Security researchers of well-known security firm 'Symantec' have identified a cyber-criminal operation which relies on a new-fangled Linux backdoor, nicknamed Linux.Fokirtor, to embezzle data without being discovered.
[ORG at the start of the month]
[And from September, too]
The United States and its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic sources and an internal American government document obtained by The Cable.
Ruth from the Open Rights Group sez, "With the huge amount of evidence leaked by Edward Snowden on surveillance by the NSA and the GCHQ, the Open Rights Group has compiled a list of the top 6 points that everyone should know about how their rights have been violated. To combat this tide of privacy-invasions ORG also list the 6 key things that they want to do in response, and how you can help the biggest year of campaigning against mass surveillance. We believe that if enough people speak up we can change how surveillance is done."
Mark Udall (D-Colorado), Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) collectively filed an amicus curae brief for a lawsuit filed against the NSA, claiming that its record collection violated the Fourth Amendment.
A newly released report from the watchdog group Essential Information alleges that powerful corporations spy on and sabotage the very nonprofit groups dedicated to keeping them in check.
They are called smart TVs, but they could be doing more than being that smart and intelligent TV in your living room or game room.
A report published on DoctorBeet’s Blog, revealed that the author’s new LG Smart TV was calling home, sending detailed information about the author’s viewing habits to a (remote) LG server and using that information to display targeted ads on the Smart TV’s Smart Landing Screen. LG calls the program Smart Ads.
The US National Security Agency's (NSA) spying scandal could have a deep impact on US business prospects in China, where security concerns threaten to weigh down on the demand for American products.
Early in November of this year, The New York Times quoted an agency boast that when Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. secretary general, visited President Barack Obama at the White House last April, the president found before him a secretly intercepted copy of the U.N. head’s talking points (as if Obama might not have guessed what they would be). The agency on its internal broadsheet listed this as the week’s “operational highlight.”
Unlike in 2001, the NSA now has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 employees worldwide (its assistant director, John C. Inglis, jokingly estimated in 2012 that the number of current employees was “between 37,000 and 1 billion.”)
But the question to be asked of any bureaucracy is what it actually does. We know now that the NSA purloins (presumably electronically, but who knows?) other people’s mail. It undoubtedly, with its billions, can employ some second-story men, as well as those who service its giant antennae — or read your e-mails or copy out your Facebook page. But why do they bother? That is the fascinating question.
The U.S. government “really blew it” on conducting surveillance programs that riled foreign leaders and domestic skeptics, Facebook Inc. (FB) Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a television interview.
Luxembourg's data protection authority cleared Microsoft and its subsidiary Skype of data protection violations related to the U.S. National Security Agency's Prism spying program, the agency said Monday.
[Clearly not very factual and generally not a good article overall]
New declassifed documents show legal arguments over bulk metadata collection.
Twitter has implemented new security measures that should make it much more difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on communications between its servers and users, and is calling on other Internet companies to follow its lead.
The company has implemented "perfect forward secrecy" on its Web and mobile platforms, it said Friday. The technology should make it impossible for an organization to eavesdrop on encrypted traffic today and decrypt it at some point in the future.
Civil liberties advocates on Friday asked a federal court in New York to end the National Security Agency counterterrorism program that collects data on billions of phone calls by Americans, arguing that it violates the Constitution and was not authorized by Congress.
A federal judge on Friday appeared receptive to the idea that Americans enjoy some level of privacy in their phone records, in the first court challenge to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of data from telecommunications companies.
The U.S. Supreme Court will not intervene to stop the National Security Agency’s domestic telephone surveillance program — for now.
The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it would not review a ruling by the secretive intelligence court that gave the government access to records kept by Verizon Communications Inc on millions of telephone calls.
The long-shot case was brought to the high court by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public interest research organization. It was the first time the high-profile issue has come before the justices since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began in June to leak secret documents detailing American surveillance programs.
Now that the extent of the US National Security Agency's surveillance programs has been exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it's beholden on the public to fight back or else find themselves "complicit" in the activities, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
To say that there are a lot of people who are angry with the National Security Agency right now would be an understatement. But the things that are getting the most political attention right now—such as the invasion of the privacy of American citizens and spying on the leaders of American allies—are just a fraction of the problem, according to cryptographer and Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow Bruce Schneier.
