The National Security Agency on Saturday released a statement in answer to questions from a senator about whether it “has spied, or is … currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials”, in which it did not deny collecting communications from legislators of the US Congress to whom it says it is accountable.
In a letter dated 3 January, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont defined “spying” as “gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business”.
Read moreFacebook has been hit with another privacy lawsuit. The class-action suit takes aim at the social network’s alleged practice of scanning users’ private messages in order to profit from their data. For instance, the suit complains, if you send a private message to a Facebook friend that includes a link to another website—say, this article on Slate—Facebook takes notice. Ars Technica’s Casey Johnston explains:
The plaintiffs describe how Facebook effectively “clicks” on links within Facebook messages, an activity that it doesn’t explicitly disclose to users. The lawsuit claims Facebook crawls the linked page to see if it contains one of Facebook’s “Like” buttons. If so, Facebook registers that private-message link as a “Like” on the relevant site’s Facebook page—a strange example of turning a private communication public.
Read moreIn 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 Chaos Computer Congress is the largest offline hacker gathering in Europe. Over 9000 people came to Hamburg between Christmas and New Years Eve to attend talks, discuss, meet up with like-minded folk, hack, make and rejoice in the abundance of LEDs.
It being a hacker conference there was a high DIY level. The congress was organized and run by volunteers called Angels, self-organized sessions outnumbered the talks of the main program and groups organized in Assemblies to create a home base in the sea of people. The Congress Center Hamburg building was completely pimped, its CCH logo hacked to read CCC, a temporary night club was built up on the ground floor (with working water canon!) and the congress’ rocket logo came to life in front of the entrance.
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 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 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.
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