In December 2013 the District Judge Richard Leon ruled, according to which large-scale surveillance and gathering information about Internet users, implemented the National Security Agency (NSA), the United States, "are likely unconstitutional''.
Now the country's Ministry of Justice hopes that another judge overturned the decision. U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint on the decision of the judge Leon on December 3. Agency intends to achieve recognition of the legality of surveillance of all citizens. "I am sure that the collection of data on citizens' telephone conversations and analysis violate the customer's expectations of privacy," - said in court Leon.
Read moreA secretive U.S. spy court has ruled again that the National Security Agency can keep collecting every American's telephone records every day, in the midst of dueling decisions in two other federal courts about whether the surveillance program is constitutional.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Friday renewed the NSA phone collection program, said Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such periodic requests are somewhat formulaic but required since the program started in 2006. The latest approval was the first since two conflicting court decisions about whether the program is lawful and since a presidential advisory panel recommended that the NSA no longer be allowed to collect and store the phone records and search them without obtaining separate court approval for each search.
Read moreThe phone numbers and usernames of more than 4.6 million North American Snapchat users have been leaked online. SnapchatDB, an unofficial site run by an anonymous individual or group, allows open access to two files — one an SQL dump, one CSV text — that show details of the photo-sharing app's users alongside their location.
The final two digits of phone numbers have been censored "to minimize spam and abuse," but SnapchatDB says people should "feel free" to contact it for the uncensored database, as it may release it under certain circumstances. Usernames are presented unedited, and SnapchatDB notes that "people tend to use the same username around the web."
Read moreAs it now appears, the NSA can not cope with the processing of large volumes of traffic too, which come into its system, and in 2013 the agency has asked to reduce the extent of the surveillance program MUSCULAR.
“Their current activities reduces the performance of the system when they process all the data,” - said William Binnie (William Binney), a developer of software that is used in the NSA, told WSJ. According to him, the NSA mired in an array of unnecessary information, which prevents the agency to carry out useful work in search of potential terrorists. Not surprisingly, some experts have expressed the view that the total surveillance of citizens, including the collection and analysis of all metadata Internet traffic, not helped to prevent a single terrorist act.
Read moreData collected by Norway's intelligence services in Afghanistan is used by US and Nato forces to target controversial drone attacks, the organisation's head has revealed.
Lieutenant General Kjell Grandhagen told Aftenposten newspaper that the data Norway's E-Service handed over to the US's National Security Agency was "part of an overall information base used for operations".
"Such operations may include the use of drones or other legal weapons platforms," he confirmed. When Norway's Dagbladet newspaper reported in November that the US's National Security Agency collected 33m pieces of phone data from Norway over just one month, Grandhagen claimed that this was not data from Norwegians' phone calls as Dagbladet reported.
Read moreAs a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.
Read moreA panel appointed by President Barack Obama has recommended significant changes to controversial surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) that were disclosed by Edward Snowden.
The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies report calls on Obama to end the NSA’s collection of a massive database of telephone metadata and to enact new restrictions on the use of private data held by communications and technology companies. The more than 300-page report includes 46 specific recommendations to the President, and follows on months of slow leaks from a treasure trove of documents taken from the NSA by Snowden that have caused an uproar both in the U.S. and around the world.
Read moreDenmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and several other EU countries were named among “third party partners” in the NSA-led global signal intelligence program, a new leak submitted by journalist Glenn Greenwald to Danish TV reveals.
According to the document, obtained by Swedish TV program ‘Mission: Investigate’, that has been probing Sweden's participation in global spying operations, nine European countries were added to the list of NSA accomplices. The "third party partners" to the Five Eyes nations has now grown to include nine states - Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain.
Read moreNational Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden wrote in a lengthy "open letter to the people of Brazil" that he's been inspired by the global debate ignited by his release of thousands of National Security Agency documents, and that the NSA's culture of indiscriminate global espionage "is collapsing."
In the letter, released widely online, Snowden commended the Brazilian government for its strong stand against U.S. spying. He said he'd be willing to help the South American nation investigate NSA spying on its soil, but could not fully participate in doing so without being granted political asylum, because the U.S. "government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak."
Read moreIn an e-mail sent to BSD project leader Theo de Raadt, former NETSEC CTO Gregory Perry has claimed that NETSEC developers helped the FBI plant "a number of backdoors" in the OpenBSD cryptographic framework approximately a decade ago.
Perry says that his nondisclosure agreement with the FBI has expired, allowing him to finally bring the issue to the attention of OpenBSD developers. Perry also suggests that knowledge of the FBI's backdoors played a role in DARPA's decision to withdraw millions of dollars of grant funding from OpenBSD in 2003. "This is also probably the reason why you lost your DARPA funding, they more than likely caught wind of the fact that those backdoors were present and didn't want to create any derivative products based upon the same."
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