Privacy Watch: Latest on NSA et al.
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-02 15:43:43 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-02 15:44:59 UTC
Micorsoft
-
Scary. Insane. Ridiculous. Invasive. Wrong. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has had the ability to secretly activate a computer's camera "without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording" for years now. What in the hell is going on? What kind of world do we live in?
Marcus Thomas, the former assistant director of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, told the Post that that sort of creepy spy laptop recording is "mainly" used in terrorism cases or the "most serious" of criminal investigations. That doesn't really make it less crazy (or any better) since the very idea of the FBI being able to watch you through your computer is absolutely disturbing.
-
The FBI team works much like other hackers, using security weaknesses in computer programs to gain control of users’ machines. The most common delivery mechanism, say people familiar with the technology, is a simple phishing attack — a link slipped into an e-mail, typically labeled in a misleading way.
Snowden
-
Along with journalist colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, I spent six days with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong. He had spent almost all of his short adult life working in America's spy agencies, but at the end of those six days, the unknown 29-year-old became one of the most famous faces on the planet. He went public in a Guardian video, revealing himself as the source of one of the biggest leaks in western intelligence history.
-
Only three months after the Snowden leaks on NSA snooping began, we learn from Ars Technica that the developers at FreeBSD have decided to rethink the way they access random numbers to generate cryptographic keys. Starting with version 10.0, users of the operating system will no longer be relying solely on random numbers generated by Intel and Via Technologies processors. This comes as a response to reports that government spooks can successfully open some encryption schemes.
-
Agency Implementing 2-Person Rule, Increasing Encryption Use
Greenwald
Machon
-
While British politics and media display a strong reluctance to confront the harsh realities of UK spying, we should be worried about further revelations of a dystopian, Orwellian surveillance system gone global, former MI5 agent Annie Machon told RT.
-
Here’s an RT inter€view I did about the media response to Edward Snowden, the media response, pri€vacy and what we can do.
Obama
-
The facts that we know so far – from Fisa court documents to LOVEINT – show that the NSA has overstepped its powers
-
Before he left for Hawaii, the president was sending signals that government surveillance programs need an overhaul to restore the public’s faith on issues of national security.
Judgement
-
The September 11th terrorist attacks revealed, in the starkest terms, just how dangerous and interconnected the world is. While Americans depended on technology for the conveniences of modernity, al-Qaeda plotted in a seventh-century milieu to use that technology against us. It was a bold jujitsu. And it succeeded because conventional intelligence gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connecting al-Qaeda.
Prior to the September 11th attacks, the National Security Agency (“NSA”) intercepted seven calls made by hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar, who was living in San Diego, California, to an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA intercepted those calls using overseas signals intelligence capabilities that could not capture al-Mihdhar’s telephone number identifier. Without that identifier, NSA analysts concluded mistakenly that al-Mihdhar was overseas and not in the United States. Telephony metadata would have furnished the missing information and might have permitted the NSA to notify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) of the fact that al-Mihdhar was calling the Yemeni safe house from inside the United States.
1984
-
A Scottish sci-fi writer has cancelled the last instalment in a trilogy about high-tech government spying after discovering that the NSA has been doing exactly what he described in his books.
-
Snowden in 2013 revealed what George Orwell in 1949 had already revealed in 1984: that Big Brothers who spy on their citizens will go on to do very bad things. He then asked for asylum in a country with a long history of its own citizens seeking asylum from his country.
Sci-FI Made Real
Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.
-
A leaked NSA cyber-arms catalog has shed light on the technologies US and UK spies use to infiltrate and remotely control PCs, routers, firewalls, phones and software from some of the biggest names in IT.
The exploits, often delivered via the web, provide clandestine backdoor access across networks, allowing the intelligence services to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks that conventional security software has no chance of stopping.
Corporate and Other
-
Kelly hired David Cohen, the former head of the C.I.A.’s spy division, to run the force’s intelligence outfit. Cohen, a trained economist known to be intensely loyal to his superiors (and profane with everyone else), created the Demographics Unit, which imbedded special recruits in eighteen Muslim neighborhoods to monitor every aspect of daily life. At the same time, Kelly created the International Liaison Program, which posted detectives in eleven hot spots overseas, including London, Paris, Madrid, Abu Dhabi, and Tel Aviv. “We’ve reorganized the department to accommodate this world view,” Kelly said. “You might say that the N.Y.P.D. has aspired to become a Council on Foreign Relations with guns.”
-
We have all heard by now of the massive surveillance being conducted by the NSA and other governments across the world. China is a well-known anti-privacy country and others have decided to also spy on their citizens’ social network activities amongst other things. The Internet censorship trends are getting pretty bad.
