There is a new twist: the merger of the private sector, DHS and the FBI means that any of us can become WikiLeaks, a point that Julian Assange was trying to make in explaining the argument behind his recent book. The fusion of the tracking of money and the suppression of dissent means that a huge area of vulnerability in civil society – people's income streams and financial records – is now firmly in the hands of the banks, which are, in turn, now in the business of tracking your dissent.

It was all about crypto. If you want to be in pay TV, you have to be good at intellectual property protection. If you don’t make it difficult for non-subscribers to rip off your content, that’s exactly what they will do, in such numbers that you won’t make any money. In practical terms that means good (robust, but scaleable) crypto. In turn, that means understanding the weaknesses of cryptosystems in order to make better ones. Cryptology and cryptography go hand in glove. Hire hackers! Hire geeks ...!

... So, anywaydata breaches, flaky ex-cops, private investigators, wildly out of control News International minionsthose are the operational signature of “The News Of the World”. They are NDS hallmarks, too, as we see. To all appearances, the same rather profitable syndrome has manifested itself twice on Murdoch’s watch, more or less at the same time.

But twice is still just a coincidence, isn’t it?

But amidst all the lawsuits and accusations, it turns out there are some other fascinating stories to be found in News Corp's world of competitive corporate hacking and private security. A new book by Neil Chenoweth, Murdoch's Pirates, digs into that world and turns up some pretty fascinating results. From an excerpt published in the Sydney Morning Herald, we get the story of some befuddled inter-agency espionage between News Corp and its own subsidiary, complete with aliases, informants, moles and a cross-border escape gambit by a spy on the run.

Slashdot users are extremely unhappy with the new Slashdot Beta design. The comment section of every single post is devoted to dissatisfaction with the new design. ... ... The thing to keep in mind about community sites devoted to user generated content is that the users generate the content.

The New York City Police Department’s massive and controversial intelligence and analytics unit is evaluating whether Google Glass is a decent fit for investigating terrorists and helping cops lock up bad guys, VentureBeat has learned. The department recently received several pairs of the modernist-looking specs to test out.

“We signed up, got a few pairs of the Google glasses, and we’re trying them out, seeing if they have any value in investigations, mostly for patrol purposes,” a ranking New York City law enforcement official told VentureBeat.

Google recently filed a patent for a system that identifies when and where a “mob” event takes place and sends multimedia alerts to relevant parties. The patents are actually titled “Mob Source Phone Video Collaboration” and “Inferring Events Based On Mob Sourced Video“.