Some details are starting to emerge on how the domestic spying program authorised by US President Bush actually works and on who is co-operating with the US Government to make it happen.

According to a report on C|Net News, 94% of world-wide Internet traffic was routed through US switches and peering-points in 2005.

This makes the NSA’s job easier. The C|Net article describes in detail the various technical options open to the NSA for tapping land-based or underwater fibre-optic cables and copper lines.

A C|Net News survey published a few days ago identified 15 large US telecommunications companies and back-bone service providers who said that they were not co-operating.

A further 12 refused to confirm or deny participation, in some cases citing “national security concerns” as the reason for their coyness.

AT&T, one of the non-commital companies, is now being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for alleged illegal surveillance of users’ data in co-operation with the NSA.

More:

• NSA Spying Myths (The Nation)
• On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress (New York Review of Books)
• The whole thing is a wicked beat-up by well-known liberal pinko organizations like ABC, CBS and NBC (NewsBusters)

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NetShred is a stand-alone app that protects your privacy on the Internet by shredding the browsing histories and caches of your browsers and email clients.

It supports all the main browsers and the following email clients - Mail.app 1 and 2, Eudora 5, Eudora 6, Mailsmith 2.x, Mozilla 1.x and Netscape 7.x.

After launching the app (a process that can be automated so that occurs at start-up) , its main screen presents you will an overview of its abilities:

Installed browsers are highlighted in green, active ones in red.

Caches and histories can only be securely shredded when the app is closed. You can either do this manually, or set NetShred X to perform the shredding automatically when you exit the app.

The Preference Pane provides further options:

Here you can set the degree of automation that you want, what you would like the app to shred, what degree of shredding you require and how many write-overs you would like.

A further tab allows you to specify which browsers and email clients NetShred should monitor and shred.

In this day and age people have more reason than ever to think about their online privacy. NetShred X takes care of that for you and is a good complement to ShredIt, a general purpose shredder from the same developer.

NetShred is shareware (USD 19.95). A fully featured demo is available from the developer’s web site.

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In a move that may surprise many doom-sayers (like me) who fret about Google, Gmail and privacy, the search engine company has refused a request from the US Department of Justice for information about the search habits of Google users.

It’s important to recognise that the DoJ only asked for “de-identified” data, aggregated statistics that cannot be linked to individual users. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL all happily complied with the request.

But Google refused, partly because it fears turning the information over will create the public perception that Google doesn’t protect the privacy of its users.

Leslie Walker at the Washington Post has written a very interesting article in response on what exactly Google does know about individual users. Or you could browse the 934 hits on the story at Google News.

In further Google-realated privacy news, Gmail has introduced a more visible delete button. This gives users the impression that they can delete emails from the Gmail system.

Certainly the button removes the messages from the web interface, but whether it really means that they have gone, or whether they lurk around in Google’s massive data collection system is another matter. Gmail’s privacy statement is not clear about that.

Whoops, there I go again….

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Gmail’s feature-rich web interface and the Web 2.0 hype are prompting more and more people to abandon desktop email clients.

Stowe Boyd at Corante dropped Mail.app for Gmail’s web-based interface and was glad to leave the “big fat app” behind in favour of Gmail’s leanness.

Jeremy Zawodny is using web-based email exclusively now. Despite some frustrations, he is “reasonable happy with Gmail”.

Jim at Jounreyman James found that leaving Apple Mail for Gmail simplified his life.

(UPDATE: You can add Cheesetoe to the list. And C.K. Sample III.)

Against this background, Jean-Francois Arseneault’s post about canning his Gmail account stood out. He is very happy about a return to Thunderbird, which he in turn says has simplified his email life.

Google has gone off the boil for him. His concerns, which he lists in his blog entry, are part technical and part privacy-related. “Knowing Google can see my communications is down right freaky”, Jean-Francois says.

Concerns about Gmail and privacy are nothing new. Gmail’s policy of never deleting anything raises interesting questions about privacy and data-ownership. Its revised privacy policy, released in October last year, was not reassuring.

Mike Bell recently posted his concerns about Google Analytics in the Mint Support Forum. He’s dropped the Google service as he believes that it violates his site’s privacy policy. “I’m not impressed, however, with the fact that Google has access to all of my user stats and they can cross reference those and correlate them and then target my users,” he writes.

Another new Gmail feature also raises privacy concerns. Suyog is worried about Gmail’s new “map feature”, which offers to map any address found in one of your emails. “For God’s sake”, he says, “I hope Google stops any more feature creeps like these!”

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In his “Devil’s Advocate” column at MacObserver, John Kheit reveals just how much information about the files on your computer is stored as metadata in Spotlight’s database and elsewhere.

Did you know, for example, that a metadata record is kept of the location from which you downloaded every file in Safari? This information is not embedded in the file and not sent on when you forward the file, but other kinds of metadata are.

The column details the different types of metadata on your Mac and how to find them, outlines some privacy concerns and provides advice about stripping it before sending files to others.

One solution, he suggests, is to get Mail.app to strip metadata from attachments before sending them.

Potential breaches of privacy and confidentiality are concerns for everyone, not just Windows Vista users.

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A little while ago, I posted an entry about Gmail, privacy and data ownership that contained some important things that were news to me.

Last Friday Google released a revised general privacy policy and a revised policy for Gmail.

In the Gmail policy, you can read more about the fate of deleted messages:

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

CNET News has published an article on the new policies with some comment. There is also discussion on Slashdot.

I can’t decide if this quote from the CNET article is reassuring or just funny:

Brad Hill, author of “Google for Dummies,” said there was no cause for alarm.

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