Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
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, […]
Judge Limits DHS Laptop Border Searches
June 11th, 2010Via: Cnet: A federal judge has ruled that border agents cannot seize a traveler’s laptop, keep it locked up for months, and examine it for contraband files without a warrant half a year later. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in the Northern District of California rejected the Obama administration’s argument that no warrant was necessary […]
U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe
June 7th, 2010I have a bit of trouble believing what Wired is reporting here. One just can’t go “rummaging through” compartmented files. Each person with access to a particular compartment would have to be individually cleared for that compartment. Say the compartmented thing is a new spy plane that is designated with the codeword AAA. Bob works […]
No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency
June 7th, 2010This is a very interesting piece about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Via: The New Yorker: He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are […]
Lawyers Claim Google Wi-Fi Sniffing ‘Is Not an Accident’
June 4th, 2010Via: Gizmodo: Lawyers suing Google claimed Thursday they have discovered evidence in a patent application that Google deliberately programmed its Street View cars to collect private data from open Wi-Fi networks, despite claims to the contrary. “At this point, it is our belief that it is not an accident,” said Brooks Cooper, an Oregon attorney […]
WikiLeaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor
June 2nd, 2010Many technologies that amateur anonymity fetishists are attracted to are actually designed to harvest information. Put yourself in the shoes of the NSA. If you wanted a concentrated haul of the most interesting information what would you do? You would establish a honeypot: a service (free or paid) that purported to provide an anonymous web […]
Toolkit: A Look at the Gear That Experts Use to Spy on Spies
May 31st, 2010Via: Wired: When companies like Archer Daniels Midland and Liberty Mutual Insurance are worried that someone is bugging their boardrooms or tapping their phone lines, they call Kevin Murray. He heads one of the most sophisticated surveillance-detection firms this side of the FBI. Wired asked Murray about the bevy of gizmos he and his staff […]
Government Wants to Monitor Networks of All Critical Infrastructure Providers
May 28th, 2010Oh sure. Via: Wired: Companies that operate critical infrastructures and do not voluntarily allow the federal government to install monitoring software on their networks to detect possible cyberattacks would face the “wild” internet on their own and place us all at risk, a top Pentagon official seemed to say Wednesday. Defense Deputy Secretary William Lynn […]
Government to Track Your Child’s Body Mass Index
May 27th, 2010U.S. Generals Want Congress to Implement Nutrition Standards for iZombies Because They’re Too Fat to Fight Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig Via: American Thinker: I thought this might be one of those bills where someone has misread the language and interpreted what the legislation is supposed to do incorrectly. Nope. Rep. Kind of […]
