Shocker: MPs’ Private Emails Are Routinely Accessed by GCHQ
June 4th, 2016Via: Computer Weekly:
GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) have access to intercepted emails sent and received by all members of the UK Parliament and peers, including with their constituents, a Computer Weekly investigation has established.
The One About Google Voice by the Independent
June 3rd, 2016I occasionally use the voice feature on my Android phone, so I went to look at the recordings on Google, which the article below explains how to do.
Indeed, the audio is archived.
The article implies that Android is transmitting audio without the user initiating the voice feature.
While I don’t doubt that’s a possibility (see below), from looking at the list of audio sessions in Google’s history of my use of the feature, I don’t see any indication that it recorded any random conversations.
That said, I have definitely been targeted for audio surveillance via my mobile phone one time that I’m aware of. I visited a friend and set the phone down. The battery charge state was about 60%. When I went to leave a couple of hours later, I picked up the phone and the battery was nearly dead and the phone was hot. Under normal circumstances, it would have dropped by maybe a couple of percent. Someone very definitely decided to turn my phone into a bug that time. The phone never behaved like that before or since.
So while I don’t see any evidence of Android transmitting random audio in the manner described in the article below, Android is very definitely capable of being used as an audio bug, and it has happened to me to the point that it was totally obvious. It’s not like it came as a shock that this happened. I’d been reporting on the capability for years on Cryptogon. It just finally happened to me.
The incident I described above happened a couple of years ago and I never mentioned it on here. I thought that people might think, “Oh sure, conspiracy theorist thinks he was targeted for surveillance,” etc. etc. That’s fine, but that incident definitely happened. I’m mentioning it now because I think the danger of the piece below is that people will see their audio sessions, recognize them as legitimate, and assume nothing to see here, that’s the extent of what can happen with the phone.
Nope.
If you carry a mobile phone, or find yourself in the presence of people who carry mobile phones, know that any audio could potentially be recorded.
Snowden actually demonstrates how you can avoid having the phone turned into a bug when you’re not using it.
Of course, as soon as you put the battery back in, you give up your position and when you do anything on the phone, that’s compromised as well. But it might be helpful to someone to know that the mics and cameras can be removed.
Via: Independent:
Google could have a record of everything you have said around it for years, and you can listen to it yourself.
The company quietly records many of the conversations that people have around its products.
The feature works as a way of letting people search with their voice, and storing those recordings presumably lets Google improve its language recognition tools as well as the results that it gives to people.
The Rise of the Meta-Criminal
June 2nd, 2016Via: Jon Rappoport:
Trevor Timm of the Electronic Freedom Frontier dug up a very interesting nugget. It was embedded in the heralded December 2013 White House task force report on spying and snooping.
Under Recommendations, #31, section 2, he found this:
“Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate financial systems.”
Timm quite rightly wondered: why were these warnings in the report?
Were the authors just anticipating a possible crime? Or were they reflecting the fact that the NSA had already been engaging in the crime?
If this was just a bit of anticipation, why leave it naked in the report? Why not say there was no current evidence the NSA had been manipulating financial systems?
Those systems would, of course, include the stock market, and all trading markets around the world.
Related: They Made a Killing: The Use of Knowledge of Covert Operations in the Stock Market
Research Credit: KA
Wal-Mart Testing Drones in Warehouses to Manage Inventory
June 2nd, 2016Via: AP:
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing drones that it says will help it manage its warehouse inventory more efficiently, and which it said Thursday could be rolled out in the next six to nine months across its distribution centers.
The move is another sign of how the nation’s largest retailer is seeking to compete against online leader Amazon.com, which is testing drones to deliver packages.
During a media tour Thursday at a distribution center, Wal-Mart offered a peek at a drone that flies around the massive center, captures images in real time and flags the misplaced items.
Wal-Mart says using the drones enables it to check inventory in about a day or less, instead of a month that it takes manually.
The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret
May 31st, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.
It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.
With a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades—until now. In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia’s holdings for the first time this month after “concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data,” according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America’s largest foreign creditors.
Yet in many ways, the information has raised more questions than it has answered. A former Treasury official, who specialized in central bank reserves and asked not to be identified, says the official figure vastly understates Saudi Arabia’s investments in U.S. government debt, which may be double or more.
The current tally represents just 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves, well below the two-thirds that central banks typically keep in dollar assets. Some analysts speculate the kingdom may be masking its U.S. debt holdings by accumulating Treasuries through offshore financial centers, which show up in the data of other countries.
