The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.
Read moreGoogle is stepping up efforts to toughen data encryption in an effort to limit unofficial snooping on user information in the wake of the revelations about the NSA and PRISM. Eric Grosse, vice president for security engineering at Google said "It's an arms race", as he described government hackers as "among the most skilled players in this game."
In the aftermath of leaked documents from Edward Snowden, suggesting that some US companies have made it easy for information to flow to the government, Google is keen to show it is doing its utmost to protect its users' privacy. The company, that it would still have to comply with any legally approved Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requests and would hand over data whenever obligated to.
Read moreThe US intelligence agency NSA has been taking advantage of the smartphone boom. It has developed the ability to hack into iPhones, android devices and even the BlackBerry, previously believed to be particularly secure.
Michael Hayden has an interesting story to tell about the iPhone. He and his wife were in an Apple store in Virginia, Hayden, the former head of the NSA, said at a conference in Washington recently. A salesman approached and raved about the iPhone, saying that there were already "400,000 apps" for the device. Hayden, amused, turned to his wife and quietly asked: "This kid doesn't know who I am, does he? Four-hundred-thousand apps means 400,000 possibilities for attacks."
Read moreThe NSA has huge capabilities – and if it wants in to your computer, it's in. With that in mind, here are five ways to stay safe from the leading security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier.
Now that we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on the internet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves. For the past two weeks, I have been working with the Guardian on NSA stories, and have read hundreds of top-secret NSA documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Read moreUS and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.
The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.
Read moreUS law enforcement officers working on anti-drugs operations have had access to a vast database of call records dating back to 1987, supplied by the phone company AT&T.
The project, known as Hemisphere, gives federal and local officers working on drug cases access to a database of phone metadata populated by more than four billion new call records each day. Unlike the controversial call record accesses obtained by the NSA, the data is stored by AT&T, not the government, but officials can access individual's phone records within an hour of an administrative subpoena.
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 moreOhio Attorney General Mike Devine at a press conference told reporters on the existence of a powerful facial recognition software that can access the database license. Photos from ID, he said, were secretly transferred to the police.
How does the photos were in the program is unknown. The system compares the faces of the people on driving licenses with CCTV footage and photographs of offenders detained in police stations. Devine said that the police have successfully used the new technology of data processing from June 2 of this year. During that time, were carried more than 2.6 million search queries. The program is aimed at more efficient use of surveillance cameras, wrote Raw Story.
Read moreThe German magazine Der Spiegel says the U.S. National Security Agency secretly monitored the U.N.'s internal video conferencing system by decrypting it last year.
The report is one of many developments that have come to light since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked national security documents to the press, revealing a government surveillance program called PRISM that collected metadata over telecommunications lines. The newspaper said Sunday that documents it obtained from Snowden show the NSA decoded the system at the U.N.'s headquarters in New York last summer.
Read moreThe National Security Agency admitted in a statement Friday that there have been “very rare” instances of willful violations of agency protocols by agency officers. Some of those willful violations involved officials turning their private eyes on love interests.
The practice isn’t frequent — one official estimated a handful of cases in the last decade — but it’s common enough to garner its own spycraft label: LOVEINT. Spy agencies often refer to their various types of intelligence collection with the suffix of “INT,” such as “SIGINT” for collecting signals intelligence, or communications; and “HUMINT” for human intelligence, or spying.
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