A list of the well-known politicians who have defended Edward Snowden

Now that he's left office, former attorney general Eric Holder appears to have softened a bit on how he'd handle Edward Snowden.

Holder told Yahoo News on Monday that he thinks his former Justice Department should strike a deal with Snowden, whose revelations of government spying on foreigners and Americans put our country "in a different place," according to Holder.

As Andrea Peterson makes clear over at The Switch, that's not quite the line Holder was toeing while in office. While never ruling out a plea deal, Holder had previously said Snowden "is a person that we lodged criminal charges against."

Now, Holder joins a small crowd of current and former politicians to defend or show leniency to the former National Security Agency contractor. Here are six more well-known Snowden defenders:

Jimmy Carter: He deserves leniency

Al Gore: What the government did was worse than what Snowden did

Sen. Chris Coons: Snowden's contributions should be recognized

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.): He's a whistleblower

Rep. John Conyers: His revelations were important

Read more @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/07/07/a-list-of-the-well-known-politicians-who-have-defended-edward-snowden/

 

NSA Search Engine Taps Into Global Comms to Intercept, Well, Everything

Edward Snowden has once again provided fodder for the surveillance fears of American citizens: New leaked documents show that the National Security Agency's (NSA's) XKeyscore search engine hoovers up vast amounts of private communications information, to the tune of 700,000 voice, fax and video files every day.

According to a report in The Intercept, XKeyscore doesn’t bother with intercepting last-mile telephone calls and the like. Oh no. It drinks directly from the hose: it taps into the billions off bits that are carried on the long-haul fiber-optic cables that make up the global communications network, including data on people's internet searches, documents, usernames, passwords, emails and chats, pictures, voice calls, webcam photos, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, VOIP streams taken from Skype sessions, etc. etc.

In other words, it absorbs everything.

XKeyscore is used by NSA intelligence agents as well as spooks in Canada, New Zealand and the UK (and possibly other allies) to target people by location, nationality and browsing histories. The NSA itself calls it "a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world" with "the ability to scale in both processing power and storage."

The Intercept reported that in reality, the system collects vast amounts of the aforementioned data and keeps it for up to five days—what the NSA calls “full-take” data on people’s communications. And, it stores the metadata of this traffic for up to 45 days. Storage facilities consist of 700+ servers scattered around the world, including in the US, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, and many other countries.

In a statement, the NSA told The Intercept that there’s nothing untoward going on:

Read more @ http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/nsa-search-engine-taps-into-global/

 

NSA to Keep Collecting Your Telephone Metadata for 6 More Months, Court Rules

Updated | "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

That’s the (translated) opening line of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s ruling, released today, which gives the NSA the go-ahead to temporarily resume its controversial bulk collection of telephone metadata.

The practice briefly came to an end earlier this month when provisions of the post-9/11 Patriot Act expired. As per the ruling, the agency is only permitted to restart the once-secret practice, uncovered by leaker Edward Snowden, for 180 days—the amount of time allotted by Congress in the USA Freedom Act.

Read more @ http://www.newsweek.com/nsa-keep-collecting-your-telephone-metadata-6-more-months-court-rules-348847

Remember Paul’s filibuster, and then they let the Patriot Act fall by the wayside in a very strange turn of events…… I think that is because they were told the FISA court will reinstate the spying on everyone….. so they let the Patriot Act drop……  it’s what it looks like to me anyway.  

Secret US court allows resumption of bulk phone metadata spying

A secret US tribunal ruled late Monday that the National Security Agency is free to continue its bulk telephone metadata surveillance program—the same spying that Congress voted to terminate weeks ago.

Congress disavowed the program NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed when passing the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed June 2. The act, however, allowed for the program to be extended for six months to allow "for an orderly transition" to a less-invasive telephone metadata spying program.

For that to happen, the Obama administration needed the blessing of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). The government just revealed the order.

In setting aside an appellate court's ruling that the program was illegal, the FISA Court ruled that "Congress deliberately carved out a 180-day period following the date of enactment in which such collection was specially authorized. For this reason, the Court approves the application (PDF) in this case."

The government urged the FISA Court not to acquiesce to a federal appellate court's May decision that declared illegal the collection of metadata from every call in and out of the United States. That court had ruled that Congress did not clearly authorize the spying. The Justice Department also told the secret court that the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals' decisions "do not constitute controlling precedent for this Court."

