The National Security Agency was blocked by a judge from carrying out plans tomorrow to begin destroying phone records collected for surveillance after a privacy group argued they are relevant to lawsuits claiming the practice is unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the agency today to retain the records and scheduled a hearing for March 19 on whether they can be destroyed. The NSA had planned to dispose of the records following a March 7 ruling by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington.
Read moreFrom his sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with roughly a dozen police officers outside, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Saturday that everyone in the world will be just as effectively monitored soon -- at least digitally.
"The ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there and, arguably, will be there in the next couple of years," said Assange, speaking to a large audience at the South by Southwest Interactive festival here.
Assange rocketed to international fame, and infamy, in 2010 after Wikileaks began helping publish secret government documents online.
Read moreInternet knows no borders, and it is logical to assume that web users are not afraid to express their views directly in the virtual space. But if you believe poll. Ericsson ConsumerLab, it is not. 68% of users are afraid to freely express what they think.
The survey was conducted among citizens of the United States, Mexico, Sweden, Egypt, Pakistan and Thailand. Dispelled another myth that all the Internet - not those who are in the real world. It turned out that 89% of users do not lie and indicate real data about yourself when registering on different sites. More than half (59%) of respondents said they were concerned that their personal data may be monitored by third parties.
Read moreThe revelations of Edward Snowden keep on coming. The Guardian reports on a hacking program of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) codenamed Optic Nerve. The program intercepted Yahoo webcam chats collecting and storing images of millions of users, even when individual users were not suspected of wrongdoing.
The leaked documents revealed that GCHQ secret files date from 2008 till 2010 and in the first 6 months Optic Nerve collected the still images from 1.8 million users globally. One of the files estimated till 11% of the content categorised as "undesirable nudity”.
Read moreThe Obama administration has asked a special surveillance court for approval to retain records of millions of Americans' phone calls stored by the National Security Agency — an unintended consequence of lawsuits seeking to stop the data-surveillance program.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Justice Department was considering such a move, which would end up expanding the controversial database by not routinely deleting older call records. Under the current system, the database is purged of phone records more than five years old. The Justice Department, in a filing made public Wednesday, said it needs to retain the older records to preserve evidence for law suits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others.
Read moreSecret organizations in the network hackers staged provocation in the interests of the American and British intelligence services.
Hired specialists under the supervision of the alliance Five Eyes distributed network false information to mislead and control the parties to the communication on the Internet. This was reported in the documents from the files of Edward Snowden. Special undercover units to track messages on the Internet, introduced in the discussion forums, social networking corresponded and threw false information to guide the users' opinions in a certain way.
Read moreMark Zuckerberg crusade to connect another billion people to the Internet, but US government's spy scandal last year make these efforts more difficult, said Facebook’s CEO during an interview at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Spain.
Journalist David Kirkpatrick, known for his book "The Facebook Effect" (2010) asked how the leaked documents from the Edward Snowden, former government contractor, jeopardise Facebook and other Internet giants. The companies were accused of providing US National Security Agency unfettered access to their servers. Most likely this scandal has affected company's reputation and its business relations and communications internationally.
Read moreJulian Assange has called on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate NSA spying on WikiLeaks. Secret documents have revealed how the NSA spied on WikiLeaks and its followers, seeking to classify it as “a malicious foreign actor.”
In its latest release of US government documents, WikiLeaks has accused the National Security Agency of tracking its members and followers. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has called the NSA’s espionage program “reckless and illegal” and has demanded Washington open an investigation into the claims.
“News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said in a statement on WikiLeaks’ website.
Read moreTens of thousands of accounts associated with customers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have their data turned over to US government authorities every six months as the result of secret court orders, the tech giants disclosed for the first time on Monday.
As part of a transparency deal reached last week with the Justice Department, four of the tech firms that participate in the National Security Agency’s Prism effort, which collects largely overseas internet communications, released more information about the volume of data the US demands they provide than they have ever previously been permitted to disclose. But the terms of the deal prevent the companies from itemising the collection, beyond bands of thousands of data requests served on them by a secret surveillance court.
Read moreThe Angry Birds site was defaced by hackers, the company behind the game has confirmed, after revelations that America's National Security Agency and the UK's GCHQ have been targeting the site's “leaky” user data.
An image employing the NSA logo and a “spying birds” caption replaced the official Angry Birds website for a brief time on Tuesday.
The hack was in response to the revelation that the Angry Birds apps, among others, were leaking personal data via advertising networks on which the UK and US intelligence agencies were spying.
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