his progress in previous inquiries. A judge ruled in January that the FBI had acted in a manner “fundamentally at odds with the statute”. Now, armed with that ruling, Shapiro hopes to change policy across the entire department. Shapiro filed his suit on the 50th anniversary of Foia’s passage in July. FOIA requests to the FBI are processed by searching the Automated Case Support system (ACS), a software program that celebrates its 21st birthday this year. Not only are the records indexed by ACS allegedly inadequate, Shapiro said, but the FBI refuses to search the full text of those records as a matter of policy. When few or no records are returned, Shapiro said, the FBI effectively responds “sorry, we tried” without making use of the much more sophisticated search tools at the disposal of internal requestors.

The Internet is so vast and formless that it’s hard to imagine it being invented. It’s easy to picture Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is easy to visualize. You can hold it in your hand and examine it from every angle. The Internet is the opposite. It’s everywhere, but we only see it in glimpses. The Internet is like the holy ghost: it makes itself knowable to us by taking possession of the pixels on our screens to manifest sites and apps and e-mail, but its essence is always elsewhere. This feature of the Internet makes it seem extremely complex. Surely something so ubiquitous yet invisible must require deep technical sophistication to understand. But it doesn’t. The Internet is fundamentally simple. And that simplicity is the key to its success.

Google is set to restrict search terms to a link to a Wikipedia article, in the first request under Europe's controversial new "right to be forgotten" legislation to affect the 110 million-page encyclopedia.

The identity of the individual requesting a change to Google's search results has not been disclosed and may never be known, but it is understood the request will be put into effect within days. Google and other search engines can only remove the link -- as with other "right to be forgotten" requests, the web page itself will remain on Wikipedia.

Tor, the Internet anonymizer, received more than $1.8 million in funding from the US government in 2013, even while the National Security Agency was reportedly trying to destroy the network.

The bulk of the US funding came in the form of "pass-through" grants, money which ultimately comes from the US government distributed through some independent third-party. Formerly known as "the onion router", Tor is software which allows its users to browse the Internet anonymously.

The Tor Project also received direct funding from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of State, totaling $100,325 and $256,900 respectively.

One of Australia’s key laws governing surveillance -- the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) (TIA) Act of 1979 -- is desperately in need of an overhaul.

Under the TIA Act there are three ways authorities can gain access to private information.

The first is access to the content and substance of telecommunications in real time, for which they need a warrant. This provides access to the content of emails, text messages, phone calls and Internet use.

Second, there is access to stored telecommunications and their contents, which also requires a warrant. For this, authorities must suspect the person of an offence that carries a minimum three-year sentence.

Then there is access to metadata, the shell details of communications -- calls and emails sent and received, the location of a phone, Internet browsing activity. There is no access to the content of the communication, just how, to or from whom, when and where. A warrant is not required for this, and under the current law organisations other than police or security agencies can get access to it.

Nearly 900 writers have lent their name to a letter objecting to Amazon's tactics as it negotiates over e-books with Hachette, the fourth largest publisher in the US.

Outside Amazon and Hachette, no one fully knows what the dispute is about. But it is understood to be a battle over e-book revenue with Amazon thought to want 50% from every e-book instead of 30%. The stakes are high.

The BBC has been told to tackle a continued “gender imbalance” among its presenters and talent following sustained criticism that it is failing to put enough women on air.

The BBC Trust called on management to come up with a co-ordinated plan to tackle the shortcomings, despite various initiatives announced by director general Tony Hall since he took on the job in 2013. The trust also flagged up an unexplained pay differential at the corporation although moves have been made to reduce the gender pay gap.

Edward Snowden has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

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.