• A guide to keeping your internet activity anonymous and safe.

• Check this out: there are companies that deal in finding loopholes in commercial software, and then selling access to them to governments so that they can exploit vulnerabilites in people's computers. Yup: instead of alerting, say, Apple, that there's a flaw in its software (and to please fix it!), these people are quietly selling the security loopholes to secretive government spy agencies, enabling backdoor digital surveillance. Sounds bad. But security researcher Christopher Soghoian thinks it could be much worse: just wait until these "middlemen" start selling these security loopholes to people who want to destroy our infrastructure, he says. Seems like the government shouldn't be encouraging and enriching these people, no?

• Today's house homeland security oversight committee hearing on DHS social media monitoring raises the question: why is a private company being paid $11 million to run that government program? It's an important question, and the contract with General Dynamics just scratches the surface of the government's extremely close cooperation with private companies when it comes to intelligence and spying. If you are interested in learning more about this government-corporate power sharing, do not miss this article on Infraguard, the leading FBI-private sector partnership. It is incredibly secretive and anti-democratic, but it's an integral part of how the intelligence world does business. (h/t @kennethlipp)

• Is it possible for journalists to maintain the integrity of their sources, given the extensive and unaccountable nature of the modern surveillance state? The New York Times' Supreme Court columnist Adam Liptak advises that it is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for journalists to protect the people who feed them information for stories. What does that mean for a democratic society? Nothing good. Read Emptywheel for a slightly deeper interrogation of the problem.

• German police tracked 4.2 million cell phones and found zero criminals, a report says. Does that remind anyone of the secret East German police force, the Stasi? Both the phone tracking and the society-wide surveillance done by the Stasi are great examples of why zooming out to look at the entire society is not good intelligence procedure. Why? Because if you are looking at everything, you won't see anything. Police and federal agents should focus on real threats, not fishing expeditions that compromise our privacy and waste the government's time chasing ghosts.

• We now know that the DOJ failed to produce reports to Congress showing how many times the agency used "trap and trace" and "pen register" wiretaps, as the agency is legally required to do every year, between 2004 and 2008. In light of that stunning revelation, the ACLU has filed a public records request to the DOJ seeking statistics on the use of these invasive surveillance tools. Stay tuned to hear what we get back.

• The National Institute for Justice, which oversees a government account for law enforcement related research and development grants, is funding a number of creepy projects this year. Among them is a grant for nearly $500,000 to a company called StereoVision Imaging, Inc. to build "Image Stabilized Binoculars with Integrated 3D Facial Recognition Imaging Capabilities." You read that right: binoculars with 3D face recognition. How long until the police ditch the binoculars and have 3D face recognition built-in to contacts they wear, unbeknownst to us?