Speaking at a presentation in DC, Bruce Schneier nailed the strategic cost of allowing the NSA to sabotage Internet security through BULLRUN: it has cost the US government all credibility as a contributor to Internet governance.
“We don’t discuss intelligence matters,” Australia’s bewildered prime minister told the media again this morning, making him the only person left on earth not discussing intelligence matters. Seven months after the fuse was lit, the scandal of the US National Security Agency surveillance state has finally detonated in Australia.
Indonesia has recalled its envoy to Canberra over reports that Australia spied on phone conversations of the Indonesian president, his wife and other high-ranked government officials.
A double blow for Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono this week. First it emerged his personal cell phone was being tapped by a foreign spy agency.
Requests from governments worldwide for user information have more than doubled since three years ago. Worse still, says Google, is what the US won't let us tell you.
Ex-lord chancellor defends Guardian reporting of Snowden files and says he's sceptical of warnings from spy agency chiefs
European and US justice officials have agreed to work towards "restoring trust" after the NSA scandal. The EU's Viviane Reding told DW she saw signs of an "absolutely new" attitude to Europeans' privacy.
Today, I do not use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or any other social network. I didn’t delete my accounts (impersonators really suck), but I’m logged out and radio silent across the board.
Following months of Snowden disclosures, the extent to which the National Security Agency’s extraordinary surveillance infringes on the privacy of our communications and other vast areas of our lives has become widely apparent. Far less appreciated, however, is the global threat that the NSA’s spying poses to freedom of expression over the Internet.
The NSA’s seemingly limitless prying into our personal electronic data is predicated on a cramped vision of our right to privacy. As I have described in this space these intrusions are facilitated by various shortcomings in current US law. For instance, the law recognizes a privacy interest in the contents of our communications, but not in what is known as our metadata, the electronic details about whom we communicate with, what we search for online, and where we go. The rationale, stated in a 1979 US Supreme Court ruling, is that we have no privacy interest in the phone numbers we dial because we share them with the phone company, even though the court could just as easily have ruled that the phone company has a fiduciary duty to respect the privacy of its customers.
Fisa court judge who authorised massive tapping of metadata was hesitant but felt she could not stand in the way
The relentless migration to the cloud requires strong encryption. Customers will demand it -- and snooping will be deterred
Norway’s intelligence services have admitted collecting details of over 33 million phone calls involving the country’s citizens during a month-long period between December 2012 and January this year. The data was shared with the U.S. signals intelligence agency, the NSA.
As more NSA-related documents are forced out into the public eye, the narrative contained within the court opinions is at odds with the NSA's continuous declarations that utmost care has been taken to prevent violating the privacy of Americans.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has vowed that the NSA won't be allowed to get away with its nefarious surveillance of the internet any more … as soon as 1,100 boffins can agree on a PRISM-proofing plan.
It’s understandable that the guards standing outside the U.S. Consulate General in Frankfurt are a little nervous. The building used to house the U.S.’s largest military hospital. Now it looks more like a fortress with its high walls, barbwire, antitank barriers, security cameras and guards with machineguns. But is it really an offense to stand in front of the building here, on the sidewalk? Or, better put, does a dawdling passer-by really necessitate two police cars and American security officers? Really?
Lavabit's founder has claimed other secure webmail providers who threatened to shut themselves down in the wake of the NSA spying revelations had received court orders forcing them to stay up.
It has been announced this week by PiCloud and Dropbox that it is has acquired PiCloud the platform which specialises in high performance computing, as well as batch processing and scientific computing applications from the cloud.
A new project seeks to lay down some ground rules for what could become a cloud for the continent.
While there's been so much attention lately on the NSA's surveillance tactics and its legality, for years there's been a separate issue that we've been covering: the outdated ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) rules (written in the '80s) that cover law enforcement's ability to get access to your data, such as emails. The laws make almost no sense today, as they were written in a time when the internet was much more limited. The idea of everyone storing pretty much all of their information and communications online wasn't even a concept at the time -- and that creates bizarre and nonsensical rules, like arguing that emails that have been on a server for more than 180 days are considered "abandoned" and no warrant is needed to view them.
The DNI's recent document dump has sprung loose an April 2009 "notification memorandum" from the NSA, which provides updates on its "end-to-end" reviews of both the Section 215 (phone metadata) and the Section 402 (email metadata) bulk records collections. As was noted in earlier posts, both programs were suspended by the FISA court because of the NSA's routine abuse FISA Act limitations.
