Ostensibly concerned that terrorists would disguise themselves as gamers in order to secretly communicate, agents from the NSA, CIA, Pentagon and Britain's GCHQ have posed undercover in online realms like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Xbox Live. In fact, the practice grew so popular with the spy agencies that a special "deconfliction" group was established to prevent the agents from inadvertently spying on or trying to recruit each other.
Our country's best and brightest began disguising themselves as digital trolls, elves, and supermodels in 2008, after a top-secret NSA documents—provided by Edward Snowden described the games as a "target-rich communication network" that lets terrorists and other criminals "hide in plain sight."
Read moreGovernment requests for data soared from 3,580 in 2009 to 10,918, Google said on Thursday -- and those are only the data demands the web giant is allowed to publish.
A 2013 Transparency Report described on the Internet giant's Public Policy blog is the latest in an ongoing effort to provide a window into worldwide governmental efforts to tap into the digital profiles Google builds and the digital communications it relays. The report revealed a tremendous increase worldwide in government efforts to mine Google’s data.
The company has used the periodic disclosures as an opportunity to push back against those government demands, many of which Google is banned from even discussing
Read moreMicrosoft has declared war on Google in a series of high profile criticisms about the way the firm scans the contents of every email its users send to target ads at them.
Microsoft has launched a campaign openly criticising its rival Google for snooping on people’s emails.
The software company has said it is appalled how Google uses “private information for profit” and found the majority of people think scanning emails is “an invasion of privacy. “ In a series of new adverts, Microsoft explains how Google reads every email users send, picking up on key words to target advertising in a bid to make more cash.
Read moreMicrosoft and Google announced Friday they are going forward with a lawsuit against the US government for the right to reveal more information about official requests for customer data by American intelligence.
The companies originally filed suits in June following revelations provided by Edward Snowden of their relationship with the National Security Agency and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the government’s requests of the companies’ systems. Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith announced the companies were following through with a suit, saying negotiations with the government since June have not yielded significant progress.
Read moreFacebook received about 26,000 government requests for information about 38,000 users in the first six months of 2013, with half of the orders coming from the United States government.
The social networking service published the numbers on Monday, following the release of customer information data requests from Microsoft and Google. Facebook said government agents from 74 countries demanded information about its users, but the vast majority of these requests came from the US. US federal law allows the government to demand Facebook data without a warrant, and companies must fight such requests in secret court hearings if they deny them.
Read moreThe German government has recommended that Federal Administration and other high profile public sector departments in the country do not use Windows 8 because, it warns, it contains security backdoors that cannot be controlled or trusted, and that may be easily accessible by the NSA.
The warnings are present in leaked documents obtained by German daily newspaper Zeit.de:
"Due to the loss of full sovereignty over the information technology, the security objectives of ‘confidentiality' and ‘integrity' can no longer be guaranteed. "This can have significant consequences on the IT security of the Federal Administration," the documents say.
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 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.
Read moreAll who uses Skype, it is obliged will agree with point that the company can read everything that there write (look Privacy policy in Skype). Company Heis, together with German colleagues, has found out by the elementary experiment that Microsoft actively uses this possibility, but very much oddly.
Practically right after message sendings in Skype in which the link on certain https a resource contained, the given resource has been visited with IP, belonging Microsoft HQ in Redmond, the USA. It has been noticed that after transfer to a body of the message of the link, the traffic unusual to it distinguished by the server as potential attack of repeated reproduction is generated. In too time IP the address from which "malefactor" tries to get access under the link, belongs Microsoft.
The charge: Microsoft is reconfiguring the Skype network so that it Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) can have access to intercept calls over the network to aid in investigations. The reality is of course convoluted with no concrete evidence but it’s worth mentioning what exactly is going on here. So head past the break to get the scoop.
As Rafael Rivera explained a few months ago is his article about Skype and Windows Phone, Skype’s original network operated on a peer-to-peer node system which means that Skype only initiated the calls but the actual communication was one-to-one with no one as the middleman.
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