The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department conducted a secret test of mass surveillance technology, organizing round-the-clock surveillance with drone for the territory of the whole city.
The incident took place in 2012, but the issue has become known just now.
Compton has a total area of 26 km2. It is possible to cover such an area completely with a high resolution camera with a single drone. Police received images in real time and were able to zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton. In other words, the police could easily track the movement of every citizen in the city, but residents were unaware of it.
Read moreInternet service providers must turn over customer emails and other digital content sought by U.S. government search warrants even when the information is stored overseas, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
In what appears to be the first court decision addressing the issue, U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York said Internet service providers such as Microsoft Corp or Google Inc cannot refuse to turn over customer information and emails stored in other countries when issued a valid search warrant from U.S. law enforcement agencies. If U.S. agencies were required to coordinate efforts with foreign governments to secure such information, Francis said, "the burden on the government would be substantial, and law enforcement efforts would be seriously impeded."
Read moreWhen couples find out they are expecting, they usually spread the news to family and friends as soon as possible.
When Janet Vertesi, an assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, found out she was pregnant, she made a very similar call to family and friends, but with very different intentions.
Those close to Vertesi and her husband were told not to post anything on social media sites that would reveal the couples' pregnancy. Vertesi had decided to take her pregnancy off the grid, not because she wasn't overjoyed, but because marketing bots that figure out when a woman is pregnant become relentless in their targeted advertising.
Read moreStanford University network engineers have unveiled a refreshingly enlightened password policy. By allowing extremely long passcodes and relaxing character complexity requirements as length increases, the new standards may make it easier to choose passwords that resist the most common types of cracking attacks.
Students, faculty, and staff can use passwords as short as eight characters, but only if they contain a mix of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols, according to the policy, which was published last week on Stanford's IT Services website. Even then, the short passwords must pass additional checks designed to flag common or weak passcodes (presumably choices such as "P@ssw0rd1", which can usually be cracked in a matter of seconds).
Read moreNow the main stream of data goes through the servers located in the USA. The President of Russia Vladimir Putin considers it necessary and important to place on the territory of Russia the servers of large national Internet resources that will protect the stored information.
This opinion he expressed today, on April 24, speaking at a meeting of the media forum in St. Petersburg, ITAR-TASS reported. "It is possible to do, but it takes time and capital investment," he said, adding that now the main stream of data goes through the servers located in the USA, where everything is controlled. "All that the Internet has emerged as a special project of the CIA and developing," Putin said.
Read moreIs telephone metadata sensitive? The debate has taken on new urgency since last summer’s NSA revelations; all three branches of the federal government are now considering curbs on access.
Consumer privacy concerns are also salient, as the FCC assesses telecom data sharing practices.
President Obama has emphasized that the NSA is “not looking at content.” “[T]his is just metadata,” Senator Feinstein told reporters. In dismissing the ACLU’s legal challenge, Judge Pauley shrugged off possible sensitive inferences as a “parade of horribles.” On the other side, a number of computer scientists have expressed concern over the privacy risks posed by metadata.
Read moreIn early January in 2014 Eloi Vanderbeken reported that vulnerability was found in Linksys and Netgear routers that gave full access to the device, including the root- shell.
The backdoor was not fixed in this post- update, but it was masked. And if before it was activated when the system started up, but now in order to activate it the ethernet- package of special type is needed to be send. So now it can be used only if you are an Internet Service Provider or in the same local network with a router. Among new function of the backdoor is possibility of flashing LEDs.
Read moreRussia's parliament has passed a bill that could see Western technology firms barred from operating if they fail to store Russian data within the country.
The legislation would require Silicon Valley companies, such as Facebook, Google’s Gmail, and Microsoft-owned Skype, to relocate Russian customer data back onto Russian soil in order to allow authorities to legally acquire and inspect data at will. Currently, Russian authorities have no powers to acquire data outside its borders, unless they submit a lawful mutual legal assistance request, which can be denied by that nation.
Read moreRussian law gives Russia’s security service, the FSB, the authority to use SORM (“System for Operative Investigative Activities”) to collect, analyze and store all data that transmitted or received on Russian networks, including calls, email, website visits and credit card transactions.
SORM has been in use since 1990 and collects both metadata and content. SORM-1 collects mobile and landline telephone calls. SORM-2 collects internet traffic. SORM-3 collects from all media (including Wi-Fi and social networks) and stores data for three years. Russian law requires all internet service providers to install an FSB monitoring device (called “Punkt Upravlenia”) on their networks that allows the direct collection of traffic without the knowledge or cooperation of the service provider.
Read moreIn response to Edward Snowden’s mass surveillance revelations, Google is working to make complex encryption tools, such as PGP, easier to use in Gmail. PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, is an encryption utility that historically has been difficult to break. But Google has “research underway to improve the usability of PGP with Gmail,” according to a person at the company familiar with the matter.
VentureBeat’s source at Google acknowledged that “end-to-end encryption is the best defense for message protection, though it comes at considerable cost in functionality.” PGP is currently compatible with Google’s Gmail service, although it’s widely regarded as unapproachable to a majority of Internet users — like the Tor project.
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