A recent article in New Republic highlights the new landscape – and new threats to journalists – in national security reporting. The story highlights that one of the major dangers to journalists and their sources are journalists own security practices. In…

The Internet is reverberating with the news that the NSA has been secretly collecting data from major technology companies. The program – called PRISM – enabled the surveillance organization to spy on communications including emails, live chats, file shares and even…

The New York Times reports that the Obama administration may support a new FBI plan to wiretap web users. The FBI’s argument is that traditional wiretapping techniques are becoming increasingly obsolete as communication moves online. In 2010, the organization began…

Today The New Yorker unveiled Strongbox, a secure way for sources to share messages and files, while protecting their anonymity. Strongbox is based on Tor and requires the source to download and install the software necessary to access the Tor…

We have exciting news – the Dispatch team will be presenting a paper at the First Workshop on Social News on the Web at WWW ’13 in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to presenting the paper, we’ll participate in brainstorming…

TechCrunch reports that Syria is experience massive Internet outage, as shown in the Google Transparency Report and reports from the security firm Cloudflare. Virtually no traffic is coming out of the area. The situation is reminiscent of 2012, when the Syrian…

“Citizen Surveillance Helps Officials Put Pieces Together” An article in the WSJ highlights how surveillance technology in popular devices (i.e. smartphones) is aiding criminal investigators. In the recent F.B.I. search for the Boston Marathon bombers, they used video surveillance from…

In 2011, two layers brought a suit against digital business analytics company comScore. The claim? That comScore was collecting user information without their knowledge, then selling it to third parties. The suit centered on the firm’s OSSProxy software which is…

Earlier this year Citizen Lab, a human rights monitoring group based in Toronto, found that American-made surveillance and censorship technologies were being used by several governments with a track record of human rights violations. The group scanned for the signature…