Archive for the 'Covert Operations' Category
NSA Uses Google Cookies to Pinpoint Targets for Hacking
December 11th, 2013Via: Washington Post: The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using “cookies” and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance. The agency’s internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the […]
FreeBSD Developers: Don’t Trust Intel/Via Random Number Generators
December 10th, 2013Via: Ars Technica: Developers of the FreeBSD operating system will no longer allow users to trust processors manufactured by Intel and Via Technologies as the sole source of random numbers needed to generate cryptographic keys that can’t easily be cracked by government spies and other adversaries. The change, which will be effective in the upcoming […]
What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
December 10th, 2013Via: ACLU: We now know that the NSA is collecting location information en masse. As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered…
World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games
December 9th, 2013Via: ProPublica: Not limiting their activities to the earthly realm, American and British spies have infiltrated the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and scooping up data in the online games played by millions of people across the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Fearing that terrorist or criminal […]
The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With A Little Help From the CIA
December 7th, 2013Via: Time: One of the great things about the late great Nelson Mandela is that he didn’t hold grudges. How else could he have accepted normal relations with the CIA, which tipped off the white-supremacy regime to his whereabouts in 1962? According to a 1990 Johannesburg Sunday Times newspaper account, a CIA agent by the […]
Reagan Administration, CIA Complicit in DEA Agent’s Murder, Say Former Insiders
December 7th, 2013Via: Tico Times: Former DEA El Paso boss: Agent Camarena had discovered the arms-for-drugs operation run on behalf of the Contras, aided by U.S. officials in the National Security Council and the CIA, and threatened to blow the whistle on the covert operation. Two former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents and a former U.S. Central […]
NROL-39: Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach
December 6th, 2013Via: Register: The NRO are totally embracing their menacing Big Brother persona and putting it out there for world+dog to see, having launched a bunch of satellites and a mysterious payload on a spacecraft yesterday – complete with the logo of a creepy octopus sucking the life out of our world. The Office of the […]
Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet
December 5th, 2013Via: Wired: In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system — a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly. The traffic hijack, […]
Confirmed: NSA Tracking Cellphone Locations Worldwide
December 4th, 2013In summary, my thesis was that the NSA operation that Tice was involved with was related to tracking individual Americans, on the ground, in real time, using the mobile phone networks…I’m pretty sure that it knows more about all of us than we can imagine. —Cryptogon, 2007 I refuse to accept that this only targets […]
Mission Acomplished: Afghanistan Opium Harvest at Record High
December 4th, 2013Via: BBC: Afghan opium cultivation has reached a record level, with more than 200,000 hectares planted with the poppy for the first time, the United Nations says. The UNODC report said the harvest was 36% up on last year, and if fully realised would outstrip global demand. Most of the rise was in Helmand province, […]
