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(Updated: December 29, 2015) In an earlier posting on this weblog we took a look at the phones used by the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which included an eye-catching red one. In some more recent pictures we can see that this red phone has apparently been replaced by an interesting looking white telephone. Although this device itself is white, it has a rarely seen but very distinctive feature: a red curly cord for the handset and also a red cable for the phone line. The buttons are also surrounded by some kind of red overlay: Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, meets with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, July 26, 2014 in Tel Aviv. (Photo: Handout/Getty - Click to enlarge) The dark gray phone at the left is a more common Nortel M3904 executive phone - a model which is also used at the NSA headquaters and at the office of the British prime minister. Nortel was a big Canadian telephone equipment manufacturer, but was dissolved in...

(Updated: September 15, 2014) This time we present an article written in cooperation with the French weblog about intelligence and defence Zone d'Intérêt in which we compare the data collection of Google to intelligence agencies like NSA: Introduction Since 1998, Google has grown to become an essential part of the web infrastructure and took an important place in the daily lives of millions. Google offers great products, from search engine to video hosting, blogs and productivity services. Each day, users provide Google, willingly and candidly, with many different kind of personal information, exclusive data and files. Google justifies this data collection for commercial purposes, the selling of targeted ads and the enhancement of its mostly free services. These terabytes of user data and user generated content would be of tremendous value to any intelligence service. As former director of CIA and NSA Michael Hayden half-jokingly stated at Munk debates : " It covers your te...