Items tagged with Snowden
In 2013, Edward Snowden released information on the U.S. Government regarding the mass surveillance and aggregation of data in America. Now, a U.S. Appellate Court has deemed the mass surveillance unconstitutional and thus illegal. As Reuters reported, “the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.” This is a win for both Snowden and people and groups against government surveillance. After fleeing persecution and ending up in Russia, Snowden is still following the situation. Yesterday,...
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There are many ways for one to monitor their physical surroundings and possessions, but these methods are not always accessible or inconspicuous. Haven: Keep Watch uses an Android device’s sensors to monitor an area and watch out for unwelcome guests; its stable version was released this past December. Haven was co-developed by Edward Snowden and the Guardian Project with the support of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It is both an open source project that is available on GitHub and an app that can be downloaded on Google Play. It was originally released in 2017, but has been updated over the past few months. Anyone can download Haven, but it was particularly created with journalists,...
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Geopolitical borders have softened in various ways thanks to the prevalence of the Internet. An email sent by an American could cross multiple international borders before being received by another American. A recent study by the Century Foundation revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly utilizes various “traffic shaping” techniques to survey and store American communications. Internet traffic does not travel along the shortest route, but instead favors the fastest, least congested, or least expensive course. Data from various countries is backed up in data centers around the world. Sharon Goldberg of the Century Foundation noted, “An email sent from San Jose to New York may...
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We reported earlier this week on a large collection of exploits that have been put up for auction by a group that calls itself Shadow Brokers. The promise was that all of the files were sourced from a secret NSA group called Equation Group, and now, Edward Snowden has released documents to prove that's just the case. This confirmation comes from The Intercept, a website which ultimately came to be as a direct result of Snowden's leaks three summers ago. With this trove of software confirmed to be sourced from the NSA, it raises some big questions. When Shadow Brokers put its collection of exploits up for auction, it took only a couple of days before we found out that there was some real threat...
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If you are worried that someone is trying to hack into your iPhone via radio transmissions, Edward Snowden might have the solution for you. Snowden and hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang just announced a design for a case-like device that connects to your iPhone and detects whether its radio is transmitting a signal. Snowden and Huang argued that phones can still transmit a signal if they are in airplane mode. Your GPS is still active even if your phone is not. They also contended that Faraday bags can still leak transmissions. A lone ranger phone therefore is not necessarily safe from surveillance. How would this add-on work? The actual device would look like a external battery case...
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Tired of reading about the FBI and Apple trading blows over an encrypted iPhone yet? Well relief may be in sight. This evening, the FBI filed a request to delay Tuesday's court hearing on the matter, and now that request has been accepted by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym. Why has the FBI suddenly changed course? According to the brief, the FBI has not stopped working on trying to access the data on Syed Farook's government issued iPhone 5C. They state that an "outside party" demonstrated a possible method for unlocking the phone on Sunday, March 20th, sparking this about face. The FBI has previously stated that they have exhausted all other known options. This...
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If you're passionate about the topics of privacy, government surveillance, and security and also how they relate to the FBI and DOJ's fight to unlock that fateful San Bernardino iPhone, the whole situation likely pales in comparison to what communist countries like China force their citizens to tolerate. In an effort to root out threats to society, the Chinese Communist Party has contracted for development of a data analytics technology of sorts that is best described as taking a page straight out of the 2002 movie staring Tom Cruise called Minority Report. Credit: Flickr TadokoroAs Bloomberg reports, a top Chinese contractor by the name of China Electronics Technology Group is developing a big...
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When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the significant spying efforts conducted by the NSA two summers ago, it was hard to grasp at first what ramifications would result from the documents release. Since then, the world has been hit by one leak after the other, and ultimately, we've seen that it's not surprising to see the US government do whatever it has to do in order to monitor the people it wants to, regardless of whether or not you feel this type of mass surveillance constitutional. Now, nearly six years after Chelsea Manning released a staggering collection of sensitive classified and unclassified documents to WikiLeaks, we learn of another whistleblower report that involves the use of...
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Since he brought to light the enormous spying efforts of the US government two years ago, Edward Snowden has opened our eyes to a slew of related and (sometimes, not so related) topics. Some are not quite expected, though, such as one he revealed during a chat with Neil deGrasse Tyson on his StarTalk podcast. Essentially, encryption could harm our chances of making contact with aliens. E.T. phone home? Not easily done with encryption. During the chat, Snowden says that if encryption is implemented really well, then it wouldn't be recognizable as encryption at all. Instead, it'd simply be random noise. Because of that, if aliens managed to pick up a signal, it could simply be chalked up as randomness,...
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It hasn't even been a single week since we learned that the NSA could have been involved in creating a bunch of malware that trickled out over the past decade, and already we have another scandal to munch on. Unfortunately, this one is even more disgusting -- if you can believe that. Via documents leaked to The Intercept by Edward Snowden, it's been revealed that both the US' NSA and Britain's GCHQ have been teaming-up since 2010 to bypass the security of mobile SIM cards the world over. Kicking this off, the intelligence agencies broke into the network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards, Gemalto. As of the time of writing, Gemalto has been unable to find traces of a breach. Britain's GCHQ...
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One of the more interesting stops on our recent trip to Amsterdam was at The Hague Security Delta. For those of you who might not be aware, The Hague is the name of the government seat of the Netherlands (and yes, the article is capitalized). The Hague Security Delta (HSD) is the official title of a collaborative effort between Netherlands businesses, the government, and multiple research institutions to identify emerging security threats, share best practices, and foster collaboration between industry, governments, and universities. One of the most interesting topics that came up during our visit was the issue of mobile network security, particularly now that Edward Snowden has let the cat somewhat...
