Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
The New “Convenient” Way to Buy Wine in Pennsylvania: Swipe Driver’s License, Look Into Camera, Blow Into Breath Sensor
July 9th, 2010Via: AP: Swipe your driver’s license, look into the camera, blow into the breath sensor and — voila! — you have permission to buy a bottle of wine from a vending machine. Pennsylvania, which has some of the most Byzantine liquor laws in the nation, recently introduced the country’s first wine “kiosks.” If the machines […]
German Government Takes Legal Action Against Facebook; Saving Private Data of Non-Members for Marketing Purposes
July 8th, 2010Via: BBC: German officials have launched legal proceedings against Facebook for accessing and saving the personal data of people who do not use the site. Facebook could face fines of tens of thousands of euros under privacy laws. The social networking firm confirmed it had received a letter about the action. “We consider the saving […]
NSA’s “Perfect Citizen” Program
July 8th, 2010Maybe NSA could use the already operational intercept nodes to place the new “sensors.” Via: Wall Street Journal: The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with […]
Britain: Surveillance System Monitors Conversations
July 5th, 2010Via: Telegraph: The technology, called Sigard, monitors movements and speech to detect signs of threatening behaviour. Its designers claim the system can anticipate anti-social behaviour and violence by analysing the information picked up its sensors. They say alerts are then sent to police, nightclub bouncers or shop security staff, which allow them to nip trouble […]
Next WikiLeaks Release May Involve ECHELON
June 22nd, 2010If they have information related to tasking the system, such as the words and phrases used, or the targets of the system, or actual intercepts, that would be pretty astonishing. It’s hard to believe that they would have stuff like this, but who knows… Look at that 9/11 pager data dump. Where did that come […]
U.S. Worried About Losing Gigantic Surveillance Honeypot to Russian Company
June 22nd, 2010Dr. Evil and the rest of the scum and villainy in the universe communicate via clear text instant messenger? Via: Financial Times: Senior US law enforcement officials have objected to AOL’s pending sale of one of the largest instant-messaging services to a Russian investment firm, fearing it will put some of the world’s top criminals […]
Pentagon “Revives” Rumsfeld-Era Domestic Spying Unit
June 21st, 2010The people at Raw Story should type MAIN CORE into a search engine and get back to us about how this is just now being revived. Via: Raw Story: The Pentagon’s spy unit has quietly begun to rebuild a database for tracking potential terrorist threats that was shut down after it emerged that it had […]
Napolitano on Internet Surveillance
June 20th, 2010Via: AP: Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday. As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, […]
NSA Whistleblower Used Hushmail to Communicate with Reporter
June 16th, 2010Absolutely no surprises here. At best, Hushmail is useless for communications where a state is the privacy attacker. At worst, it’s a purpose built honeypot. See this one from 2007: Hushmail: Encrypted Email Provider Turns Over Clear Text Messages to Feds. Via: Weekly Standard: To communicate covertly with the Sun reporter, Drake opened up a […]
GCHQ by Richard Aldrich
June 16th, 2010GCHQ by Richard Aldrich on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. Via: Register: If information indeed is power, then GCHQ is undoubtedly the closest thing the British government has to the Death Star. As the historian Richard J Aldrich notes in the introduction to his excellent new history of the Cheltenham-based agency it represents by far our largest, […]
