A recent poll published by USA Today shows Americans are more closely split than before (45%-43%) as to whether the Snowden disclosures helped or hurt America’s interests. The survey also indicated that, by a margin of 56%-32%, the American public (or at least those who responded to the poll) is in favor of the government pursuing criminal charges against Snowden.
Speaking of the NSA, a blast released by Security Law Brief reports that, according to The New York Times, the “NSA has implanted software in 100,000 computers” pursuant to a program, code-named Quantum, that effectively “enables the NSA to conduct surveillance on those computers and use them to launch cyberattacks.”
Here’s an interesting take from The Economist on how technological advances are negatively impacting the job market. “Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines,” for example, bank tellers, transportation ticket-takers, typists, and production line workers, “were those that involved routine repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information (“big data”), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people.”
Lastly, and also brought to you by The New York Times, Chinese authorities have blamed the Internet disruptions experienced in the country this week on hackers. Others, however, as the article explains, are skeptical of that explanation and believe it is more likely that the government’s censorship firewall is responsible for the massive outage.
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