Read more @ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/secret-us-court-allows-resumption-of-bulk-phone-metadata-spying/

FISA Court Authorizes NSA to Resume Bulk Collection of Domestic Phone Calls

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA court), which supervises the activity of the National Security Agency and grants surveillance warrants against international spies, ruled on Monday that the agency may resume its bulk telephone data collection activities.

Yet the American Civil Liberties Union stepped in and filed a complaint with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which had previously decided that the program was unlawful, and requested an injunction.

The NSA program was due on June 1, but the Congress revived it a day later by passing the USA Freedom bill. The new law stated that bulk collection of phone record could not be resumed until six months have passed.

The six-month rest was necessary to allow the NSA switch to a different type of surveillance program – one in which phone records are kept by phone companies but federal agents have access to them.

Bulk collection of phone data only involves keeping track of phone numbers and call duration with no info on the content of conversations, officials say.

Read more @ http://www.wallstreetotc.com/fisa-court-authorizes-nsa-to-resume-bulk-collection-of-domestic-phone-calls/219336/

 

Personally I think a secret court is highly fishy….. courts should not be secret because there is far too much corruption going on worldwide!

  

US Court: NSA Can Resume Bulk Data Collection

Read more @ http://www.voanews.com/content/us-court-nsa-can-resume-bulk-data-collection/2844037.html

 

Court gives the NSA permission to continue phone metadata collection for now

Read more @ http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/court-rules-nsa-resume-phone-metadata-collection/

 

The USA Freedom Act and Fourth Amendment Jurisprudence

The USA Freedom Act of 2015, enacted June 2, sharply curtails the ability of the National Security Agency and FBI to obtain, without judicial approval, transactional telephone records from carriers and to search the metadata contained in those records without judicial approval as well. Privacy advocates in both parties fought hard for the act (as well as for more restrictions, which did not pass, on the government's ability to perform such surveillance).

The revelations of Edward Snowden, a former CIA analyst and NSA contract analyst, regarding the surveillance are well known and need no general summary. What is interesting, from a Fourth Amendment point of view, is whether the act renders moot the famous two-part test for determining whether an area enjoys privacy protection under the Fourth Amendment, announced in Justice John Marshall Harlan II's concurring opinion in Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967), under which a court is first to determine whether the subject evinced a subjective expectation of privacy, and second to determine whether society finds that expectation to be reasonable (hence, the famous "reasonable expectation of privacy").

Read more @ http://www.thelegalintelligencer.com/id=1202731358280/The-USA-Freedom-Act-and-Fourth-Amendment-Jurisprudence?slreturn=20150608002440

 

What a joke…. America has been hit by terrorist attacks in the past and all the spying did not stop them…..

 

Chris Christie: If U.S. Hit By Terror Attack, Haul Rand Paul Before Congress

Gov. Chris Christie on Monday escalated his criticism of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul over his stance against the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone call records, saying his rival for the Republican presidential nomination should be forced to testify before Congress if the U.S. suffers a terrorist attack.

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Monday morning, Mr. Christie said that Mr. Paul’s opposition to the NSA’s metadata program had made the U.S. “weaker and more vulnerable.”

“He should be in hearings in front of Congress if there’s another attack, not the director of the FBI or the director of the CIA,” said Mr. Christie, a former U.S. Attorney who launched his presidential campaign last week.

Read more @ http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/07/06/chris-christie-if-u-s-hit-by-terror-attack-haul-rand-paul-before-congress/

 

'Journalism as a Profession May Soon Dry Up If Sources Can Be Easily Traced'

CHENNAI: “When you guys go to a doctor for a medical check-up, do you think that’s a private conversation?” Alan Rusbridger asks  the audience of teachers and students. The query is met with a unanimous ‘yes’ from the sea of 196 students listening in rapt attention to the former Editor-in-chief of The Guardian, who became popular after he broke the news of the National Surveillance Agency (NSA) snooping, brought to light by American whistleblower Edward Snowden. “To a journalist, a source is something sacred, and information that comes our way is sensitive,” said the veteran, speaking at the orientation session of the Asian College of Journalism which welcomed its newest batch of students on Monday.

Rusbridger, who will be conducting sessions for the students during his three-week-long stint, will be speaking under three themes - ‘Climate Change’, ‘Snowden’ and ‘Other modes of Journalism’. 