Neocon Ghoul Announces Plan Underway to Ensure Hillary Clinton Becomes President
May 30th, 2016Wealthy Republicans Planning to Run Third Party Candidate to Stop Trump:
Some other flunky Republican-as-3rd-Party candidate would simply take votes from Trump, making it more likely that Clinton would win. These guys don’t think that their candidate will have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning.
In other words, these Republicans would rather have Clinton for President than Trump, and they’re working to make that happen.
And if some vote fraud happens on election day… *meh* I guess the 3rd party candidate took some votes away from the Donald.
So… Three candidates.
Do you want Hillary, Hillary or Hillary?
Via: Independent:
A leading conservative has claimed that Donald Trump will be challenged for the presidency by a impressive independent candidate with a “real chance” of beating the Republican nominee.
In a tweet on Sunday evening, Bill Kristol, an outspoken critic of Mr Trump and editor of the Weekly Standard, a respected conservative magazine, declined to give further details.
“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate—an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance,” he said.
Building Blocks of Life Found in Comet’s Atmosphere
May 30th, 2016Via: Space:
For the first time, scientists have directly detected a crucial amino acid and a rich selection of organic molecules in the dusty atmosphere of a comet, further bolstering the hypothesis that these icy objects delivered some of life’s ingredients to Earth.
The amino acid glycine, along with some of its precursor organic molecules and the essential element phosphorus, were spotted in the cloud of gas and dust surrounding Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the Rosetta spacecraft, which has been orbiting the comet since 2014. While glycine had previously been extracted from cometary dust samples that were brought to Earth by NASA’s Stardust mission, this is the first time that the compound has been detected in space, naturally vaporized.
The discovery of those building blocks around a comet supports the idea that comets could have played an essential role in the development of life on early Earth, researchers said.
Former Zurich Insurance Boss Martin Senn Kills Himself
May 30th, 2016Via: Reuters:
Former Zurich Insurance boss Martin Senn has committed suicide six months after leaving the company under a cloud, a tragedy that comes less than three years after Zurich’s finance chief took his own life.
Senn, 59, shot himself at his family’s Alpine resort home in Klosters, Swiss newspaper Blick reported. He had quit as chief executive of Zurich in December following a series of profit warnings and a botched takeover of British rival RSA.
“Martin Senn’s family has informed us that Martin committed suicide last Friday,” the company said in a statement on Monday, adding it was “stunned and deeply shaken”.
His death follows the suicide of Zurich’s finance chief Pierre Wauthier in August 2013, which brought into sharp focus the pressures facing senior corporate executives in Switzerland and elsewhere.
Wauthier, 53, killed himself after writing a suicide note addressed “To whom it may concern” in which he described becoming demoralised by what he called a new, more aggressive tone at Zurich under then-Chairman Josef Ackermann.
Research Credit: DF
Rumor: After Dieselgate Disaster, VW Planning Big Move to Electric Vehicles
May 30th, 2016Via: Quartz:
VW is in trouble. Its multi-year deception to hoodwink US environmental laws is costing it billions of dollars, in addition to inestimable public good will. Worse, the scandal has threatened the company’s future. Until last year the maker of the world’s best-selling cars, VW has had to pivot away from its long-term strategic bet on diesel-fueled vehicles, which are at issue in the deception, and to electrics.
Now, in what would seek to eclipse Tesla’s pathmaking electric strategy, VW appears to be poised for a gigantic down-payment on that new future with a possible $11 billion battery factory.
…
VW’s own plans are sketchy—a story broken by Handelsblatt, the respected Dusseldorf-based business newspaper, said the idea is to get past Dieselgate, as many call it, and become an industry leader in electric industry technology.
One More Time: Facebook Tracks Everyone
May 27th, 20162011: Facebook Is Building Shadow Profiles of Non-Users
Countermeasures, EasyPrivacy:
EasyPrivacy is an optional supplementary filter list that completely removes all forms of tracking from the internet, including web bugs, tracking scripts and information collectors, thereby protecting your personal data.
Via: Gizmodo:
There is no escaping Facebook’s advertising reach. The social network has announced that it will now be foisting ads on to every single person who uses third-party sites that are signed up to its advertising scheme, regardless of whether the user has a Facebook account or not.
Until now, Facebook showed ads only to its members when people landed on third-party sites that were signed up to its Audience Network ad system. That meant that it only ever bothered tracking what Facebook users did, in order to learn about them and better target advertising.
Now, though, reports the Wall Street Journal, it will use the same techniques—largely plug-in and cookies, but also Like buttons too— in order to track what everyone does when visiting those web pages. Andrew Bosworth, vice president of Facebook’s ads and business platform, explained to the Journal:
“Our buttons and plugins send over basic information about users’ browsing sessions. For non-Facebook members, previously we didn’t use it. Now we’ll use it to better understand how to target those people.”
