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Edward Snowden is apparently feeling safe enough in Hong Kong to field questions at The Guardian in a live Q&A. In his first answer, Snowden defended his decision to leak information about NSA operations against China and other countries by saying he didn’t reveal any operations against “legitimate military targets,” only civilian infrastructure like universities and businesses. Snowden said that hacking countries we’re not at war with could crash critical systems, affecting “millions of innocent people.” As for why he chose Hong Kong, he said he could have been interdicted on his way to Iceland and that it would take longer for the U.S. to pressure Hong Kong into extraditing him. Snowden also said that more information on exactly what sort of access the NSA has to tech company servers—he said it was “direct,” but companies and the NSA say it’s more targeted.

Of former Vice President Dick Cheney calling him a "traitor" on national television, Snowden commented that "Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American..."

From the Q&A, Snowden was asked:

Kimberly Dozier @KimberlyDozier

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond? http://www.guardiannews.com #AskSnowden
10:34 AM - 17 Jun 2013

His response:

US officials say this every time there's a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Three former NSA officials who tried to bring the immense data-collecting activities of their agency to light say Edward Snowden did the right thing by making the operation public. In a round-table interview with USA Today (See video above), Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe praised Snowden for exposing information in the public's interest. The trio pushed back on the idea that his actions caused grave harm to the country, saying people including terrorists know the government is monitoring their telecommunications.

Posted to Youtube by Twitter user @SusanB26, she recalls from painful personal experience how she learned about bank fraud. Perhaps her sharing this information can be of help to someone else.

Are you being tricked into giving up your privacy? In an age of social networking, when people everywhere are sharing personal information in exchange for free services, are we over-looking the value of our personal data? Al Jazeera speaks with Cory Doctorow, a self-proclaimed 'cyber-optimist' about the 'privacy bargain', the war on computer freedom, and his dreams of a 'techno-utopia'.

By Lois Beckett, ProPublica

In Minnesota, Democratic volunteers scour their local newspapers each morning for letters to the editor with a political slant. They pay attention to the names of callers on radio shows. They drive through their neighborhoods and jot down the addresses of campaign lawn signs.

Then they feed the information into a state Democratic Party database that includes nearly every voter in Minnesota.

Some of the states' few dozen data volunteers are so devoted that they log into the party database daily from their home computers. Deb Pitzrick, 61, of Eden Prairie, convinced a group of her friends to form the "Grandma Brigade." These women, in their 50s, 60s and 70s, no longer want to knock on doors for the Democrats. Instead, they support the party by gathering public information about other voters.

Much of the data the Grandma Brigade collects is prosaic: records of campaign donations or voters who have recently died. But a few volunteers see free information everywhere. They browse the listings of names on Tea Party websites. They might add a record of what was said around the family Thanksgiving table — Uncle Mitch voted for Bachmann, cousin Alice supports gay marriage.

One data volunteer even joked about holding "rat out your neighbor parties," where friends would be encouraged to add notes about the political views of other people on their block.

Once information about individual people is entered into the state party's database, it doesn't stay in Minnesota. Almost all the information collected by local volunteers like the Grandma Brigade also ends up in the party's central database in Washington.

Few places have data volunteers as dedicated as the ones in Minnesota, which has been held up as a model for other state Democratic parties. Both Democrats and Republicans have centralized databases that, among other things, track opinions you share with local campaign volunteers.

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Planning to vote this November? Some things go better if you get prepared. People should get ready to vote now to make their voices heard in this important election year. There are a few ways voters can get their votes in easily, get their votes counted, and make sure their voices are heard. Don’t just show up – get ready! This video from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) explains how to make sure your vote counts.

You can also check out this helpful page that provides voting information for your state, you can also find your polling place, check your registration status, and if you don't find the information you're looking for -- call 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) for assistance.

A new video from the Gates Foundation...

Giving women and girls access to family planning tools and information is the easiest way to empower them to determine their own futures.

Raise your voice and pledge to support family planning for the millions who need and want it: http://no-controversy.com.

A couple in Danville, California were shocked to discover earlier this year that heirlooms they had stored in a safety deposit box at a Bank of America were missing. They were even more shocked when they found out that Bank of America had drilled open the box, removed the valuables and shipped them for holding in South Carolina.

When Unsa Kamal and her husband Aizad received a letter from Bank of America informing them their box had been drilled opened and emptied, they said they thought it was junk mail. But after carefully reviewing the letter, the Kamals said the bank in fact emptied their safe deposit due to lack of information.

“They claim they didn’t have Social Security numbers, which is not true,” Aizad Kamal said. When they open the account that’s something very basic they ask for and they have that.”

A local CBS affiliate Consumer Watch verified that the Kamal's had listed their correct Social Security numbers on their rental agreement with the bank, but Bank of America would not admit any wrongdoing.

BoA did agree to return the items, although they would not insure them for their full value, so the Kamal's hired an attorney to help them force the bank to insure the heirlooms -- some going back several generations -- for their full current replacement value. The bank now won't comment due to pending litigation.

Does Cybercrime Really Cost $1 Trillion?

by Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan ProPublica, Aug. 1, 2012

Gen. Keith Alexander is the director of the National Security Agency and oversees U.S. Cyber Command, which means he leads the government's effort to protect America from cyberattacks. Due to the secretive nature of his job, he maintains a relatively low profile, so when he does speak, people listen closely. On July 9, Alexander addressed a crowded room at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and though he started with a few jokes 2014 his mother said he had a face for radio, behind every general is a stunned father-in-law 2014 he soon got down to business.

