The USA Freedom Act, blocked by the Senate, would have curbed powers granted under the Patriot Act, including bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
Lawmakers' efforts to overhaul some of the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance programs were dealt a setback Tuesday when a reform bill failed to garner enough votes to proceed in the Senate. The bill had the support of the White House, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, and a host of tech companies but was opposed by all but a handful of Republicans, some of whom were divided over the reason for their opposition.
Read moreMozilla is starting a new initiative that the company says is designed to incorporate more privacy enhancing features into Firefox and the other Mozilla products. The project involves collaboration and will involve Mozilla running a group of high-speed Tor relays, as well.
Privacy has become a major issue for users across the spectrum, not just the security conscious or paranoid. Nowadays, consumers are seeking out privacy enhancing tools and shunning those that infringe on their expectations of online privacy. Especially the NSA revelations of the last 18 months also have helped make privacy a key concern for enterprises and their customers.
Read moreWikileaking embassy-stayer has accused Google of being born bad and getting badder as it grew. We know how Assange feels about Google, and we know how Google feels about Assange.
The WikiLeaks man, writing in a new book, entitled When Google Met WikiLeaks, says that Google is an evil, bad, government sanctioned and supporting blight on the internet. Google says that Assange is paranoid. Assange seems to have more muck to throw around, though, and accuses Google of being something of a state puppet that is possibly dangling from the arm of Hillary Clinton. He reckons that Clinton punked him through Schmidt and bagged a couple of State-suits a free lunch on his tab.
Read moreTo stop terrorists and other criminals, cell phones should have encryption backdoors to enable US government surveillance, argues FBI Director. After one year on the job, Comey outlined his vision for the future of the FBI, including a bigger focus on cyber and the creation of a new intelligence office within the bureau.
Cell phone encryption will prevent the federal government from stopping terrorists and child molesters unless the government is given special access. FBI Director called out the default encryption in Apple's iOS 8, and the optional Android encryption that will become the default for that operating system when Android 5.0 Lollipop is released next month.
Read moreGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt warned Wednesday that the National Security Agency's online spying could "end up breaking the Internet". A large number of major tech firms, including Apple, Microsoft and Google, made headlines last year after they were revealed to have cooperated with the NSA in its extensive surveillance program called PRISM.
Longtime reporters who cover the NSA know that any time we ask the obstinate spy agency for information, we’re probably going to hit a brick wall. But who would have thought that trying to obtain information about information the agency has already given us would lead to the same wall?
Read moreIntelligence service BND failed to protect the private data of German citizens as it handed over internet data collected at a Frankfurt traffic hub to the US. During an ongoing parliamentary investigation into US National Security Service spying on German soil the secret documents were obtained from the federal government.
So when last year in was revealed that the two intelligence services had been collaborating to collect communication data at the De-Cix internet exchange node in Frankfurt, the BND had to produce explanations. The German service said it had a filter running, which prevented data of German citizens from being collected and forwarded to the NSA.
Read moreInventors of surveillance systems reported to authorities that it is possible to track absolutely any user who has a mobile phone, and the location of a person is not important, it doesn’t matter whether he is near or in another country.
The most famous intelligence services around the world, such as the National Security Agency of the USA and The Government Communications Headquarters of the United Kingdom use information from mobile phones for a long time. However, due to the new systems in countries that are less developed technically, it is possible to track people around the world easily. How does the system work?
Read moreWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange equated Google with the National Security Agency and GCHQ, saying the tech giant has become “a privatized version of the NSA,” as it collects, stores, and indexes people’s data.
“Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behavior, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others,” Assange told. “So the result is that Google, in terms of how it works, its actual practice, is almost identical to the National Security Agency or GCHQ,” the whistleblower argued.
Read moreThe NSA has repeatedly assured the public that it definitely does not perform economic espionage. It may collect metadata and communications from around the world and intercept shipments of computer hardware in order to install its own spying devices, but it doesn't perform espionage in service of American corporate interests.
This was the small thing that set our intelligence agencies slightly above similar agencies in China. Last August, the ODNI (Jame Clapper's office) sent this categorical denial in response to leaked documents. “The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.” And then the truth came rolling in, thanks to Snowden's leaks.
Read moreA secret and scrappy court battle that Yahoo launched to resist the NSA’s PRISM spy program came to an end in 2008 after the Feds threatened the internet giant with a massive $250,000 a day fine if it didn’t comply and a court ruled that Yahoo’s arguments for resisting had no merit.
The detail of the threat became public after 1,500 pages worth of documents were unsealed in the case, revealing new information about the aggressive battle the Feds fought to force the company to bow to its demands. Yahoo fought to unseal the case documents to provide better transparency about the government’s data collection programs.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland