The number of wiretaps secured in federal criminal investigations jumped 71 percent in 2012 over the previous year, according to newly released figures. Federal courts authorized 1,354 interception orders for wire, oral and electronic communications, up from 792 the previous year, according to the figures, released Friday by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts. There was a 5 percent increase in state and local use of wiretaps in the same period. (mo...
Sunday, 30 June 2013
The Tin Foil Hat folks have upgraded for the 21st Century. New types of stealth clothing are being developed. They thwart video and infrared surveillance techniques. Here is a brief rundown...Stealth sunglasses. Stealth handbag.Stealth cap. Stealth clothing.TV Hat (More for video viewing rather than video stealth, but worth a peek :)"What's a Reg Blank?" I hear you say... Reg is a "blank", a person not indexed in the...
Saturday, 29 June 2013
One of several surveillance-related games at E3, "Watch Dogs" casts players as Aiden Pearce, a vigilante who can tap into security cameras and listen in on phone calls across a virtual rendition of an automated Chicago...The timing of "Watch Dogs" is remarkable in light of recent revelations about the National Security Agency's controversial data-collection programs. They were revealed in media stories by The Guardian and The Washington Post, leaked...
Friday, 28 June 2013
A visit to a restroom is usually a private thing but some customers at a Texas restaurant say that’s not the case. This comes after one man discovered a security camera in the restroom of Wolfie’s restaurant in Lake Conroe.It’s not the place you’d expect to be under surveillance but the management says it’s for safety. The cameras are high up above the door so customers do not see them until they are about to exit. There is a sign posted in the hallway...
The news media is overflowing with reports of "High Tech" car burglars. They appear to be opening locked cars while holding a "black box" which "has police all over the nation stumped as to how it works."Here, at the Spybusters Countermeasures Compound, we believe the black box is nothing more than a radio signal jammer. The thief is nearby when the person locks their car using a wireless fob. They interfere with the locking signal and the car...
Thursday, 27 June 2013
Undercover video shot in May by a conservative activist shows two corporate distributors of free cell phones handing out the mobile devices to people who have promised to sell them for drug money, to buy shoes and handbags, to pay off their bills, or just for extra spending cash.The 'Obama phone,' which made its ignominious YouTube debut outside a Cleveland, Ohio presidential campaign event last September, is a project of the Federal Communications Commission's 'Lifeline' program, which makes land line and mobile phones available to Americans who...
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Eunice Huthart, who says she worked as a stunt double for Angelina Jolie, has filed a lawsuit against News Corp. for intercepting her voice-mail messages. The complaint was filed in California last week and is believed to be the first claim brought by a victim in the U.S. over the ongoing hacking scandal that has been haunting Rupert Murdoch's company. Several thousands of people have been identified as phone hacking victims and News Corp. has...
Tuesday, 25 June 2013
An issue, previously fixed by Adobe in October 2011, has reappeared in Google Chrome and allows attackers to take control of webcams and microphones from Flash content. At its heart the problem is an old one: click-jacking. The trick places a transparent Flash animation panel over an image and then makes the permissions dialog for accessing the webcam and microphone appear. All that is then needed is to convince the user to click on the right part of the image. In security consultant Egor Homakov's proof of concept this is done by using an image...
Monday, 24 June 2013
You can now add “spymaster” to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s various titles. On Friday June 14, a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report elaborated on previous reports that Amazon had won a $600 million contract to build a “private cloud” for the CIA...[on their employment site,] Amazon is looking for engineers who already have a “Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information” clearance, or are willing to go through the elaborate screening process required to get it. TS/SCI is the highest security clearance offered by the US government,...
Sunday, 23 June 2013
Odds are, sometimes you wish you could check in on what’s happening around your home from your phone. Problem is, unless you regularly take a dip in your Scrooge McDuck money pool, decent remote-viewable camera technology is still an unaffordable luxury for most. It’s a premium feature for many alarm companies, even though the tech behind it is pretty old, and the prices on warehouse-store offerings can be steep. People Power’s Presence and Appologics’ Airbeam apps serve roughly the same purpose: repurposing iOS devices you already own into...
