U.S. spy agency used some Americans' data to map their behavior: NYT

　　The New York Times reported on Saturday that the National Security Agency, the main U.S. government surveillance organization, had since 2010 used data it gathered to map some Americans' "social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information."
　　In the latest revelation of the activities of the NSA, which have prompted concern about previously unknown intrusion into Americans' privacy in the name of protecting against terrorist and other foreign attacks, the newspaper quoted documents provided by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who fled to Russia earlier this year.
　　It said the documents showed that "the spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and email logs in November 2010 to examine Americans' networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after NSA officials lifted restrictions on the practice."
　　The policy shift was intended to help the agency "discover and track" connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an NSA memorandum from January 2011, the Times said.
　　It said the NSA was authorized to conduct "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness" of every email address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.
　　The agency could augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents, the paper said.
　　It said NSA officials declined to say how many Americans had been affected and said the documents did not describe the result of the scrutiny, which it said "links phone numbers and emails in a 'contact chain' tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest."
　　COURT RULING
　　Earlier this week, leaders of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said they were working on legislation that would tighten oversight of federal electronic eavesdropping programs. Support for such changes has been growing since Snowden leaked information in June that the government collects far more Internet and telephone data than previously known.
　　The Times said that an NSA spokeswoman, asked about the analyses of Americans' data, said, "All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period." It quoted her as saying: "All of NSA's work has a foreign intelligence purpose."
　　She said the policy change disclosed in the latest revelations was based on a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans could have no expectation of privacy about what numbers they had called.
　　The Times quoted her as saying that, based on that ruling, the Justice Department and the Pentagon decided that it was permissible to create contact chains using Americans' "metadata," which includes the timing, location and other details of calls and emails, but not their content. The agency is not required to seek warrants for the analyses from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
　　NSA officials declined to identify which phone and email databases were used to create the social network diagrams, and the documents provided by Snowden do not specify them, the paper said.
　　It said the NSA did say that the large database of Americans' domestic phone call records, which was revealed by Snowden in June and caused alarm in Washington, was excluded.
　　The Times said that while concerns in the United States since Snowden's revelations had largely focused on the scope of the agency's collection of the private data of Americans and the potential for abuse, the new documents provided a rare window into what the agency actually did with the information it gathers.

Unless Microsoft includes a magic trick up its sleeve to permit

　　In an work to save each of its ailing platforms, Microsoft is organizing to combine each the Windows 8 and Windows Telephone eight app stores into a single, all-encompassing app shop. It isn’t totally clear irrespective of whether this will result in comprehensive cross-platform compatibility for each Windows eight and WP8 apps - like Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Shop - or if it’s far more a case of designing a really kick-ass app store that each platforms will then use independently of one another. In either case, the new combined app shop will seek to rectify two large complaints: That Windows 8 and Windows Telephone eight have poor app ecosystems, and, specially inside the case of Windows 8, the utterly atrocious app store encounter that ordinarily leaves you asking yourself why on earth you decided to purchase a Windows tablet as opposed to an iPad.
　　This news comes from the usual “sources acquainted with the company’s plans,” who spoke to the Verge. As outlined by the source, the head of Microsoft’s newly formed Operating Systems group, Terry Myerson, held a meeting exactly where he told a large number of Microsoft personnel regarding the new plan to combine the app stores. There didn’t seem to be significantly within the way of particulars, only that the new retailer - which we’ll bet excellent funds on it being named One particular Shop - would come with the “next release” of Windows and Windows Telephone. This need to imply Windows Phone eight.1 and an update for Windows 8.1, each of which are due in spring 2014.
　　As for how the 1 Retailer will actually perform, we are able to only guess. In a perfect planet, it would work like the iOS App Retailer: apps created for Windows Phone 8 will be scaled up for use on Windows eight tablets, and apps particularly created for tablet interfaces would show up if you are browsing the retailer in your Windows eight tablet. Apple can get away with this simply because its smartphones and tablets run the identical operating program, and thus developers can target the precise similar APIs. Windows eight and Windows Telephone eight share a lot of similar attributes, and also some low-level code, but it is nowhere near the identical level of similarity as an iPhone and iPad.
　　Microsoft, for its portion, has previously taken for the stage and promised a unified ecosystem - however the specifics on how such unification could really happen haven’t been forthcoming. Because it stands, in case you develop a Metro app very carefully, porting it to Windows Phone eight is usually as effortless as altering some lines of code. In reality, even though, resulting from wildly different screen sizes, UI and UX paradigms, as well as a big variety of hardware targets (from Tegra three and integrated GPUs, via to Haswell and discrete GPUs), cross-platform compatibility has remained elusive.
　　Unless Microsoft includes a magic trick up its sleeve to permit developers to conveniently create apps that run on each platforms - a compatibility layer (emulator) of some sort, perhaps - then it’s much more likely that the 1 Shop will just be a new app shop design and style that may be applied by both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Windows eight sorely requires a new app shop, and if a genuinely unified app ecosystem is coming for Windows 9 and Windows Telephone 9, then it wouldn’t hurt to obtain individuals utilized for the new app shop these days. (Study: The Windows eight Shop is broken: Here’s how you can repair it.)
　　A further possibility, as I’ve hinted at prior to, is that one particular of Microsoft’s OSes could actually consume the other. As lately as final week, Microsoft’s Myerson told some analysts that we should anticipate to see Windows RT on larger phones - and it goes the other way, as well, with the Lumia 1520 phablet operating Windows Telephone. I would not be shocked if Windows/RT sooner or later consumes Windows Phone, which would pretty neatly resolve the issue of cross-platform compatibility by removing the pesky “cross” bit.
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