US 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 moreThis time the target is the corporate side of the espio/industrial complex, the subject of a release of 249 documents from 49 companies around the globe specializing in making and selling spookware to governments.
A huge new revelation from Wikileaks this hour has exposed a sweeping surveillance industry, which has been developing spyware for governments to track and control their citizens. RT was among the very few media outlets given access to the documents prior to their release.WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange stated: “WikiLeaks’ Spy Files #3 is part of our ongoing commitment to shining a light on the secretive mass surveillance industry.
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 moreEuropean police intend to introduce devices to reduce or limit the vehicle's speed automatically. The EC's mobility and transport department reaches new standards of road safety. Car manufacturers could be required to supply basic models featuring new security systems that allow police remotely apply brakes in case of exceeding the speed limit. All other drivers may also be forced to fit their vehicles with speed limit devices.
Surveillance cameras and satellite communications can be used to determine vehicle's speed. Most of new cars feature dashboard computers making the remote communication possible.
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.
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 German government has recommended that Federal Administration and other high profile public sector departments in the country do not use Windows 8 because, it warns, it contains security backdoors that cannot be controlled or trusted, and that may be easily accessible by the NSA.
The warnings are present in leaked documents obtained by German daily newspaper Zeit.de:
"Due to the loss of full sovereignty over the information technology, the security objectives of ‘confidentiality' and ‘integrity' can no longer be guaranteed. "This can have significant consequences on the IT security of the Federal Administration," the documents say.
Read moreAxarhöfði 14,
110 Reykjavik, Iceland