“If it becomes easy to trace who all a journalist met with and spoke to, in the coming future, the profession will soon dry up,” he noted, speaking on ‘Journalism since Edward Snowden’.  He points out that it is in this current era of international espionage and privacy being a premium, that the whistle-blower made his case known through The Guardian.

Rusbridger says that it is easy for a government to figure out what every single person at a given room of audience is up to. “It won’t take more than minutes to tell what each one of you does, your background and your activities,” he told the students whose interest was piqued further. Metadata, for instance, was revealed to be a treasure trove for information-siphoning. Although it differs from ‘data’ in some technical respects, it is still perused by international spies putting people in the risk of being snooped on and data-theft. In layman’s language, Metadata is data about data (data about a text message for example like time, date, sender) and if “only need metadata, not your personal data” is an institutional disclaimer that used to put people at ease, we might have to think again. Because, as Alan reveals, “If you ask spies, they’ll say ‘that’s all we need’. Just metadata can help in drawing the pattern of a person’s life and habits.” He rues that at the international level, the technology engaged by  governments in scouring its own citizen’s personal data is shockingly beyond the knowledge and comprehension of even legislators and judiciary. “And in the midst of political and commercial affiliations, the decision to publish something comes down to the story itself. The decision stands on the folds of the material,” he says, answering the plethora of questions from the students. “You’re here to think! If there’s time for it after your lessons that is..” he adds in jest.  

Read more @ http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/Journalism-as-a-Profession-May-Soon-Dry-Up-If-Sources-Can-Be-Easily-Traced/2015/07/07/article2906689.ece

 

XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications

One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.

These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. “At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage.”

Read more @ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/01/nsas-google-worlds-private-communications/

 

The Shocking Scope of the NSA's XKEYSCORE Surveillance

Every time anyone uses a computer to send an e-mail, watch a video, do a Google search, or update a Facebook status, the National Security Agency (NSA) is probably collecting and collating that activity on one of its many servers.

XKEYSCORE — the codename of the computer code used by the NSA to perform these actions — is massive and more intrusive than most people understand.

On July 2, Micah Lee, Glenn Greenwald, and Morgan Marquis-Boire of The Intercept published the second of a two-part exposé of the inner-workings of this system that should shock the consciences of constitutionalists and civil libertarians.

The revelations are based on information gleaned from documents leaked to Greenwald (and others) by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower who uncovered and then revealed the massive violations of the Constitution being carried out by the government of the United States.

How wide is the net cast by the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system? The Intercept reports:

XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.

Surprisingly, the second installment reveals that XKEYSCORE is powerful, despite being built on some rather simple software. The Intercept reports:

This global Internet surveillance network is powered by a somewhat clunky piece of software running on clusters of Linux servers. Analysts access XKEYSCORE’s web interface to search its wealth of private information, similar to how ordinary people can search Google for public information.

It is tempting to assume that expensive, proprietary operating systems and software must power XKEYSCORE, but it actually relies on an entirely open source stack. In fact, according to an analysis of an XKEYSCORE manual for new systems administrators from the end of 2012, the system may have design deficiencies that could leave it vulnerable to attack by an intelligence agency insider.

XKEYSCORE is a piece of Linux software that is typically deployed on Red Hat servers. It uses the Apache web server and stores collected data in MySQL databases. File systems in a cluster are handled by the NFS distributed file system and the autofs service, and scheduled tasks are handled by the cron scheduling service. Systems administrators who maintain XKEYSCORE servers use SSH to connect to them, and they use tools such as rsync and vim, as well as a comprehensive command-line tool, to manage the software.

While the vulnerabilities of the NSA’s XKEYSCORE system are disturbing, the way it is used to gobble up gigabytes of personal data and online habits of millions of people never suspected of any crime should certainly be more alarming.

Greenwald first described the details of the program in July 2013 after examining a PowerPoint presentation included in the information he received from Snowden. In his first report, he explained the scope of XKEYSCORE.

One presentation claims the [XKEYSCORE] program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet," including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata. Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual’s internet activity.

Exactly how does it work? Greenwald explained that, too: “An NSA tool called DNI Presenter, used to read the content of stored emails, also enables an analyst using XKEYSCORE to read the content of Facebook chats or private messages. Analysts can also search by name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, the language in which the internet activity was conducted or the type of browser used.”

