The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used “State Secrets Privilege”
The State Secrets Privilege is a vestige from English common law that lets the executive branch step into a civil lawsuit and have it dismissed if the case might reveal information that puts national security at risk.
Josh was called in to investigate and noticed that one particularly troublesome external IP had gone in and deleted *all* of the content on the system. The IP didn’t belong to some overseas hacker bent on destroying helpful government information. It resolved to googlebot.com, Google’s very own web crawling spider. Whoops.
More than three quarters of web surfers don’t realize that Google records and stores information that may identify them, according to a new opinion poll.
Students are finding out the hard way that online privacy is much like the Chicago Bears’ defense: just when you need it most, it completely disappears.
How I am not surprised by this? Well, seeing that Facebook is remnants of a DARPA project, and it’s investors have somewhat ominous ties to the intelligence community, this seems about par.