The declassified document is addressed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). There's no indication this information was also disseminated to the House Intelligence Committee, but perhaps that will surface in the future. The memo spends a few introductory paragraphs detailing the efforts the NSA has made to clean up its act before delving into more interesting details -- including the limitations placed on the Section 215 collection by the Judge Walton, as well as a new problem it uncovered during its 60-day "end-to-end" reviews.
We've written a few times about the latest document dump by James Clapper and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence this week, in which they declassified a large pile of documents (after being told to by the courts -- though they don't mention that part). But, one of the odder parts was that the dates were redacted on certain legal filings, such as the FISA Court order by judge Reggie Walton smacking the NSA around a bit for not complying with the law.
Yesterday, we wrote about the DOJ responding to a FISA Court order that it declassify a FISA Court ruling on the interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act (related to the bulk collection of metadata), in which the DOJ effectively told the court that it wasn't going to obey.
Intelligence and security committee chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind seeks explanation of deal that allowed US to 'unmask' Britons
American intelligence agencies were given permission to track phone calls, emails and internet records of British citizens in a secret deal struck with UK officials, it has been claimed.
Ordinary Britons may have had their phone and email records monitored by US surveillance teams, it has been claimed.
British intelligence officials reportedly paved the way for the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on unwitting and innocent citizens, a memo leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden has suggested.
It is believed that in 2007 a deal was reached to give the green light to the NSA to hold and analyse information about British citizens that it previously did not have access to.
On Wednesday, The Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News revealed what most suspected by this point: the monitoring of vast swathes of the British populace. In 2007, then-prime minister Tony Blair allowed a change in the intelligence agreement between the U.K. and the U.S., permitting the Americans to record British citizens’ phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses, so as to map who communicates with whom. It is extremely unlikely that this data is not shared with the British authorities.
Approved plans made by British intelligence officials reportedly allowing the phone, internet and email records of ordinary UK citizens to be analysed and stored by the US National Security Agency is a "sell out" of privacy, according to Big Brother Watch.
Intelligence and security committee chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind seeks explanation of deal that allowed US to 'unmask' Britons
A secret court's backwards logic opened the floodgates for the NSA to gather metadata. We're still feeling the repercussions
Russia’s largest internet company is expanding into the US, trying to lure customers by keeping the data from its services offshore.
Shareholders urge the telecom giants to be more transparent about U.S. data demands
Some shareholders in Verizon Communications and AT&T are pushing to know what the telecom companies have told U.S. or foreign agencies about their customers, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said Wednesday.
Iceland’s attempts to become a free-speech haven risk floundering in the wake of revelations regarding the extent of internet monitoring by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) has spent the last three years working protections for whistleblowers and investigative journalists into the country’s constitution. But the knowledge that monitoring of digital communications is far more widespread than previously thought makes it difficult to promise safety to sources who might have hoped otherwise.
“When we were making IMMI, even if we were aware that there had been spying going on, on all our devices, I don’t think any of us at the time – late 2009, early 2010 – anticipated that it was so invasive,” says Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of the driving forces behind the initiative.
Back when Yahoo was something hollered at a rodeo and no one could conceive of Googling anything, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order that extended the power of US intelligence agencies overseas, allowing broader surveillance of non-US suspects. At the time, no one imagined he was granting authority to spy on what became known as Silicon Valley.
But Jameel Jaffer, of the American Civil Liberties Union, told a judge in federal court: "If you accept the government's theory here, you are creating a dramatic expansion of the government's investigative power."
US District Court Judge William Pauley reserved decision on an ACLU request to halt the National Security Agency surveillance programmes pending the outcome of its lawsuit against President Barack Obama's administration.
DHS I&A DSAC Records Illuminate Aspects of Federal Public-Private Intelligence Partnership: Wikileaks, Anonymous, Booz Allen Hamilton, Career CIA Officers at DHS Domestic Intelligence Office
There’s a spot of skulduggery going on in the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Not to put too fine a point upon it, a lot of questions are being asked about why the worshipful judges have, at least publicly, demanded a trial in Europe for Saif el-Islam al-Gaddafi – son of the late Muammar – but have blithely accepted that the dictator’s ruthless security boss, Abdullah al-Senussi, should be tried in the militia-haunted chaos of Libya.
