The email service reportedly used by surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Thursday after its owner cryptically announced his refusal to become "complicit in crimes against the American people."
Lavabit, an email service that boasted of its security features and claimed 350,000 customers, is no more, apparently after rejecting a court order for cooperation with the US government to participate in surveillance on its customers. It is the first such company known to have shuttered rather than comply with government surveillance. Silent Circle, another provider of secure online service.
Read moreThe National Security Agency, hit by disclosures of classified data by former contractor Edward Snowden, said Thursday it intends to eliminate about 90 percent of its system administrators to reduce the number of people with access to secret information.
Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, the U.S. spy agency charged with monitoring foreign electronic communications, told a cybersecurity conference in New York City that automating much of the work would improve security. "What we're in the process of doing - not fast enough - is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent," he said.
Read moreLast night’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno went about as well as normal for Barack Obama, apparently.
Leno brought up some uncomfortable topics, taking the President off of his economic campaign speech, and into unchartered waters — literally, as Joe Biden would say. When pressed about the NSA’s widespread collection of domestic telephone and Internet records, Obama insisted that the NSA wasn’t spying on Americans … just keeping their records handy, or something: President Obama on Tuesday defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs in a wide-ranging interview on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.
Read moreGermany’s BND intelligence service sends “massive amounts” of intercepts to the NSA daily, according to a report based on Edward Snowden’s leaks. It suggests a tight relationship has been developed between the two agencies – which the BND claims is legal.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Snowden and obtained by Der Spiegel revealed that the 500 million pieces of phone and email communications metadata collected by the NSA in Germany last December were “apparently” provided with the BND’s approval. The data was allegedly handed over at two collection sites as part of the operation titled “Germany – Last 30 days.”
Read moreTooth fillings acting as radio receivers may be nothing more than a myth, but scientists at the National Taiwan University are developing an artificial tooth that would send rather than receive transmissions.
They’re working on embedding a sensor in a tooth to keep an eye on oral goings on, along with a Bluetooth transmitter to transmit the data and tell your doctor what your mouth's been up to. Our mouth is our most multi-purpose orifice. We breathe with it, we taste with it, we use it for eating, for talking, for expressing emotions, for making love and even foolishly trying to open the occasional beer bottle. But scientists think it's also an untapped resource for monitoring people’s health.
Read moreMajor telecom companies have been assisting the UK intelligence agency GCHQ by granting access to all the traffic passing through their fiber-optic cables – and by developing Trojan software, leaked papers obtained by German media reveal.
The classified slides obtained by German news agencies Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and NDR list global telecommunication operators among the collaborators of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. The documents are said to have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The 2009-dated GCHQ slides reportedly provide the names of the following companies.
Read moreThe US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes. The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands.
"GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight," a GCHQ strategy briefing said. The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency.
Read moreMichele Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband, in the same time frame, was Googling backpacks. Wednesday morning, six men from a joint terrorism task force showed up at their house to see if they were terrorists. Which begs the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?
The men identified themselves as members of the "joint terrorism task force." The composition of such task forces depends on the region of the country, but, as we outlined after the Boston bombings, includes a variety of federal agencies. Among them: the FBI and Homeland Security.
Read moreThe bipartisan leaders of a powerful Senate committee questioned the truthfulness of the US intelligence community in a heated Wednesday morning hearing as officials conceded that their controversial bulk phone records collection of millions of Americans was not "the most important tool" – contradicting statements they previously gave to Congress.
Two senators said they now planned to introduce new legislation before the August recess that would significantly transform the transparency and oversight of the bulk surveillance program. The chairman of the committee has already advocated for ending the bulk phone records collection and plans his own legislative push to shut it down.
Read moreU.S. authorities are more likely to ask for personal information of a user's microblogging service Twitter. Over the past six months, the U.S. government sent 902 to the company requesting a statement. Twitter just received 1176 requests.
Thus, in the United States accounts for more than 70% of all claims, the report said. In second place at the request of information is Japan (87 requests), and the third - the United Kingdom (26 requests). A large number of requests from Turkey or Brazil have been reported to the company. In this case, Twitter is rarely receives requests to remove a certain message. In just six months, the company received 21 such a request, of which only two were initiated by the U.S. authorities.
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