Microsoft 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.
Read moreIt has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.
So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition.
Read moreThe federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.
The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.
Read moreGuardian editors on Tuesday revealed why and how the newspaper destroyed computer hard drives containing copies of some of the secret files leaked by Edward Snowden. The decision was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents.
It resulted in one of the stranger episodes in the history of digital-age journalism. On Saturday 20 July, in a deserted basement of the Guardian's King's Cross offices, a senior editor and a Guardian computer expert used angle grinders and other tools to pulverise the hard drives and memory chips on which the encrypted files had been stored.
Read moreWe are now in, roughly, week 11 of what has become a more or less steady stream of revelations about the NSA's efforts to collect and analyze huge amounts of the data people create every day online.
Given what is now known, are the disclosures of the NSA's programs reshaping how people use the Internet? If so, this is a phenomenon that could in turn reshape, in a very basic way, what the Internet is -- what information it holds. A new report from the analytics firm Annalect finds what it calls "substantial" changes in Americans' behavior and attitudes since June.
Read moreThe former head of the National Security Agency said Sunday that not only does ending the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs seems unlikely, but he images those endeavors could expand in scope during the coming years.
Former NSA chief Michael Hayden told television host Bob Schieffer of CBS’ Face the Nation over the weekend that the current program that collects the metadata of millions of American phone customers on a regular basis for the United States government could in the future perhaps be used to soak up even more statistics about US citizens.
Read moreCountries of greatest interest to the U.S. are China, Russia, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan, according to German weekly.
The United States’ surveillance programs included intensive spying on Germany, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. Der Spiegel cited a classified document from the archive of Edward Snowden, the American citizen who fled the U.S. after revealing details of its espionage programs and has received temporary asylum in Russia. According to the report, in April 2013, U.S. officials ranked its espionage targets on a scale of 1 (of highest interest) to 5.
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