Guardian, The

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.

The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013. During that year, it submitted 178 applications for the data to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court during that period, which, as first revealed by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden, permitted the ongoing, daily collection of practically all US phone records.

The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.

A day after a surprise Supreme Court decision to outlaw streaming TV service Aereo, US broadcaster Fox has moved to use the ruling to clamp down on another Internet TV service.

Fox has cited the ruling -- which found Aereo to be operating illegally -- to bolster its claim against a service offered by Dish, America’s third largest pay TV service, which streams live TV programming over the Internet to its subscribers and allows them to copy programs onto tablet computers for viewing outside the home.

The move has fueled criticism of the Aereo ruling from groups that have argued the decision will limit consumer choice, hand more power to broadcasters and stifle innovation.

Immediately after the Aereo ruling, Fox’s legal team submitted the Supreme Court’s Aereo decision to bolster its case against Dish. Oral arguments in the case are scheduled before the ninth circuit court of appeals on 7 July in Pasadena, California.

Britain's security and intelligence agencies should consider how far they are invading people's privacy when they seek permission for intrusive surveillance, their government-appointed watchdog has recommended.

Sir Mark Waller, the intelligence services commissioner, said the agencies should set out the specific invasion of privacy requested so that a proper assessment could be made of whether it was justified. Before invading people's privacy, the intelligence services must satisfy the minister that intrusive surveillance is necessary and proportionate, which means that the intelligence gain will be sufficiently great to justify the intrusion into the privacy of the target and any unavoidable collateral intrusion into the privacy of others.

The commissioner says he questions staff about how they have applied the tests of necessity and proportionality. Concerns that the interference may have been disproportionate seem to have prompted Sir Waller's insistence that the agencies pay more attention to privacy in future.

"I have recommended to all the agencies that separate consideration be given to the individual privacy being invaded as part of the test for proportionality," he said in his concluding chapter. "In all cases, I want to see this set out separately in the application for these intrusive techniques and to see this wording reflected in the warrants."

[Commentary] If you got angry in May when the National Security Agency, the White House and Eric Cantor's spy-friendly House of Representatives took a once-promising surveillance reform bill and turned it into a shit sandwich, I've got some good news for you: so, apparently, did many members of Congress.

Recently, in a surprising rebuke to the NSA's lawyers and the White House -- after they co-opted and secretly re-wrote the USA Freedom Act and got it passed -- an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives voted to strip the agency of its powers to search Americans' emails without a warrant, to prohibit the NSA or CIA from pressuring tech companies to install so-called "back doors" in their commercial hardware and software, and to bar NSA from sabotaging common encryption standards set by the government.

But the House's support of these new fixes, by a count of 293 to 123 and a huge bipartisan majority in the House, just put the pressure back on for the rest of the summer of 2014: the Senate can join the House in passing these defense budget amendments, or more likely, will now be pressured to plug in real privacy protections to America's new snooping legislation before it comes up for a vote. This all puts the White House in an even more awkward position. Does President Obama threaten a veto of the defense bill to stop this?

[Commentary] In the era of big data, the battle for privacy has already been fought and lost -- personal data is routinely collected and traded in the new economy and there are few effective controls over how it is used or secured.

Data researchers and analysts now say that it’s time for legislation to reclaim some of that privacy and ensure that any data that is collected remains secure.

“We have become the product,” says Rob Livingstone, a fellow of the University of Technology and the head of a business advisory firm.

However, Livingstone says the dilemma facing regulators is how they can regulate the collection, storage and trading of personal data on the on the Internet, when all of these activities, and the corporations themselves, operate across multiple continents and jurisdictions. The task of reclaiming some semblance of privacy is all the more urgent because the rate at which personal data is being collected is accelerating.

The buzz around big data is attracting millions of dollars of from investors and brands hoping to turn a profit, while intelligence agencies are also furiously collecting information about our online activities for much different purposes. And alongside these, there’s also the black market operators that make millions of dollars a year out of things like identity theft and matching disparate data sets across the web to help identify people who might be suitable targets for a scam.

[Porter is an award-winning freelance journalist, editor of PC Mag Australia]