Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
New Hydrogen Powered Drone Can Fly for Four Days
June 5th, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times: A massive experimental drone designed by Boeing Co. engineers to fly for up to four days at a time completed its first test flight above the Mojave Desert at Edwards Air Force Base. The drone, called Phantom Eye, and its hydrogen-fueled propulsion system have the potential to vastly expand the reach […]
Microsoft Update and The Nightmare Scenario
June 5th, 2012Via: F Secure: About 900 million Windows computers get their updates from Microsoft Update. In addition to the DNS root servers, this update system has always been considered one of the weak points of the net. Antivirus people have nightmares about a variant of malware spoofing the update mechanism and replicating via it. Turns out, […]
Castoff NRO Satellites Have Better Telescopes Than Hubble; If Pointed at Earth ‘Can See a Dime Sitting on Top of the Washington Monument’
June 4th, 2012The way it was told to me back in the 1980s, by a guy I thought was nuts, was that, “A dime on the sidewalk was no problem,” for NRO. Well, that’s pretty similar to what was just printed in the Washington Post today: NASA official Michael Moore gave some hint of what a Hubble-class […]
Flame ‘Could only have been written by a large team of highly skilled software engineers’
June 2nd, 2012Via: Ars Technica: At least 20 modules available for the malware bring a menu of highly advanced spying capabilities to the unknown people who control it. One plugin turns on the internal microphone of infected machines so Skype conversations can be secretly monitored in real time. A separate module scans nearby Bluetooth-enabled devices for names […]
‘The Last Days of Cash’
May 31st, 2012IEEE: A Special Report on the Future of Money – The Last Days of Cash – How E-Money Technology is Plugging Us into the Digital Economy
Anti-Censorship Tool Used in Syria and Iran Compromised; Logs Keystrokes, Phones Home to Server in U.S.
May 31st, 2012Via: Security Week: Simurgh, a privacy tool used in Iran and Syria to bypass Internet censorship and governmental monitoring, is being circulated with a backdoor. The compromised version has been offered on P2P networks and via web searches. Research conducted by CitizenLab.org has shown that malicious version isn’t available form the original software source, only […]
Solar Powered Ground Sensors That Can Transmit Information for Decades
May 29th, 2012Via: Wired: America is supposed to wind down its war in Afghanistan by 2014. But U.S. forces may continue to track Afghans for years after the conflict is officially done. Palm-sized sensors, developed for the American military, will remain littered across the Afghan countryside — detecting anyone who moves nearby and reporting their locations back […]
Texas: Students Will Be Tracked Via Chips in IDs
May 25th, 2012Via: My San Antonio: Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students. District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) […]
FBI Quietly Forms Secretive Net-Surveillance Unit
May 24th, 2012My guess is that this headline should read, “Sheepdipped NSA Sources and Methods Now Used for Domestic Law Enforcement.” Via: Cnet: CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications. Research Credit: almaverdad2
NSA Running College Programs for Cyber Operators
May 23rd, 2012Via: Reuters: The National Security Agency is trying to expand U.S. cyber expertise needed for secret intelligence operations against adversaries on computer networks through a new cyber-ops program at selected universities. The cyber-ops curriculum is geared to providing the basic education for jobs in intelligence, military and law enforcement that are so secret they will […]
