A 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 moreSyrian computer hacker conglomerate, the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), has kicked off the New Year with a number of cyber-attacks, compromising Skype’s Twitter, Facebook accounts, and its official blog.
Social media accounts belonging to Skype, Microsoft’s voice-over-IP service, were hacked around 19:30 GMT. SEA posted on Skype's Twitter account a rogue message saying "Stop spying on people! via Syrian Electronic Army."
The hacker group also urged people not to use Microsoft accounts because the company is “selling the data to the governments.”
Read moreThe NSA can plant malicious software on Apple's iPhone, turning one of the world's most popular smartphones into a pocket-sized spy, according to a leading security expert.
Privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum gave the public an unusually explicit peek into the intelligence world's toolbox at a hacking conference in Germany, pulling back the curtain on the US National Security Agency's (NSA) arsenal of high-tech spy gear.
The independent journalist and security expert said on Monday that the NSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren't online.
Read moreThe US National Security Agency has collected sensitive data on key telecommunications cables between Europe, north Africa and Asia, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday citing classified documents. Spiegel quoted NSA papers dating from February and labelled "top secret" and "not for foreigners" describing the agency's success in spying on the so-called Sea-Me-We 4 undersea cable system.
The massive bundle of fibre optic cables originates near the southern French city of Marseille and links Europe with north Africa and the Gulf states, continuing through Pakistan and India to Malaysia and Thailand.
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 moreSince the first of many leaked documents showed that the NSA has been gathering phone records as part of its anti-terrorism program, there's been an ongoing fight over just what these records reveal.
To supporters, the metadata collection is a limited system that's rarely queried and doesn't contain enough information to be considered an invasive search: the NSA has said it doesn't collect either the content of calls or the names attached to phone numbers.
As many technology and legal experts on the other side say, though, metadata matters, and a Stanford Security Lab project demonstrates that removing names from a database doesn't effectively mean much.
Read moreIn his first television appearance since claiming asylum in Russia, Snowden -- who caused shockwaves around the world by revealing mass US electronic surveillance programmes -- will give a staunch defence of privacy in the short pre-recorded broadcast.
"Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying," he says.
Citing the classic dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", he adds: "Great Britain's George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information.
Read moreCanada’s intelligence agency deliberately kept the country’s Federal Court “in the dark” to bypass the law in order to outsource its spying on Canadian citizens abroad to foreign security agencies, a federal judge said.
Federal Court Judge, Richard Mosley, has slammed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for knowingly misleading him on numerous occasions.
Since 2009, Mosley has issued a large number of warrants to the CSIS, authorizing interception of electronic communications of unidentified Canadians abroad, who were investigated as threats to domestic security.
Read moreThe U.S. government claims that a public hearing on wiretapping is not possible, as this will damage the country's security, because the materials of the case still remain classified.
According to the Government, despite the fact that the whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the world have sufficient secrets when discussing details may emerge new details. For example, many are now wondering whether engaged in collecting intelligence data itself or telecommunications companies such as AT & T and Verizon, helped her in this. In considering the claims in court for the first time the government has acknowledged that the NSA wiretapping of telephone conversations engaged and media monitoring.
Read moreTop Israeli politicians want the US to stop "systematically spying" on Israel after revelations that the NSA intercepted emails of former top brass. Much to everybody's surprise, the Prime Minister’s Office has chosen to stifle the scandal, however.
"The secret is out," Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz said on Sunday. "The US is systematically spying on the defense and diplomatic leadership here in Israel. Is this how friends treat each other?" Housing Minister Uri Ariel said on Israel Radio he expected the US to admit wrongdoing.
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