Wikileak’s founder, Julian Assange, made headlines around the world this past week with his presentation on the release of tens of thousands hundreds of documents (with more to be released) outlining that “Mass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is a secret new industry spanning 25 countries.”

So that you are able to stay informed about developments that may positively or negatively impact your application development or personal use of technology, you should know about an emerging global industry focused on mass-scale spying on mobile devices, social media, or other internet-based use and so you are encouraged to view the video below and then visit Wikileaks – The Spy Files.

In case you are ready to immediately dismiss this as a “foreign country” problem and that it wouldn’t or couldn’t affect you or your organization, remember the “inadvertent” collection of U.S. citizen’s communications when domestic warrantless wiretapping ensued. In addition, it has been revealed that in January 2011, the National Security Agency broke ground on a $1.5 billion facility in the Utah desert that is designed to store terabytes of domestic and foreign intelligence data forever and process it for years to come.

While it is an imperative that our government intelligence agencies can stay on top of the exponential explosion in online communications and technologies, we’ve quickly learned this week with the CarrierIQ “rootkit scandal” how much we don’t know about what software is on our devices, how the carriers are using their ability to track our location within a few feet of our mobile phones is being used, and whether or not they are automatically storing ALL of our data with open, non-warrant-based analysis by intelligence agencies.

The flip side of this is another issue, one that certainly justifies U.S. expenditures and an acceleration in intelligence agency capability. It is how the stakes are rising QUICKLY on everything happening in cyberspace. As more and more of us shop online, map our businesses and processes to the web, interact socially online and can instantly (and for free) talk with anyone, anywhere on the planet, ensuring that the bad guys in other countries aren’t able to mass vacuum up our data and use it against us is critical to our national defense.

I normally don’t harvest content en masse from a website, but I honestly didn’t think the SOPA/Protect IP bills would actually make it to the floors in Congress.

It has and the hearings are going on right now but, according to Tim O’Reilly (the tech publisher) on Google+ a moment ago, “This is really important. They aren’t even hearing testimony from opponents of the bill. The “hearings” are a sham, with testimony from supporters only.”

A veritable Who’s Who of tech giants—including Facebook, Google, Twitter, eBay, Yahoo, AOL and Mozilla—explicitly came out against both SOPA and PROTECT-IP in a letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees

To get you up-to-speed quickly, here’s why this is bad:

Good infographic is here too.

The following came from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet Blacklist Legislation as a new way to prevent online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative is nothing more than a dangerous wish list that will compromise Internet security while doing little or nothing to encourage creative expression.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s domain name system (DNS). The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to redirect or dump users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the reliability and universality of the DNS evaporates.

It gets worse: Under SOPA’s provisions, service providers (including hosting services) would be under new pressure to monitor and police their users’ activities. While PROTECT-IP targeted sites “dedicated to infringing activities,” SOPA targets websites that simply don’t do enough to track and police infringement (and it is not at all clear what would be enough). And it creates new powers to shut down folks who provide tools to help users get access to the Internet the rest of the world sees (not just the “U.S. authorized version”).

WHAT CAN YOU DO? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has placed a hold on the Senate version of the bill, taking a principled stand against a very dangerous bill. But every Senator and Representative should be opposing the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA. Contact our members of Congress now to speak out!