The New American published information earlier that the NSA uses XKEYSCORE to save gigabytes of Internet traffic data; however, that is a gross understatement.

Read more @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/21193-the-shocking-scope-of-the-nsa-s-xkeyscore-surveillance

 

Behind the Curtain :  A Look at the Inner Workings of NSA’s XKEYSCORE

The sheer quantity of communications that XKEYSCORE processes, filters and queries is stunning. Around the world, when a person gets online to do anything — write an email, post to a social network, browse the web or play a video game — there’s a decent chance that the Internet traffic her device sends and receives is getting collected and processed by one of XKEYSCORE’s hundreds of servers scattered across the globe.

In order to make sense of such a massive and steady flow of information, analysts working for the National Security Agency, as well as partner spy agencies, have written thousands of snippets of code to detect different types of traffic and extract useful information from each type, according to documents dating up to 2013. For example, the system automatically detects if a given piece of traffic is an email. If it is, the system tags if it’s from Yahoo or Gmail, if it contains an airline itinerary, if it’s encrypted with PGP, or if the sender’s language is set to Arabic, along with myriad other details.

This global Internet surveillance network is powered by a somewhat clunky piece of software running on clusters of Linux servers. Analysts access XKEYSCORE’s web interface to search its wealth of private information, similar to how ordinary people can search Google for public information.

Based on documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Intercept is shedding light on the inner workings of XKEYSCORE, one of the most extensive programs of mass surveillance in human history.

How XKEYSCORE works under the hood

It is tempting to assume that expensive, proprietary operating systems and software must power XKEYSCORE, but it actually relies on an entirely open source stack. In fact, according to an analysis of an XKEYSCORE manual for new systems administrators from the end of 2012, the system may have design deficiencies that could leave it vulnerable to attack by an intelligence agency insider.

Read more @ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/02/look-under-hood-xkeyscore/

 

A Government Snoop That Puts the NSA To Shame

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans to monitor 95% of all credit-card transactions by 2016

Since Edward Snowden leaked details of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance program two years ago, the controversy over privacy and domestic spying has crossed party lines, embarrassed senior officials and launched presidential campaigns. The political furor led to passage of the USA Freedom Act in early June. It will stop the NSA from collecting information on millions of American citizens’ phone calls.

A Pew survey in May showed bipartisan majority disapproval of the NSA program—including 56% of Republicans, 48% of Democrats and 57% of independents. Yet the NSA at least was trying to protect Americans from terrorism. Another, far more pernicious data-collection program run by another huge, secretive and unaccountable government bureaucracy exists instead for the purpose of limiting Americans’ freedom.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, through its 12 data-mining programs, collects and monitors information for nearly 600 million personal credit-card accounts on a monthly basis. The CFPB is gearing up to monitor 95% of all credit-card transactions by 2016 (more about this below).

The NSA surveillance program that stirred controversy gathered “metadata”—not the content of the calls, but information like the numbers dialed, the call duration, and the cellphone towers involved. According to the NSA and President Obama, the data collected was anonymous. But researchers at Stanford have demonstrated that linking supposedly anonymous phone numbers back to real people is simple. At that point, the data allows for inferences about those people, their relationships and activities.

If your cellphone bill can reveal that much personal information, imagine how much is contained in your credit-card bill. Every restaurant you visit, every drugstore purchase, every trip you go on, every time you fill up your car—all potentially scooped up by a government agency. And earlier this year MIT researchers demonstrated a method to “re-identify” anonymous credit-card data.

Every month the CFPB also gathers data on 22 million mortgages, 5.5 million student loans, two million bank accounts with overdraft fees, and hundreds of thousands of auto sales, credit scores and deposit advance loans.

The agency claims most of the data it acquires through third parties is anonymous. But as in the case with the NSA surveillance, anonymous means only that the CFPB hasn’t connected the data with a name at the time they collect it. All of the data the CFPB is accumulating adds up to millions of detailed profiles of American citizens.

Section 1022 of the Dodd-Frank Act—the 2010 law that created the CFPB—specifically bars the agency from collecting data “for purposes of gathering or analyzing the personally identifiable financial information of consumers.” But Section 1031 does give the CFPB broad power to prohibit what the agency determines to be “unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices.”The express purpose of the data collection, according to the agency, is to decide what it will prohibit.

