Edward Snowden was wanted after he had exposed the information about surveillance programs made by U.S. secretive agencies all over the world. His exposure opened the question about privacy. In U.S. where PRISM is used overall anonymity becomes a rarity. Someone accepted it, someone is angry, but everybody agrees that there is no easy way to avoid NSA curious eye.
“5 years ago, I would say that mobile phone is a small informer in your pocket and that you should get rid of it and should not carry. It doesn't matter now. There are automatic license plate readers which allow watching you.
Read moreKatherine Losse claims social network's customer support could access any user's account with a master password. Facebook employees at one time had access to a “master password” that granted them access to every one of the accounts on the social network, according to a former employee.
And while “more secure forms of logging in to repair accounts” were later put into operation, Katherine Losse, who joined Facebook in 2005 as its 51st employee, told The Guardian Wednesday that members of the site should avoid sharing personal information, especially now that the scope of surveillance by the U.S. government has come to light.
Read moreMicrosoft worked hand-in-hand with the United States government in order to allow federal investigators to bypass encryption mechanisms meant to protect the privacy of millions of users, Edward Snowden.
According to an article published on Thursday by the British newspaper, internal National Security Agency memos show that Microsoft actually helped the federal government find a way to decrypt messages sent over select platforms, including Outlook.com Web chat, Hotmail email service, and Skype. Snowden, the 30-year-old former systems administrator for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, provided the paper with files detailing.
Read moreAbout a year after Facebook reportedly joined PRISM, Max Kelly, the social network's chief security officer left for a job at the National Security Agency, either a curious career move or one that makes complete sense.
The Chief Security Officer at a tech company is primarily concerned with keeping its information inside the company. Now working for an agency that tries to gather as much information as it can, Kelly's new job is sort of a complete reversal. Facebook, among other tech companies, has distanced itself from the government, claiming it only cooperates when it is legally required to.
Read moreAccording to the documents, leaked by Edward Snowden to the Guardian, the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) collects vast amounts of data from fibre-optic systems. The scale of the operation is massive, and the use of the data, also shared with the NSA is a big concern.
The project called Tempora aims to attach probes on 90% of the cables running through the UK. In the last 5 heart Tempora is half way - it has access to 200 fibre-optic cables (including the transatlantic traffic), collecting and analysing data from 46 of them. This adds up to 600 million “communication events” daily when full content of transmissions is preserved for 3 days and metadata for 30.
Read moreThere's been plenty of commentary concerning the latest NSA leak concerning its FISA court-approved "rules" for when it can keep data, and when it needs to delete it. As many of you pointed out in the comments to that piece – and many others are now exploring – the rules seem to clearly say that if your data is encrypted, the NSA can keep it.
As part of this, the rules note: In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data bases requires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time.
Read moreAgency surveillance programs, and disputing the notion that he is following in the footsteps of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. In a PBS interview with Charlie Rose, Obama said efforts to track terrorists through phone and Internet surveillance have safeguards to prevent abusing the civil liberties of innocent Americans.
Obama cited both congressional and judicial oversight. When Rose asked, "should this be transparent in some way?" Obama responded: "It is transparent. That's why we set up the FISA court."
Read moreAccording to Der Spiegel, Germany's intelligence agency has a 100-million-euro plan to expand Internet surveillance. Meanwhile, the interior minister wants travelers to fill out a questionnaire before entering the EU. Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that the Federal Intelligence Service plans to expand its Internet surveillance program to cover 20 percent of all communications between Germany and foreign countries.
Because of technical limitations, the intelligence agency - known by its German acronym, BND - currently only monitors 5 percent of all Internet and telephone communication. However, according to German law, the BND can snoop on a maximum 20 percent of all communications traffic.
Read moreWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed a recently exposed NSA mass-surveillance scheme as a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law." Google, Facebook and other tech giants apparently involved have denied giving the NSA access to their servers.
Assange accused the US government of trying to "launder" its activities concerning the large-scale spying program PRISM. The system was made public after a leaked classified National Security Agency (NSA) document was revealed earlier this week.
"The US administration has the phone records of everyone in the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That's what's come out," he said.
Read moreThe National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.
The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind.
The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers.
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