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There's a fine line to balance when it comes to providing users with a comprehensive backup service and providing that service in a manner that fundamentally compromises the security of the people it's supposed to be protecting. According to security researcher Jeffrey Paul, iCloud has thoroughly breached that barrier thanks to unwelcome changes baked into OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). Here's the problem: Prior to now, if you were working in an application -- even a basic application like TextEdit (the Mac version of Notepad), and you quit the application, the machine would automatically save your documents and open the application with your previously-entered information when you relaunched it. It...
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Zero-day exploits are a nightmare for end-users and vendors alike as both groups have to scramble to patch and resolve problems. Today, Microsoft got tagged with one of the worst types of disclosures -- not only is there a vulnerability in every single shipping version of Windows, the vulnerability has been exploited for years by a team of Russian hackers, codenamed Sandworm. According to the iSight Partners, the Sandworm Team has been caught seeking data on the Ukrainian crisis (further undercutting the idea that the crisis in that state was anything but a Russian operation -- if such evidence were still needed), data on Western European governments, and other issues related to diplomacy, telecommunications,...
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One of the downsides to the news cycle is that no matter how big or hot a story is, something else inevitably comes along. The advent of ISIS and Ebola, combined with the passing of time, have pushed national security concerns out of the limelight -- until, that is, someone at the NSA helps out by reminding us that yes, the agency still exists and yes, it still has some insane policies and restrictions. Earlier this year, the Federation of American Scientists filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the NSA. The group was seeking information it thought would be relatively low-key -- what authorized information had been leaked to the media over the past 12 months? The NSA's response...
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News is out today of a survey from video advertising platform Ebuzzing claiming that it would cost an average of E140 per year per UK citizen to pay for an ad-free Internet and that the majority of users (98% of them, in fact) would never, ever be willing to pay such fees. I'm not surprised by results like this -- if someone asked me "Would you pay $185 a year to avoid pop-up ads?" my first thought would be "No, I'd install Ad Block" or "No, I'd just avoid the websites that show obnoxious ads I don't want to see." According to Ebuzzing's results, that's precisely what most of its respondents do. There is, however, a more interesting facet to this question. What would I pay to not be tracked online?...
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More details have surfaced on how the FBI uses its own custom malware to penetrate the Tor network's anonymizing service -- and while those tools have been deployed in some important investigations, it's sure to raise hackles in the post-Snowden era. Several years ago, the FBI launched a major sting operation against the operator of a Tor-anonymized website dubbed Pedoboard. They eventually traced the account back to one Aaron McGrath, discovered he was hosting three separate child pornography distribution hubs, and smashed all three of them. Hosting child pornography via Tor is a flagrant violation of the ToS, national, and international law, and few tears have been shed over the outcome. What...
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Over the past year, as criticism and anger have built over the NSA's numerous excesses and abuses of American civil rights, it's been easy to forget that underneath the justified anger, a genuine war has been raging. The NSA may have overreached in many respects, but that doesn't mean the government agency has invented problems from whole cloth -- and a new report drives that point home. According to the New York Times, top government officials have stated that Chinese hackers penetrated US government networks in March, potentially gaining access to thousands of dossiers on exactly which US citizens have applied for and been granted Top Secret clearance. The federal government did succeed in...
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The good news, if you can call it that, is that after polling hundreds of technology experts, the Pew Research Internet Project found that they don’t believe that cybercrime or hacking are the chief problems facing the Internet by 2025. Unfortunately, that’s because they believe there are other problems that will be worse. Those problems center around government and business interference with access and security as well as the curious issue of having too much information available. To be clear, this isn’t a study per se; Pew polled thousands of individuals in the tech field that it identified as experts with the following prompt: By 2025, will there be significant changes...
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Ever since Edward Snowden leaked details on how the government had forced various IT companies to disclose information (or secured their willing cooperation), companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been desperate to regain their users' trust. Six months ago, Microsoft announced that it would reengineer its products and services to provide a much higher level of security -- today, the company revealed that its reached an important milestone in that process. As of now, Outlook.com uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide end-to-end encryption for inbound and outbound email -- assuming that the provider on the other end also uses TLS. The TLS standard has been in the news fairly...
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Today, the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision on data privacy, holding 9-0 that neither police officers nor federal law enforcement have a unilateral right to search cell phones without first procuring a warrant. Prior to today, the government had previously argued that the police could search a cell phone under previous court rulings that extended such rights in limited cases, including incidents where the officers on the scene had reason to believe evidence could be destroyed or that the evidence was on the individual (or within arms' reach). What the Court recognized today is that a cell phone is something unique from a pack of cigarettes or a glove compartment that might contain a firearm....
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Ever since 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act, the federal government has pursued an aggressive set of data collection policies and surveillance practices. Edward Snowden's leaks last year may have raised public awareness of many of these events, but simply being aware of practices doesn't do a thing to stop them. Recent court decisions, however, could be a sign that the wall of secrecy the NSA has constructed to veil its actions is cracking -- with profound long-term implications. First, earlier this week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in United States v. Davis that cell phone users do have an expectation of privacy and that they do not "reasonably" understand that information...
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Last week, the ACLU was scheduled to meet with local police in Sarasota Florida to discuss the use of cell phone interception towers, dubbed stingrays, that are an increasingly common feature of federal and local investigations. A stingray is a fake cell phone tower that law enforcement can configure to temporarily replace the real towers a device would normally connect to. In an astonishing turn of events, the US Marshals Service has acted to prevent the meeting from taking place -- seizing all of the relevant records and claiming that they're the property of the Marshals (and by extension, the US government). Meanwhile, a Tallahassee judge reviewing a similar request for access to what ought...
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