Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Senators Accuse Government of Using ‘Secret Law’ to Collect Americans’ Data
June 29th, 2013Ya think? I was surprised to see them mention the mobile phone location data. I mean, come on, that’s the stuff of lunatic conspiracy theorists! *chortle* Via: Guardian: The senators said they were seeking public answers to the following questions in order to give the American people the information they need to conduct an informed […]
Former Stasi Lieutenant Colonel On NSA’s Mass Surveillance: ‘It Is The Height Of Naivete To Think That Once Collected This Information Won’t Be Used’
June 28th, 2013Via: McClatchy: Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile […]
License-Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records on Drivers
June 27th, 2013Via: Center for Investigative Reporting: When the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had photographed his car. The results shocked him. The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police […]
U.S. Surveillance Best Suited for Gathering Information on Law-Abiding Citizens
June 24th, 2013Via: Bloomberg: The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens. People concerned with online privacy tend to […]
The Insider Threat Program
June 23rd, 2013Via: McClatchy: Even before a former U.S. intelligence contractor exposed the secret collection of Americans’ phone records, the Obama administration was pressing a government-wide crackdown on security threats that requires federal employees to keep closer tabs on their co-workers and exhorts managers to punish those who fail to report their suspicions. President Barack Obama’s unprecedented […]
Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow, Seeking Political Asylum in Ecuador
June 23rd, 2013Operation Snowden Has Become the NSA Story Via: Washington Post: We can surmise that the information was leaking anyway, and so the government needed a distraction. Something connected to the NSA, so covering it would still feel like covering the NSA story, but that would divert much of the press from covering the actual programs. […]
Captain Obvious: GCHQ Taps Fiber Optic Cables
June 22nd, 2013Via: Guardian: Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA). The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition […]
Russ Tice on Boiling Frogs Podcast
June 21st, 2013What we have here is essentially a computer age, orders-of-magnitude-worse extension of what Curt Gentry laid out in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Tice said that NSA has turned into a rogue organization, “That’s there to protect its own interests.” That’s nothing new, if you look at bureaucratic politics—all government organizations do […]
Never Give Stores Your Zip Code
June 20th, 2013Via: Forbes: Why make such a big deal over five digits that only records that someone lives in the same area as many thousands of others? Because along with other information, the ZIP code may provide the final clue to figuring out your address, phone number and past purchasing details, if a sales clerk sees […]
India: Central Monitoring System
June 20th, 2013Via: Times of India: India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance program that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said. The expanded surveillance in the world’s most populous democracy, which the government says will […]
