NSA

President Obama on Friday announced a number of radical changes to the US government’s extensive surveillance programs, as reassurance that it’s striking the right balance between security and civil liberties. The most significant change will be the abolition of the current program that collects domestic phone call metadata in bulk. The President said he would Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents. The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Continue Reading →

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks. While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of Continue Reading →

President Obama will unveil his proposed reforms to the nation’s surveillance programs in a speech next Friday, Jan. 17, the White House announced. “He will be remaking remarks to discuss the outcomes of the work that has been done in the review process,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said. The administration provided no details Continue Reading →

“The fact that private industry now works in tandem with the government to stalk and track us online may deflect but cannot dilute the moral argument. It seems little considerations like the prohibitions against “unreasonable search and seizure” enshrined in our Bill of Rights never made it onto the Behavioral Targeting agenda. — Jaffer Ali Continue Reading →

If we learned anything this past year, it’s that information we store online is exceptionally vulnerable. Our metadata (the data that describes who we are and what we do) is in the hands of people who are about as successful at protecting it as 1850’s bankers were at protecting money in the Old West. Sure, Continue Reading →

In room-size metal boxes, secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world. According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful Continue Reading →

The US National Security Agency can reportedly sniff out every last bit of data from your iPhone, according to leaked NSA documents published by German magazine Der Spiegel. Known as DROPOUTJEEP, the spyware is said to be one of the tools employed by the NSA’s ANT (Advanced or Access Network Technology) division to gain backdoor Continue Reading →

Attendees at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this weekend got a surprising rundown of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities, courtesy of security researcher Jacob Appelbaum. Appelbaum, who co-wrote the Der Spiegel article that first revealed the NSA catalog, went into further detail onstage, describing several individual devices in the catalog and their intended purposes. Alongside Continue Reading →

The insert method and other variants of QUANTUM are closely linked to a shadow network operated by the NSA alongside the Internet, with its own, well-hidden infrastructure comprised of “covert” routers and servers. It appears the NSA also incorporates routers and servers from non-NSA networks into its covert network by infecting these networks with “implants” Continue Reading →