Was this because the court didn’t want to upset Libya’s anarchic authorities by insisting that it try both men at The Hague? Or is there an ulterior, far more sinister purpose: to prevent Senussi blurting out details in The Hague of his cosy relationship with Western security services when he was handling relations between Gaddafi, the CIA and MI6?
Mansur Mahsud of the FATA Research Center told the Bureau: ‘Yesterday Nawaz Sharif’s foreign minister gave a statement saying it would not carry out drone strikes during talks between militants and the government, and the very next day a drone strike took place in the settled area. It will increase tension and anger in Pakistan against America.’
Two major military-related groups, Officers of Russia and Soldiers’ Mothers, have addressed the Nobel Committee with a request to evaluate the inhumane statements made by the US president about drone warfare.
Drones are in effect terrorist tools that impose terror on the people that they are fired against, creating more enemies for the United States with every innocent person that is killed, Leah Bolger, president of Veterans for Peace, told RT.
The revolving door goes both ways, according to Newsweek, since most corporate executives “love hanging out” with the agency’s top spies, seeking to maintain influence in Capitol Hill.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an infographic list showing the Web service providers that encrypt or don’t encrypt their users data as it traverses the Internet.
The list derives from the foundation’s Who Has Your Back Program, which surveys Web service providers to find out if they are implementing the foundation’s best practices for encryption.
Snowden revelations shed light on facts that force us to ask ourselves important questions and to take action that might be essential for the future of our online societies and for the very structure of our political systems.
Ever since the Snowden leaks began, there's been a clear dichotomy in terms of how different industries have reacted. The various big internet companies, which were named early on as participants in the PRISM program, have been quite vocal (sometimes to profane levels) that they were not willing participants in most of these programs, and are currently involved in an important lawsuit arguing that they have a First Amendment right to reveal how much info they actually share with the government. While those eventual revelations (and they almost certainly will come out, either legally or through leaks) may reveal certain companies were more complicit than others, by all indications, the various internet companies have been very willing to fight the government over this.
According to new documents provided by the National Security Agency's favorite foe, former employee-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad is reporting that the NSA has infected more than 50,000 computer networks with malware in a process known as "Computer Network Exploitation."
The US National Security Agency placed malicious software on more than 50,000 computer networks around the world, says a report based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
The US National Security Agency has employed more than a thousand IT specialists to hack into 50,000 computer systems worldwide and to install malicious software designed to steal sensitive information, a media report has said.
In addition to its massive monitoring and collection of telephone and Internet data, the US intelligence agency has been extensively infiltrating computer systems around the world and planted malware, Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported on Saturday.
Since the revelations of NSA snooping started to emerge this summer, they have gotten a lot of mileage in the media and across the internet, but I think it is fair to say that life in the City barely missed a step.
There were some suggestions of qualitatively negative consequences, but when you work in the finance industry you get used to unspecific bluster.
[...]
Get the IOC – IBM, Oracle, Cisco – out of China, we heard several times.
Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.
The deputy director of the National Security Agency on Friday sounded skeptical about permitting the FBI, DEA or other law enforcement agencies to directly search through the NSA's vast data troves, as a new bill would appear to permit.
TreasureMap is not a document but viewing software -- very similar to MindMeister, see below -- that draws (and updates) network diagrams according to what is currently carried in an associated database. The key feature is scalability: vector graphics that zoom in and out to any level of resolution. Sort of like Google Earth, only using lines and nodes.
Google, the giant of the Internet, thought about moving its servers out of the U.S. after the NSA debacle, said Eric Schmidt, the company's chairman, on Friday at the Paley International Council Summit in New York.
As the Senate Armed Forces Committee works on the latest iteration of the National Defense Authorization Act, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va) sees it as a good opportunity to try again to pass cybersecurity legislation. He has submitted the Cybersecurity Act of 2013, legislation passed in the Senate Commerce Committee this summer after the failure of CISPA to gain momentum.
The Department of Defense’s budget is funded with the annual passage of The National Defense Authorization Act. With each year’s passing Congress adds more provisions to the law, compounding the already controversial nature of its intent. In 2012, Congress added Sections 1021 and 1022 to the bill, which codified the indefinite military detention without charge or trial of citizens for the first time in American history.