-
Older teenagers have turned their backs on Facebook, an EU-funded study has found. Young people are opting for alternative social networks like Twitter and WhatsApp, while the "worst people of all, their parents, continue to use the service."
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Project 2030 to Cover How "Project 2025"-Styled Anti-Media Zealots From America Targeted Techrights and Tux Machines
- The common denominator is also their attacks on women
- Brett Wilson LLP Failed to Meet Deadlines Set by Judge 7 Months Earlier, Tried to Ruin Our Holiday, Then Had the Audacity to Ask Us for Over 3,000 Pounds for Its Own Lateness
- As a matter of principle we will never respond to assassin while we are on holiday
- Americans Attacking British Sites Only Months After They Leave America
- We find it kind of funny if not ironic that this site, originally an American site, got legal harassment only from Americans and only months after it had moved to the UK
- Despite Losing Over a Quarter Million Dollars a Year Software in the Public Interest (SPI) Gives Helping Hand to Libreboot
- SPI's financial state depends a lot on its public image or its reputation
- If You Want to Know the Future, Listen to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Andy Farnell
- We're sure the FSF will have plenty of its own output
-
- Brett Wilson LLP Seem to Have Had Only One Litigation Client in 2025, He Was Previously Charged, Just Like the Serial Strangler From Microsoft (Whom They Now Represent)
- Karma is superstition, regulators are not
- On Claims That After Bluewashing Red Hat Will Increasingly Become an Indian Company
- Discussed this week (long and detailed)
- Slopwatch: Google Helps Plagiarism and Sends Traffic to Ripoff Artists
- That Google as a company helps spamfarms is noteworthy
- Links 18/09/2025: A Taliban Ban on Internet Access and Troubled US Job Market
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 18/09/2025: Computer Literacy and Accessing Alhena's Database
- Links for the day
- Links 18/09/2025: US War on Media (Truth Banned, Cancel Culture by the Hard Right), NYT Chief Executive Warns Cheeto is Deploying ‘Anti-press Playbook'
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 17, 2025
- IRC logs for Wednesday, September 17, 2025
- Slopwatch: Fake Articles, Fake Text, Fake Images, Negative Slant on "Linux"
- Google News has lost its value; the signal-to-noise ratio has fallen off a cliff
- Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Relax-and-Recover on Proxmox and New Smolweb File Transfer Service
- Links for the day
- Fact: EFF Got Corrupted by Corporate Money. Microsoft Lunduke (Political Noise): The Issue With EFF is, It Kills Babies.
- Microsoft Lunduke - as usual - finds a way to make it about abortions
- Pacing Publication Up a Bit
- The news cycles have gotten rather light and slow
- Links 17/09/2025: Power Outages, Digital Controls, and Attacks on the Mainstream Media (by Insecure and Corrupt Dictators)
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Flashing LineageOS and ROOPHLOCH
- Links for the day
- Links 17/09/2025: Long COVID Study, "Exposing Pegasus", and Chatbots Exposing Sensitive Data
- Links for the day
- Links 17/09/2025: Secret Settlement for Internet Archive and Google’s LLM Slop Summaries Attracting Lawsuits
- Links for the day
- The True Cost of 'Generative Models'
- Funded and promoted by the companies that profit from the waste
- 'Big Slop' Attacks Contemporary Information/Knowledge and Creative Works, 'Big Copyright' (Cartel) Attacks the Old
- Someone at IA will hopefully "blow the whistle" on what they actually agreed
- Why We Find It Difficult to Trust Rust
- A comparison between C/C++ and Rust
- Slop Nihilism is Funded by Big Oil
- Eventually human civilisation will destroy itself
- Watching the OSI: Our Series Will Carry on Irrespective of the Chief's 'Resignation'
- the OSI isn't even the real guardian of the term "Open Source"
- Professor Eben Moglen Recovering From Open Heart Surgery
- From his public pages (this is not secret)
- Just What LibreOffice Needs? Another Language? (Rust)
- what's all this concern about memory safety?
