NYT | The Obama administration, resolving years of internal debate, is on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people who communicate using the Internet rather than by traditional phone services, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

LiveLeak.com | In July of this year it became apparent through a flood of mainstream media reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) was “desperate to hire new hacking talent to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure” yet the NSA is notorious for its surveillance programs on American digital activity. David Petraeus, former director of the CIA, said at a summit for In-Q-Tel, that he was speculating on the “internet of things” and that “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies . . . particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”

RT | Starting this week, Internet Service Providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials. Months after a controversial “six-strike” program was slated to be rolled out by the biggest ISPs in the United States, the Copyright Alert System (CAS) confirmed on Monday that the initiative has gone live.

AP | China's government tightened Internet controls Friday with approval of a law that requires users to register their names after a flood of online complaints about official abuses rattled Communist Party leaders. Authorities say the law will strengthen protections for personal information. But it also is likely to curtail the Internet's status as a forum to complain about the government or publicize corruption.

WeeklyStandard.com | In the middle of the night at a U.N. conference in Dubai, the presiding chairman of the International Telecommunication Union conference surveyed the assembled countries to see whether there was interest in having greater involvement in the U.N. governing the Internet. A majority of countries gave their approval.

Wired | There’s a lot of sky-is-falling doomsday predictions about the World Conference on International Telecommunications, which opens Monday in Dubai with some 190-plus nations discussing the global internet’s future. That’s because much of the accompanying proposals from the global community have been kept under lock and key, although some of the positions of nations have been leaked and published online.

TheHill.com | Government officials from around the world will descend on Dubai next month to revise a treaty that could have a major effect on the future of the Internet. The 193 member countries of the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will meet in Dubai to update the International Telecommunications Regulations treaty for the first time since 1988. The treaty governs how telephone calls and other communications traffic are exchanged internationally.

Business Insider | Facebook really is watching your every move online. In testing out a new diagnostic tool called Abine DNT+, we noticed that Facebook has more than 200 "trackers" watching our internet activity. Abine defines trackers as "a request that a webpage tries to make your browser perform that will share information intended to record, profile, or share your online activity." The trackers come in the shape of cookies, Javascript, 1-pixel beacons, and Iframes.

Infowars.com | By all reports, sometime within the next 16 months Congress will pass a bill that puts an end to tax-free Internet sales, requiring online vendors to collect sales tax, just like the brick-and-mortar stores do. Their reasoning for this legislation, that states are losing tax revenue, sounds logical enough. But when you take a closer look, you might as well be looking through a piece of Swiss cheese.

Wired.com | There was a time, not all that long ago, when the U.S. military wouldn’t even whisper about its plans to hack into opponents’ networks. Now America’s armed forces can’t stop talking about it. The latest example comes from the U.S. Air Force, which last week announced its interest in methods “to destroy, deny, degrade, disrupt, deceive, corrupt, or usurp the adversaries [sic] ability to use the cyberspace domain for his advantage.” But that’s only one item in a long list of “Cyberspace Warfare Operations Capabilities” that the Air Force would like to possess

ZDnet | Summary: There comes a time when despite the allure of the market, Western industry should band together and turn its back on China. A time when the computer and Internet industry realizes that the censorship-and-repression tax the government is intent on levying is too high a price to pay.

Ars Technica | When Libyan rebels finally wrested control of the country last year away from its mercurial dictator, they discovered the Qaddafi regime had received an unusual gift from its allies: foreign firms had supplied technology that allowed security forces to track nearly all of the online activities of the country’s 100,000 Internet users. That technology, supplied by a subsidiary of the French IT firm Bull, used a technique called deep packet inspection (DPI) to capture e-mails, chat messages, and Web visits of Libyan citizens.

Endthelie.com | The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) – the Pentagon’s research agency responsible for such unbelievable research and development projects such as weaponized hallucinations, robots which are not only lifelike but also nearly as efficient as human beings, on-demand genetically engineered bio-products, creepy chameleon-like soft robots and dirt cheap miniature spy computers, to just mention a few projects – is now working on a new, classified cyberwarfare project dubbed “Plan X.”

PrisonPlanet.com | Citing the need to watch for potential sex offenders, Facebook is using software that tracks private conversations for suspicious behavior and keywords before alerting Facebook employees who then decide whether to pass the information on to police. The revelation was divulged during a Reuters interview with the social networking giant’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan.

The Hill | Texas Rep. Ron Paul and his son, freshman Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), are expected to back a new online manifesto from the Campaign for Liberty that decries government regulation of the Internet.