That’s a far cry from trying to prevent another 9/11. It’s also a far cry from the private information that we entrust to companies like Visa V -0.51 % and Google. GOOG 0.41 % To the extent that these companies data-mine, they do so to better serve us as consumers. CFPB’s snooping is about deciding what financial services or products—such as auto loans or payment processors like PayPal—consumers shouldn’t be able to choose.

Read more @ http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10907564710791284872504581070502004499610

 

I do not believe this….. if spying stops the terrorists then why did 9/11 happen, they were spying on everyone long before that happened….. and what about the Boston Bombings….. sorry, I believe Snowden who said the spying isn’t about catching terrorists…. Its about power, and control and economic espionage etc….  Snowden’s honesty shines like a beacon of light in the darkness that is sweeping the earth….. It didn’t stop the recent terrorist attacks in France, and they spy on everyone there too, and it didn’t stop the recent lone wolf terrorist in Australia….. and the spies here spy on everyone too…..  which pretty much proves the point of what Snowden made about it not being about terrorism. As the saying goes, the proof is in the pudding….. what has come of it is more laws to protect the spying which I think is highly suspicious…

 

From Church to a Beach: The New Terrorist Target Is You

Only good intelligence gathering can stop terror attacks before they begin, and that’s harder to do post-Snowden. Meanwhile jihadist targets are getting ever more random.

The photograph of Seifeddine Rezgui that surfaced after he slaughtered dozens of mainly Western vacationers in the Tunisian resort of Sousse is a picture of beachside nonchalance. Take away the Kalashnikov held languidly in his right hand with the barrel pointed down and he looks like just another beachcomber going for a stroll, kicking up some spray by the Mediterranean’s edge.

Read more @ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/01/from-church-to-a-beach-the-new-terrorist-target-is-you.html

 

A Spy’s Guide to Protecting Whistleblowers

Journalists now compete with spooks and spies, and the spooks have the home-field advantage.

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA—A smiling woman I don’t know greets me by first name.

The conference room has been swept for surveillance devices, she explains, and everyone who enters will get a brief pat-down.

With three other journalists and a computer security expert, I am about to begin a two-day training in pre-electronic spycraft. Our instructors: two military police veterans. The goal: Learn how to protect people who risk their jobs or freedom to share information with the public—aka whistleblowers.

After we all get settled in, class starts. “Once you realize that what’s possible in electronic surveillance today has basically reached the realm of science fiction, you have to take a different route,” says Larry Jones, a former intelligence analyst for the Marines and one of the workshop’s leaders.

His partner, Daryl Baginski, guides us through pen-and-paper cryptosystems—ways to encrypt and decrypt short messages. When we’ve encrypted a note, we mail it or leave it for someone to pick up. These techniques date back thousands of years, but even simple ciphers can stump today’s best code-breaking computers for days. A cipher called the “one-time pad” can defeat computer analysis entirely and is still used by spies. However, to get around its limitations (it requires a long key of random letters), Baginski invented his own cipher and teaches it in class. The aim, Baginski says, is “making it prohibitively laborious and expensive to keep a tab on you.”

“Governments from all over the world are [acting] against journalists, human rights activists, human rights defenders and political dissidents,” explains Bruce Schneier, widely considered the foremost U.S. electronic-security expert (Congress called him in to explain the implications of the Edward Snowden leaks). “There’s an arms race here, and journalists are losing.”

In November 2014, for example, The Intercept reported that the U.K.’s top intelligence agencies gave their employees authority to ignore attorney-client privilege and review the private documents of anyone in “sensitive professions,” including journalists. In February 2014, the Washington Post reported that state actors from Ethiopia were the “likely culprits” in a campaign to spy on U.S. journalists with “off-the-shelf ” spyware. Meanwhile, under the Obama administration, the U.S. government has subpoenaed or snooped on reporters from Fox News to the New York Times and, according to an analysis by PolitiFact, prosecuted more employees for press leaks than all previous administrations combined.

In this climate, journalists must take precautions when communicating with sensitive sources. In 2012, reporters from Vice News failed to strip metadata from a photo of John McAfee, a famous fugitive with whom they were traveling, and inadvertently revealed his location. But even the best electronic security practices have their limits. “Journalists now compete with spooks and spies,” Tom Lowenthal, the resident security expert for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), wrote in a recent post on CPJ’s website, “and the spooks have the home-field advantage.”