- Many Microsoft Managers Are Leaving
- "Hey hi" chaff or chaff about "hey hi" cannot eternally distract from the difficulties inside the company
- There Are Red Hat (IBM) Layoffs, But Google News is Infested With Slopfarms
- It contributes a lot to misinformation and it encourages plagiarism
- Tomorrow, Microsoft's Tim Anderson's 'The Register MS' Offshoot Will Have Been Inactive for 2 Months (There's Also a Slop Problem)
- We've already caught The Register MS using LLM slop for articles
- Microsoft's Chief Legal Officer Leaves Microsoft After Nearly 30 Years
- And not retiring
- Even Windows Users Are Having Problems With "Secure Boot"
- When it comes to security - Microsoft strives for the very opposite
- Another Competition Crime of Microsoft, Long Facilitated and Advocated by a Bad Actor, Who is Funded by a Third Party to Commit Extortion Against People Who Have Correctly and Repeatedly Warned About It for Over 13 Year
- We must always go back to the core issues
- 3 More Reasons to Replace Mozilla Firefox With LibreWolf
- Thankfully there are de-enshittified versions of Firefox
- USA Not a Place for Free Speech
- In America, as in the US, the attacks seem more enhanced or advanced these days
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 16, 2025
- IRC logs for Tuesday, September 16, 2025
- Links 17/09/2025: Google Layoffs in "Hey Hi" (AI), Perplexity Hit With More "Hey Hi" (Plagiarism) Lawsuits
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 17/09/2025: Reclaiming Things in a Digital Age and Moon Phases in CGI
- Links for the day
- Slopwatch: Google News is Slop, Google News is Plagiarism, Google News is Dying
- Google is off the rails
- Links 16/09/2025: "The Censorship Alarm Is Ringing in the Wrong Direction" and ASRock Does Microsoft E.E.E. on GNU/Linux
- Links for the day
- Serious "Breach of Confidentiality of Personal Data" in Europe's Second-Largest Institution, the EPO
- Yes, the same EPO that routinely uses "data protection" and "GDPR" as a pretext for hiding or covering up its corruption and white-collar crimes (it even uses that as an excuse for refusing to obey courts' orders)
- Adrienne Rockenhaus Says Her Husband Was Arrested for Running Tor and Denied Basic Rights in the United States
- the US seems to be getting "russified" in its approach towards Tor
- This is What Happens When Microsoft Canonical Lets Decisions on Ubuntu be Made by a Youngster From the British Army (Where He Did Mass Surveillance)
- "Is Ubuntu Compromised?"
- Back Doored Windows Giving GNU/Linux a Hard Time (Under the Guise of 'Security')
- Is this complication intentional? Most likely, yes
- Links 16/09/2025: Science, Security, and Conflicts
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 16/09/2025: Command-line Options in POSIX Shell and Introducing Acre 0.9
- Links for the day
- Microsoft 'Secure' Boot Versus Dual Boot With GNU/Linux
- they're meant to assume everything is OK
- Links 16/09/2025: While Oracle Pretends to be Rich It's Firing About 70 MySQL Workers, "Oracle's Revenge" (Faking Demand With "AI")
- Links for the day
- Microsoft Has Just Published a New Web Page About "Secure Boot Update Process" (Microsoft Also Admits Issues; PCs Can Stop Booting)
- Why was this page issued and published only hours ago?
- Microsoft Lunduke: I Spread Hate and Then I Receive Hate
- Cry us a river, Microsoft Lunduke
- "Use Wayland" Isn't a Bugfix for X (X11 is Still Necessary)
- They tell us X is "dead" and we must all be herded into Wayland ASAP
- "Disable Secure Boot and Fast Boot. Wipe and Start Over."
- At least they didn't say, buy a new computer...
- The Oracle Ponzi Scheme
- Oracle isn't doing well, but it's nowadays fashionable to say "clown" and "hey hi" to prop up one's stock, even based on nothing at all
- The New Head of OSI is an "Hey Hi" (AI) Obsessed Person
- when Bryant says "AI" that doesn't mean AI
- Taking Out the Battery, Opening Up Your Computer, Just Like a "Normie" Would
- At this stage, any person who still says "enable Secure Boot" is misguided or persuaded by companies that sell rootkits
- Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers and Slopfarms Still Infesting Google News (Fake 'Articles' About "Linux" Spreading FUD)
- searching for "Linux" today yields a lot of FUD
- "Governments, local authorities, schools and hospitals can lead by example by procuring only Free Software"
- Crossposted from Tux Machines
- Cindy Cohn Leaving the Electronic Frontier Foundation While Its Co-founder John Gilmore, Whom She Apparently Helped Oust, Will Celebrate 40 Years of the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
- EFF has been busy hoarding GAFAM money, whereas the latter is where all the real activism is done
- The Reach of Techrights Has Broadened
- We nowadays cover a broader range of issues
- "Google is Googlebombing KDE's Project Banana"
- So is Google googlebombing KDE's Project Banana? You decide.
- Complicating Things for No Actual Benefit, Just Added Risk and More Difficulties Adding GNU/Linux and BSDs
- Watch what it's like for people who wish to use BSDs
- Some Very Large IRC Networks Are Growing
- IRC will turn 38 next year
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 15, 2025
- IRC logs for Monday, September 15, 2025
- Links 16/09/2025: Autumn Party, RPG Planet, and Optical ROOPHLOCH
- Links for the day