Alexander warned that cyberattacks are causing "the greatest transfer of wealth in history," and he cited statistics from, among other sources, Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., which both sell software to protect computers from hackers. Crediting Symantec, he said the theft of intellectual property costs American companies $250 billion a year. He also mentioned a McAfee estimate that the global cost of cybercrime is $1 trillion. "That's our future disappearing in front of us," he said, urging Congress to enact legislation to improve America's cyberdefenses.

These estimates have been cited on many occasions by government officials, who portray them as evidence of the threat against America. They are hardly the only cyberstatistics used by officials, but they are recurring ones that get a lot of attention. In his first major cybersecurity speech in 2009, President Obama prominently referred to McAfee's $1 trillion estimate. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the main sponsors of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 that is expected to be voted on this week, have also mentioned $1 trillion in cybercrime costs. Last week, arguing on the Senate floor in favor of putting their bill up for a vote, they both referenced the $250 billion estimate and repeated Alexander's warning about the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

A handful of media stories, blog posts and academic studies have previously expressed skepticism about these attention-getting estimates, but this has not stopped an array of government officials and politicians from continuing to publicly cite them as authoritative. Now, an examination of their origins by ProPublica has found new grounds to question the data and methods used to generate these numbers, which McAfee and Symantec say they stand behind.

One of the figures Alexander attributed to Symantec 2014 the $250 billion in annual losses from intellectual property theft 2014 was indeed mentioned in a Symantec report, but it is not a Symantec number and its source remains a mystery.

McAfee's trillion-dollar estimate is questioned even by the three independent researchers from Purdue University whom McAfee credits with analyzing the raw data from which the estimate was derived. "I was really kind of appalled when the number came out in news reports, the trillion dollars, because that was just way, way large," said Eugene Spafford, a computer science professor at Purdue.

Spafford was a key contributor to McAfee's 2009 report, "Unsecured Economies: Protecting Vital Information" (PDF). The trillion-dollar estimate was first published in a news release that McAfee issued to announce the report; the number does not appear in the report itself. A McAfee spokesman told ProPublica the estimate was an extrapolation by the company, based on data from the report. McAfee executives have mentioned the trillion-dollar figure on a number of occasions, and in 2011 McAfee published it once more in a new report, "Underground Economies: Intellectual Capital and Sensitive Corporate Data Now the Latest Cybercrime Currency" (PDF).

In addition to the three Purdue researchers who were the report's key contributors, 17 other researchers and experts were listed as contributors to the original 2009 report, though at least some of them were only interviewed by the Purdue researchers. Among them was Ross Anderson, a security engineering professor at University of Cambridge, who told ProPublica that he did not know about the $1 trillion estimate before it was announced. "I would have objected at the time had I known about it," he said. "The intellectual quality of this ($1 trillion number) is below abysmal."

The use of these estimates comes amid increased debate about cyberattacks; warnings of a digital Pearl Harbor are becoming almost routine. "A cyberattack could stop our society in its tracks," Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this year. Bloomberg reported just last week that a group of Chinese hackers, whom U.S. intelligence agencies referred to as "Byzantine Candor," have stolen sensitive or classified information from 20 organizations, including Halliburton Inc., and a prominent Washington law firm, Wiley Rein LLP.

There is little doubt that a lot of cybercrime, cyberespionage and even acts of cyberwar are occurring, but the exact scale is unclear and the financial costs are difficult to calculate because solid data is hard to get. Relying on inaccurate or unverifiable estimates is perilous, experts say, because it can tilt the country's spending priorities and its relations with foreign nations. The costs could be worse than the most dire estimates 2014 but they could be less, too.

Computer security companies like McAfee and Symantec have stepped into the data void. Both sell anti-virus software to consumers, and McAfee also sells a range of network security products for government agencies and private companies, including operators of critical infrastructure like power plants and pipelines. Both firms conduct and publish cybercrime research, too. "Symantec is doing outstanding work on threat analysis," said Thomas Rid, a cybersecurity expert at Kings College London. "But still, of course they have a vested interest in portraying a more dangerous environment because they stand to gain for it."

The companies disagree. Sal Viveros, a McAfee public relations official who oversaw the 2009 report, said in an email to ProPublica, "We work with think tanks and universities to make sure our reports are non-biased and as accurate as possible. The goal of our papers [is] to really educate on the issues and risks facing businesses. Our customers look to us to provide them with our expert knowledge."

Symantec said its estimates are developed with standard methods used by governments and businesses to conduct consumer surveys and come from "one of the few, large, multi-country studies on cybercrime that asks consumers what forms of cybercrime they have actually experienced and what it cost them."

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The #YoSoy132 (#iam132) movement in Mexico started with the protest of 132 university students against the leading Mexican 2012 presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, and his close ties with the national media. Today, the protest has morphed into a popular nationwide campaign for freedom of information and media democracy that could bring about a historical change in Mexican politics.

This video is part of a five-part "How to Film Protests" series, which incorporates the best practices Witness has developed with over 300 partners in 80 countries who are using video for human rights documentation and to create lasting change.

From raw documentation of human rights violations in Syria to the Occupy protests and the range of police abuse and misconduct therein, citizen video is an increasingly powerful tool for human rights documentation.

Now more than ever we need to ensure that the footage that we capture as activists incorporates essential information like the exact date, time and location so it may best be used by the media, as evidence, and for advocacy. Additionally, we need to pay special attention to the unique safety and security risks that we face as filmmakers and activists, as well as risks to those we capture in our footage.

For more info, go here.