The undercover war on your internet secrets: How online surveillance cracked our trust in the web

Learn how the battle over privacy technologies could define the future of the web. This TechRepublic cover story explains the strange history and the serious consequences of the fight over encryption.

A black shrouded figure appears on the screen, looming over the rapt audience, talking about surveillance. But this is no Big Brother figure seeking obedience though, rather the opposite.

Perhaps even his nemesis.

NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden is explaining how his former employer and other intelligence agencies have worked to undermine privacy on the internet and beyond.

"We're seeing systemic attacks on the fabrics of our systems, the fabric of our communications... by undermining the security of our communications, they enable surveillance," he warns.

He is speaking at the conference via a video link from Russia, where he has taken refuge after leaking the documents detailing some of the NSA's surveillance projects. The room behind him is in darkness, giving away nothing about his exact location.

"Surveillance is not possible when our movements and communications are safe and protected — a satellite cannot see you when you are inside your home — but an unprotected computer with an open webcam can," he adds.

Over the last two years a steady stream of documents leaked by Snowden have laid bare how intelligence agencies in the US and the UK have waged a secret war against privacy on the internet. How they have worked to undermine the technologies used by billions of people every day to protect everything from mundane messages — or webcam chats — to their most secret thoughts.

Read more @ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-undercover-war-on-your-internet-secrets-how-online-surveillance-cracked-our-trust-in-the-web/ 

 

Which Apps Expose Your Data to the NSA’s Spying?

A recent Pew Research Center report found that some Internet users have changed their use of social networking services, apps, email, and even search engines as a result of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations about the government’s pervasive online surveillance. So how does your smartphone — the device that many of us find indispensable in our day-to-day lives — have the potential to expose your personal data and your online activity to government snooping? How does your mobile device protect your anonymity, and how does it leave your communications vulnerable to interception by the NSA and other intelligence agencies?

Which apps are tapped (or asking to be tapped) by the NSA?

Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA and GCHQ exploit not only the location data that our phones share, but all of the data that streams from the apps we use everyday, according to the New York Times. With each new generation of mobile phones, greater amounts of personal data pour onto networks where spies can access it. Among the most valuable of those “unintended intelligence tools” are so-called leaky apps, which share everything from the smartphone identification codes of users to where users have been that day.

The NSA and its British counterpart were working together on how to collect and store data from dozens of smartphone apps as early as 2007, and since then have traded techniques for acquiring location and planning data when a “target” uses Google Maps, and for accessing address books, friends lists, phone logs, and geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other services.

The agencies also showed particular interest in Google Maps, which is accurate to within a few yards or better, and collected so much data from the app that an NSA report from 2007 claimed that the agencies would “be able to clone Google’s database” of global searches for directions. A British report from 2012 included the code needed to access the profiles generated when Android users play Angry Birds.

Read more @ http://www.cheatsheet.com/technology/which-apps-expose-your-data-to-the-nsas-spying.html/?a=viewall 


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~