As reported on The Verge. by T.C. SOTTEK “I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” Senator Frank Church on Meet The Press, 1975 On November 4th, 1952, a new…
As reported on Engadget. By Jon Fingas Don’t think that the NSA’s bulk communication data collection is focused solely on the communications themselves. The Washington Post has published more Edward Snowden documents which reveal that the agency collects large volumes of contact lists from email and instant messaging users around the world. While the NSA gathers the information on foreign soil, its method reportedly prevents it from automatically screening out any Americans in the list. The NSA and anonymous officials argue that American laws…
As reported on TechCrunch. by ALEX WILHELM According to an unnamed government officialspeaking with The Hill, shutting down the U.S. government wouldn’t lead to the National Security Agency (NSA) halting its controversial, and broad surveillance efforts. The United States may shut down in short order, due to political intransigence between the two chambers of Congress. Republicans want to defund the Affordable Care Act, while Senate Democrats and the president do not. It isn’t clear if there…
As reported on The Verge. By Tom Warren The Iranian government has secretly owned and controlled an office building in the middle of New York City for years. Set on Fifth Avenue and close to the Rockefeller Center, the 36-story skyscraper houses a number of businesses across its floors. The US government has won a judgement to seize the building, and plans to use the money to compensate “victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism.” The skyscraper, 650 Fifth Avenue, was originally…
As reported on TechCrunch. by MIKE BUTCHER Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper – increasingly joining the NSA revelations train –reports today that the intelligence agency is interested in international credit card transactions and may have found a way to monitor payments processed by companies including Visa. Spiegel alleges it has even set up its own financial database to track money flows. The paper says that in 2011, the NSA possessed 180 million records via its “Follow the Money”…
As reported on TechCrunch. by GREGORY FERENSTEIN The National Security Agency improperly identified over 15,000 telephone numbers as “suspicious” because there was no one at the agency who understood the rules, according to a scathing court order declassified by the Director of National Intelligence (on Tumblr!). “The court finds that the government’s failure to ensure that responsible officials adequately understood the NSA’s alert list process, and to accurately report its implementation to the court, has prevented…
As reported on TechCrunch. by SARAH PEREZ Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco,Shine Security is reinventing the idea of what it means to be an antivirus company in an age of cyber-warfare and zero-day attacks. The company’s technology was built by white hat, ethical hackers, and works in real time, performing behavioral monitoring on end users’ systems in order to stop newly emerging threats that other anti-virus firms have yet to discover or identify. It may…
As reported on TechCrunch. by GREG KUMPARAK The password needs to die, and SlickLogin is trying to help kill it. Launching into closed beta in the Disrupt SF 2013 Battlefield today, SlickLogin lets you log into a website on your computer by holding your phone within a few inches of it. Here’s the idea: as a user, you’d go to whatever SlickLogin-enabled site you’d like to log in to. Tap the login button, hold your phone up close to…
As reported on Engadget. By Terrence O’Brien As reporters at the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica dig deeper into the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, new and disturbing revelations continue to be made. Two programs, dubbed Bullrun (NSA) and Edgehill (GCHQ), have just come to light, that focus on circumventing or breaking the security and encryption tools used across the internet. The effort dwarfs the $20 million Prism program that simply gobbled up data. Under the auspices of “Sigint (signals intelligence) enabling”…
As reported on TechCrunch. by ALEX WILHELM Today the Wall Street Journal reported the existence of several NSA programs that were either previously unknown, or little was known about. Meet Blarney, Fairview, Oakstar, Lithium and Stormbrew. The programs allow for far greater surveillance than the government has admitted to, and, importantly, detail how the government forces Internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over raw data. The programs have the ability to “reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic,”…