Saturday, 22 June 2013
(Updated with an infographic on June 30, 2013)Since The Guardian first published about the PRISM data collection program on June 6, there have been new disclosures of top secret documents almost every day, resulting in some fierce protests against apparently illegal wiretapping by the NSA and GCHQ. However, it remains unclear what PRISM actually is or does, as The Guardian didn't provide any new details or disclosed more than 5 of the 41 presentation...
The FBI employs drones in domestic surveillance operations, Director Robert Mueller revealed, but said they were used in a "very, very minimal way." Mr Mueller, in Senate testimony on Wednesday, acknowledged for the first time that the Federal Bureau of Investigation uses "very few" drones in a limited capacity for surveillance. (mo...
Friday, 21 June 2013
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Policy Guidebook This policy guidebook was created to help guide you through the questions to ask and provide some best practices to consider when establishing your own BYOD policies. Your employees want to use their own mobile devices for work. This represents a tremendous opportunity for you to extend the benefits of mobile technology to all employees. As more companies embrace the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model, many questions arise. Offered Free by: SAP (mo...
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Many Internet advertisers rely on cookies, digital code stored on your browser. Some websites place multiple cookies when you visit, allowing them to track some of your activity over time (you can see who is tracking you by installing an application such as Ghostery or Abine’s “DoNotTrackMe”).The problem for marketers is that some users set their browsers to reject cookies or quickly extinguish them. And mobile phones, which are taking an increasing...
India has launched a wide-ranging surveillance program that will give its security agencies and even income tax officials the ability to tap directly into e-mails and phone calls without oversight by courts or parliament, several sources said. The expanded surveillance in the world's most populous democracy, which the government says will help safeguard national security, has alarmed privacy advocates at a time when allegations of massive U.S. digital snooping beyond American shores has set off a global furor. (mo...
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
The communications security and intelligence branch is notorious for its abbreviations, acronyms, nicknames and codewords, and recently we learned a number of new NSA codewords from many classified documents which Edward Snowden handed over to The Guardian.Here we provide two listings, one of abbreviations and acronyms, and one of nicknames and codewords, to get somewhat more grip on these things:- Abbreviations and Acronyms- Nicknames and Codewords Listings like this can never be complete, and therefore expect new entries to be added gradually,...
"And surveillance has become entertainment, most ironically in 'Big Brother' where people compete to be under constant scrutiny. More revealing than their narcissism is the audience's enthusiastic voyeurism, playing at Thought Police from the couch." — Peter Marks, Associate Professor, senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University Sydney. He is also a member of the Surveillance and Everyday Life Research Gr...
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
You may not be able to control the privacy of your electronic data. But keeping yourself off security cameras? There’s an app for that.A new crowdsourcing mapping app called Surv gives city dwellers a way to prepare themselves for that kind of privacy infringement by mapping where those cameras are and what they’re used for.Currently in private beta-mode for New York (and raising money for a wider release on Kickstarter), the app encourages users...
Friday, 14 June 2013
Traffic at the private search engines StartPage and Ixquick has dramatically increased this week as Internet users react to news of the PRISM data sharing program. Combined, the two search engines served 3.4 million direct private searches on Wednesday, an increase of 500,000 over last week. (more) FutureWatch: A rise in encryption usage, and a new search engine... GoogleSecu...
We're not the only ones...Russia - President Vladimir Putin has defended the right by Russian special services to wiretap... “If this [wiretapping] is made within the framework of the law, by which the special services’ rules of conduct are guided, this is normal." (more)Canada has also been electronically eavesdropping on Canadians and others, scouring global telephone records and Internet data for patterns of suspicious activity, a newspaper said Monday. (more)Panama - A TV journalist and cameraman were detained by police while working on a story......
