LeakedIn

On Friday, WikiLeaks began publishing 70,000 documents from a trove of more than half a million cables and other material from inside the Saudi Arabian foreign ministry and other state agencies. The files appear to have been obtained by a group calling itself the Yemeni Cyber Army. Many of the early findings center on how the Saudi government curries favor with media outlets around the world, in part by buying hundreds or thousands of subscriptions in selected publications.

Writing in the Washington Post, Middle East expert Marc Lynch says, “it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of these leaks. They are likely to matter more than many of the previous such leaks because of how they resonate with two of the most potent issues in today’s Middle East: the regional proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran; and fierce Arab regime efforts to control an inexorably expanding Arab public sphere and erase the gains of the 2010-2011 uprisings.”

Related: On Saturday, Ryan Gallagher of The Intercept reported on newly unsealed court documents showing the back-and-forth conflict between the U.S. government and Google as the Justice Department forced the tech company to turn over a year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher who has worked with with WikiLeaks as a volunteer.

This morning, a British tribunal found that the GCHQ had unlawfully spied on two international human rights organizations, Privacy International announced.

New revelations suggest that as many as 14 million people in and outside of the U.S. government had their personal information stolen by the hackers who broke into the Office of Personnel Management and Interior Department’s computer networks, Sean Gallagher reports for Ars Technica. Noting signs that these attacks may have been done by the same group that targeted Anthem, the health insurer, and United Airlines, he writes, “When pulled together into an analytical database, the information could essentially become a LinkedIn for spies, providing a foreign intelligence organization with a way to find individuals with the right job titles, the right connections, and traits that might make them more susceptible to recruitment or compromise.”

A new report written by former White House national economic advisor Gene Sperling for Airbnb argues that the supplemental money earned by hosts “essentially represents a 14 percent annual raise for middle class families” using the platform.

The data dashboard for Los Angeles’s mayor is pretty nifty, and the city is offering to help other municipalities use the code base.

EBay has sold its 28.4 percent stake in Craigslist back to the company, ending a long legal fight between the two companies that had the odd effect of pitting two well-regarded liberal philanthropists, Pierre Omidyar (the founder of eBay) and Craig Newmark (the founder of Craigslist) against each other in court.

The European Parliament is on the verge of voting to restrict the commercial use of photographs or video of cultural works that are located in public spaces, requiring prior authorization from their owners or authors, Owen Blacker reports on Medium. This article on Wikipedia’s Signpost by James Heald details efforts to fight back.

Faced with endemic street rubbish, the Indian city of Ambala is trying a new system combining fingerprint identification, bio-metrics, digital mapping, attendance software and MapMyIndia maps to track the work of its 1000 street-cleaners and their supervisors, Sudhir Chowdhary reports for the Financial Express.