An illustration of James Bond by artist John McLusky for the Daily Express newspaper.
Bombshells regarding the NSA and its British offshoot GCHQ just can't help coming. There is so much dirty laundry and Snowden et al. bring it out by the bucketload (to be attributed to Snowden). Techrights might have an exclusive story of its own pretty soon. We are still trying to ascertain/verify the facts in a case involving Arizona's corrupt authorities (we asked for court documents to support the claims and to potentially publish). If the claims are true, then not only the NSA and FBI inject malware into people's computers (e.g. CIPAV) but local authorities too are trying to do this, completely against the law. They spy without warrants, crack computers, and also pass new laws as means of revenge against people whom they are desperate to prosecute (but can't). It sounds like a movie plot, but it sure seems to be real.
GCHQ's online surveillance has destroyed trust in British technology companies and irrevocably damaged the nation’s information security industry, according to a cryptography expert.
Liberty's director, Shami Chakrabarti, asked about the impact of the Snowden revelations on the security services' attempts to tackle terrorism, said: "I'm sure it creates challenges and irritations [but] any challenges are probably overblown. The serious bad boys know all about the technological possibilities."
Chakrabarti said Snowden had revealed "not just blanket surveillance and intrusion of privacy [but] that we got taken for mugs.
"There was a big debate in this country about a snooper's charter. That bill was dropped and now we find out they were doing this stuff anyway. That is not just a breach of privacy it is a fundamental breach of the rule of law, contempt for people, parliament and contempt of the law.
Silent Circle and Lavabit hope to respond to Snowden leaks with service stopping 'state snoopers' accessing email metadata
As the Snowden-related dis€clos€ures con€tinue to flow, each new one refut€ing the last dis€sem€bling state€ments of the des€per€ate spies, dip€lo€mats around the world must be curs€ing the over€ween€ing ambi€tions of the NSA and it vassals.
Amer€ican ambas€sad€ors are being summoned from their for€ti€fied embassies to account for US mal€feas€ance in coun€try after coun€try: Brazil, Spain, France and, of course, Germany.
In this last coun€try there has been scan€dal after scan€dal: first the hoover€ing up of bil€lions of private com€mu€nic€a€tions; the rev€el€a€tion that the Ger€man intel€li€gence agency, the BND, had been an enthu€si€astic part€ner of the NSA in devel€op€ing the XKey€Score pro€gramme and more; then, des€pite this, humi€li€at€ingly to learn that Ger€many is only con€sidered a 3rd Party intel€li€gence part€ner by the Yanks — put€ting them on a par with coun€tries like Iran, China and Russia.
One of the key responses from the NSA and its defenders to all of these Snowden leaks is that there is "rigorous oversight" of the NSA by the courts and Congress. Of course, that talking point has been debunked thoroughly, but NSA defenders keep trotting it out. It appears that the public is not buying it. At all. A recent poll from YouGov found that only 17% of people believe that Congress provides "adequate oversight" on the spying of Americans. A marginally better 20% (though, within the 4.6% margin of error, so meaningless difference really) felt that Congress provides adequate oversight of the NSA when it comes to collecting data on foreigners. Basically, that part of the NSA story just isn't particularly believable in light of everything that's come out. Oh, and people are paying attention to the news. A full 87% had heard something about the spying on foreign countries -- with only 14% thinking that such a program has helped US interests abroad.
Privacy International still awaits answers from Apple, BlackBerry, and others.
Back when the Eric Snowden brouhaha first began, we said that this was going to have serious repercussions on the tech sector here in the United States, especially after it became evident that Microsoft was actively working with the spooks by allegedly designing back doors into their operating system and keeping federal intelligence agents informed about unpatched security holes that could be used against foreign governments and “terrorist,” which now days seems to be everyone who doesn’t work for the NSA, FBI or CIA.
Comments
Needs Sunlight
2013-11-12 13:16:22
SSL MITM is a related problem, but it is the javascript which is the real enabler to mischief.