Turns out there is another reason for rejecting all those insidious game invitations from smartphone apps and their Facebook counterparts: the New York Times has revealed today that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are mining the data that your smartphone apps are generating, from location data, to contact lists, to phone logs and even the data embedded in images. Dubbed the “Mobile Surge” by the Brits, the intelligence community is giddy with glee over the trove of data served up by mobile apps.

While you may be familiar with the term “blood diamonds”, diamonds are not the only thing which are mined in the violent, war-torn mining regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo (“DRC”). Many minerals used in the manufacturing of electronics such as cell phones and computers are also mined in the DRC. These minerals, which include gold, columbite-tantalite, cassiterite, and wolframite (from which tungsten is derived), when mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, have come to be known as “conflict minerals” or “blood minerals”, and their use in manufacturing electronics by companies based in the United States is now the subject of Federal regulation by the U.S. government. Part of the recently enacted “Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act”, which, through enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), is primarily aimed at controlling financial institutions following the 2009 financial meltdown in the U.S., the “Conflict Minerals” clause, which is Section 1502 of the Dodd Frank act, requires U.S. companies to declare whether they have used any minerals from the DRC and, if they can prove that they have not, allows them to label their products as “Conflict Free”.