Someone monitoring power lines can tell what sequence of keys are being pressed on a plugged-in keyboard. That includes the passwords necessary to unlock encrypted communications and files. Another device can, from a short distance away, read the electromagnetic waves emanating from computer monitors. So anything on screen is potentially vulnerable. Still wackier are the programs that can listen to the tiny sounds of a computer processor. A technician with sufficient software can, in theory, enlist your cell phone to listen to the data being handled by your nearby laptop—including, again, encryption keys. In this age of technological wizardry, the humble passing of notes may be the last way to communicate with guaranteed privacy.

Read more @ http://inthesetimes.com/article/18035/a-spys-guide-to-protecting-whistleblowers

 

J.L. Bourne talks about real fears behind his new novel

 A global grid-down blackout explodes into an international meltdown. Panic and inflation soar even while medicine and food supplies dwindle. And a small, scattered insurgency takes up arms against what's left of the U.S. military.

This is the grim near-future imagined by an active-duty Navy intelligence expert in his new post-apocalyptic page-turner "Tomorrow War."

Out today, it's billed by publisher Simon & Schuster as an "ultrarealistic" account of an "alternate dystopian America located just down the tracks of oblivion."

This is, of course, a novel and, by definition, fiction. But like a modern-day prophet weaving deeper truth into the darkest of parables, the author says he also hopes his book serves as a wake-up call about an all-too-possible future.

"At its core, 'Tomorrow War' is a warning, based on the current snapshot of America today. This is about how things might look if we don't turn things around and start getting serious about freedom and liberty," author J.L. Bourne tells OFFduty.

Read more @ http://www.militarytimes.com/story/entertainment/2015/06/30/tomorrow-war-jl-bourne-grid-down-constitution/29106569/

 

Hacking Team Breach Shows a Global Spying Firm Run Amok

Few news events can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime’s human rights record.

On Sunday night, unidentified hackers published a massive, 400 gigabyte trove on bittorrent of internal documents from the Milan-based Hacking Team, a firm long accused of unethical sales of tools that help governments break into target computers and phones. The breached trove includes executive emails, customer invoices and even source code; the company’s twitter feed was hacked, controlled by the intruders for nearly 12 hours, and used to distribute samples of the company’s hacked files. The security community spent Sunday night picking through the spy firm’s innards and in some cases finding what appear to be new confirmations that Hacking Team sold digital intrusion tools to authoritarian regimes. Those revelations may be well timed to influence an ongoing U.S. policy debate over how to control spying software, with a deadline for public debate on new regulations coming this month.

One document pulled from the breached files, for instance, appears to be a list of Hacking Team customers along with the length of their contracts. These customers include Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and several United States agencies including the DEA, FBI and Department of Defense. Other documents show that Hacking Team issued an invoice for $1 million to Ethiopia’s Information Network Security Agency (the spy agency of a country known to surveil and censor its journalists and political dissidents) for licensing its Remote Control System, a spyware tool. For Sudan, a country that’s the subject of a UN embargo, the documents show a $480,000 invoice to its National Intelligence and Security Services for the same software.

Read more @ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hacking-team-breach-shows-global-spying-firm-run-amok/

 

Security News This Week: Your VPN Probably Isn’t Private

So many hacks, so few days in the week to write alarming stories about every one. Here’s our roundup of what you have may missed this week.

First, some news: a shocking revelation that the GCHQ, England’s spy organization, has been spying on Amnesty International. This is ironic, considering the UK government is party to the Wassenaar Agreement, which explicitly forbids regimes from spying on human rights groups.

The MIT media lab, along with two bitcoin entrepreneurs, revealed a prototype for Enigma, a system designed to encrypt data that can be shared with untrusted computers to run computations without being decrypted.

Researcher Ben Caudill will unveil a hardware proxy at DefCon designed to move you up to two and a half miles away from your IP address using a radio connection.

In movie news, a mysterious teaser trailer has finally been released for Snowden, the Oliver Stone-directed flick about the whistleblower and former NSA contractor.

And you may have noticed a slight anomaly: Tuesday’s leap second caused some sporadic outages across the Internet just after midnight.

Read more @ http://www.wired.com/2015/07/security-news-this-week-070215/  


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