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Files shedding new light on Marilyn Monroe's last night alive and her relationships with President John F Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby have emerged 51 years after her death.Documents belonging to the late Fred Otash, one of Hollywood's most notorious private detectives, were uncovered by his daughter Colleen after being found in a suburban storage unit....in his notes, Otash claimed: 'I listened to Marilyn Monroe die.'He recorded that on...
19th Century technology meets 21st Century music over a bottle of beer in the latest extension to the Beck’s Record Label project. This time, the art label has evolved, and been replaced by the grooves of Auckland band Ghost Wave. Their new single was inscribed into the surface of a Beck’s beer bottle which could then be played on a specially-built device based on Thomas Edison’s original phonograph. Making the world’s first playable beer...
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and investigative journalist is working on a book about the "surveillance-industrial state" that emerged after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Penguin Press announced Thursday that it had acquired a book by Barton Gellman, a contributing editor at large for Time magazine and a Washington Post reporter. The book, currently untitled, does not have a release date. (more)Barton also has a great blog... Counter...
To make a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak requires the use of materials that have what's known as a negative refractive index over all optical wavelengths, from red to violet. You don't see yourself.However, the artificially-structured optical materials from which cloaks are made thus far have been restricted to a very narrow range of optical wavelengths, limiting their ability to cloak over a range of colors. That obstacle to progress...
...as reported by Violet Blue for Zero Day. Text Secure (play.google.com)TextSecure encrypts your text messages over the air and on your phone. It's almost identical to the normal text messaging application, and is just as easy to use.Red Phone (play.google.com)RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in.Onion Browser (Apple iTunes)Onion Browser is a minimal web browser that encrypts and tunnels web traffic through the Tor onion router network and provides other tools to help...
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
by James B. Rule, a sociologist and a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law."THE revelation that the federal government has been secretly gathering records on the phone calls and online activities of millions of Americans and foreigners seems not to have alarmed most Americans... We privacy watchers and civil libertarians think this complacent response misses a deeply worrying political shift of vast consequence...Institutions and techniques predictably outlive the intentions of their creators. J. Edgar Hoover went...
NJ - FBI agents arrested an engineer on Wednesday as he was preparing to return to India with trade secrets he allegedly stole from Becton, Dickinson and Co., the Franklin Lakes-based global medical technology company, authorities said.B-D Patent from the late 1990'sKetankumar "Ketan" Maniar, 36, an Indian national who lived in Mahwah until last week, had amassed a veritable tool kit for the manufacture of a new pen-like device for injecting drugs...
Tuesday, 11 June 2013
Quote 1: "You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."Quote 2: "You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will." (more - with video interview) From...
Business and the advertising industry!via... AdAgePrivacy legislation has been brewing in congress for years now, but a combination of public apathy and strong industry opposition has kept it at bay. Could the Prism data surveillance scandal become the watershed moment that propels it forward?It's too soon to tell how revelations that the U.S. government has been mining web communications and phone logs will impact public opinion, but none of what...
Sunday, 9 June 2013
Last week's news sparked much discussion about privacy. Here is one semi-sarcastic exchange between two well-respected, over-50 security professionals... Q. "Whatever happened to OPSEC?" A. "Indeed. Whatever happened to OPSEC? I think you and I are seeing the "generation gap" from the other side, now. Yesterday, I was talking to a sixteen year-old about the past week's news (PRISM and the Supreme Court decision on DNA). The attitude...
Saturday, 8 June 2013
The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA). Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology...
President Barack Obama on Friday defended his administration's vast collection of emails and telephone records, saying the programs help prevent terrorist attacks while imposing only "modest encroachments" on people's privacy..."When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," the president said. Mr. Obama made clear that his own views of such intelligence-gathering efforts have evolved since he was a candidate...
Friday, 7 June 2013
(Updated: June 10, 2013)Yesterday, Thursday June 6, The Washington Post and The Guardian came with a breaking news story about a Top Secret NSA program called PRISM, which reportedly collects data directly from the servers of nine major internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Skype and Apple. Many of these firms have already denied that the government has access to their networks. Today both president Obama and director of National Intelligence...
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