Not a zine I know, but this deserves to be widely read and available to read online.

This is a copy of the handbook that Microsoft hands out to law enforcement agencies in the US that gives fine detail on exactly what information they retain, for how long, and how easy it is for the rozzers to request it. This covers amongst others Hotmail, MSN Messenger, Office and even your X-Box. This is the US domestic version but others exist for other areas of the world.

This document was originally released on Wikileaks.org with the following writeup:

"Cryptome.org is a venerable New York based anti-secrecy site that has been publishing since 1999. On Feb 24, 2010, the site was forcably taken down following its publication Microsoft's "Global Criminal Compliance Handbook", a confidential 22 page booklet designed for police and intelligence services. The guide provides a "menu" of information Microsoft collects on the users of its online services. Microsoft lawyers threatened Cryptome and its "printer", internet hosting provider giant Network Solutions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA was designed to protect the legitimate rights of publishers, not to conceal scandalous internal documents that were never intended for sale. Although the action is a clear abuse of the DMCA, Network Solutions, a company with extensive connections to U.S. intelligence contractors, gagged the site in its entirety. Such actions are a serious problem in the United States, where although in theory the First Amendment protects the freedom of the press, in practice, censorship has been privatized via abuse of the judicial system and corporate patronage networks."

Still think Facebook is a good idea for activists organising online?

Read on...