GOOGLE BALLOONS : PROJECT LOON

• Google is launching balloons into near space to provide internet access to buildings below on the ground.
• Attached equipment will offer 3G-like speeds to 50 testers in the country.
• Google calls the effort Project Loon and acknowledges it is "highly experimental" at this stage
• The firm says the concept could offer a way to connect the two-thirds of the world's population which does not have affordable net connections.

A few weeks ago Google revealed jellyfish-shaped internet-beaming antenna balloons, designed with the goal of eventually allowing more remote areas of the earth internet access.

About 30 of the super pressure balloons are being launched from New Zealand from where they will drift around the world on a controlled path.

Attached equipment will offer 3G-like speeds to 50 testers in the country.

Access will be intermittent, but in time the firm hopes to build a big enough fleet to offer reliable links to people living in remote areas.

It says that balloons could one day be diverted to disaster-hit areas to aid rescue efforts in situations where ground communication equipment has been damaged.

But one expert warns that trying to simultaneously navigate thousands of the high-altitude balloons around the globe's wind patterns will prove a difficult task to get right.

Google calls the effort Project Loon and acknowledges it is "highly experimental" at this stage.

The project has been in the works for 18 months and was announced in New Zealand. 50 volunteer households are being used as test subjects for the platform. The balloons are in the earth’s stratosphere, 19 kilometers above the earth.

The project is being developed by Google’s secret Google X lab and is currently dubbed “Project Loon.” This is the same division that created the recent driverless car and Google’s crazy internet browsing eye glasses.

The project is still in very early stages but its ultimate goal is to narrow the divide between the 2.2 billion people that have internet access and the 4.8 billion that don’t. If the technology pans out, it could remove the need of installing expensive fiber-optic cable in areas like Africa and Southeast Asia.

Military and aeronautical researchers have been experimenting with tethered balloons to beam internet signals back to earth for some time now. What makes Google’s balloons different is the fact that they’ll be untethered and out of site. They’ll move around the world, powered by natural winds.

What are superpressure balloons?

Superpressure balloons are made out of tightly sealed plastic capable of containing highly pressurised lighter-than-air gases.

The aim is to keep the volume of the balloon relatively stable even if there are changes in temperature.

This allows them to stay aloft longer and be better at maintaining a specific altitude than balloons which stretch and contract.

In particular it avoids the problem of balloons descending at night when their gases cool.

The concept was first developed for the US Air Force in the 1950s using a stretched polyester film called Mylar.

The effort resulted in the Ghost (global horizontal sounding technique) programme which launched superpressure balloons from Christchurch, New Zealand to gather wind and temperature data over remote regions of the planet.

Over the following decade 88 balloons were launched, the longest staying aloft for 744 days.

More recently, Nasa has experimented with the technology and suggested superpressure balloons could one day be deployed into Mars's atmosphere.

Each balloon is 15m (49.2ft) in diameter - the length of a small plane - and filled with lifting gases. Electronic equipment hangs underneath including radio antennas, a flight computer, an altitude control system and solar panels to power the gear.

Google aims to fly the balloons in the stratosphere, 20km (12 miles) or more above the ground, which is about double the altitude used by commercial aircraft and above controlled airspace.

Google says each should stay aloft for about 100 days and provide connectivity to an area stretching 40km in diameter below as they travel in a west-to-east direction.

The firm says the concept could offer a way to connect the two-thirds of the world's population which does not have affordable net connections.

PRISM : NATIONAL SECURITY ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM

• PRISM is a national security electronic surveillance program
• PRISM  is operated by the United National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007 PRISM has allowed the government unprecedented access to your personal information for at least the last six years.
• The existence of the program was leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden Microsoft. 
• Yahoo. Google. Facebook. PalTalk. AOL. Skype. YouTube. Apple are the associated companies.

PRISM is a clandestine national security electronic surveillance program operated by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007.

 PRISM is a government codename for a data collection effort known officially as US-984XN

PRISM is a covert collaboration between the NSA, FBI, and nearly every tech company you rely on daily. PRISM has allowed the government unprecedented access to your personal information for at least the last six years.

The existence of the program was leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by The Guardian and The Washington Post on June 6, 2013.

A document included in the leak indicated that PRISM was "the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports."

So what PRISM is all about ?

In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. 

According to leaked documents, it went into effect in 2007, and has only gained momentum since. Its stated purpose is to monitor potentially valuable foreign communications that might pass through US servers, but it appears that in practice its scope was far greater.

Companies Associated?

Microsoft. Yahoo. Google. Facebook. PalTalk. AOL. Skype. YouTube. Apple. If you've interacted with any of those companies in the last six years, that information is vulnerable under PRISM. 

Initial public statements

Corporate executives of several companies identified in the leaked documents told The Guardian that they had no knowledge of the PRISM program in particular and also denied making information available to the government on the scale alleged by news reports. Statements of several of the companies named in the leaked documents were reported :

·         Microsoft: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."

·         Yahoo!: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network. "Of the hundreds of millions of users we serve, an infinitesimal percentage will ever be the subject of a government data collection directive."

·         Facebook: "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

·         Google: "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a backdoor for the government to access private user data. "[A]ny suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users' Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.”

·         Dropbox: "We've seen reports that Dropbox might be asked to participate in a government program called PRISM. We are not part of any such program and remain committed to protecting our users' privacy."

                              

                              

                                   

How PRISM works?

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

When the NSA monitors phone records, it reportedly only collects the metadata therein. That includes to and from whom the calls were made, where the calls came from, and other generalized info. Importantly, as far as we know, the actual content of the calls was off-limits.

By contrast, PRISM apparently allows full access not just to the fact that an email or chat was sent, but also the contents of those emails and chats. According to the Washington Post's source, they can "literally watch you as you type." They could be doing it right now.

 A little bit of history might be helpful for context. Back in 2007, mounting public pressure forced the Bush administration to abandon the warrantless surveillance program it had initiated in 2001. Well, abandon might be too strong a word. What the administration actually did was to find it a new home.

The Protect America Act of 2007 made it possible for targets to be electronically surveilled without a warrant if they were "reasonably believed" to be foreign. That's where that 51% comes in. It was followed by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which immunized companies from legal harm for handing information over to the government. And that's the one-two punch that gives PRISM full legal standing.