Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

via Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s – NYTimes.com.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

There once was a time, back when the old AT&T existed,  when all  phone companies viewed customer privacy sacrosanct.

Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj

Harvard’s Berkman Center had an online class on cybersecurity and internet privacy some years ago, and the resources of the class are still online. It was about how to enhance privacy in an online world, speaking of quaint, with titles of articles like, “Is Big Brother Listening?”

And how.

You’ll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That’s not the rule of law as I understood the term.

via Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj.

To Our Customers | Silent Circle Blog

However, we have reconsidered this position. We’ve been thinking about this for some time, whether it was a good idea at all. Today, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system lest they “be complicit in crimes against the American people.” We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.

via To Our Customers | Silent Circle Blog.

NSA Award for Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper

In accepting the award I don’t condone the NSA’s surveillance. Simply put, I don’t think a free society is compatible with an organisation like the NSA in its current form. Yet I’m glad I got the rare opportunity to visit with the NSA and I’m grateful for my hosts’ genuine hospitality. A large group of engineers turned up to hear my presentation, asked sharp questions, understood and cared about the privacy implications of studying password data. It affirmed my feeling that America’s core problems are in Washington and not in Fort Meade. Our focus must remain on winning the public debate around surveillance and developing privacy-enhancing technology. But I hope that this award program, established to increase engagement with academic researchers, can be a small but positive step.

via Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » NSA Award for Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper.

Motorola Is Listening

Most subsequent connectivity to both services (other than downloading images) is proxied through Motorola’s system on the internet using unencrypted HTTP, so Motorola and anyone running a network capture can easily see who your friends/contacts are (including your friends’ email addresses), what posts you’re reading and writing, and so on. They’ll also get a list of which images you’re viewing, even though the actual image download comes directly from the source.

via Motorola Is Listening – Projects – Beneath the Waves.

MIT researchers can see through walls using ‘Wi-Vi’

Every time a Wi-Fi signal is reflected off an object, the shape and makeup of that object affects the signal that comes back. But when Wi-Fi hits a wall, most of the signal gets reflected off the wall and only a faint bit of it reflects off the people on the other side.

To get around this, Wi-Vi transmits two Wi-Fi signals, one of which is the inverse of the other. When one signal hits a stationary object, the other cancels it out. But because of the way the signals are encoded, they don’t cancel each other out for moving objects. That makes the reflections from a moving person visible despite the wall between that person and the Wi-Vi device. Wi-Vi can translate those faint reflections into a real-time display of the person’s movements.

via MIT researchers can see through walls using ‘Wi-Vi’ | ITworld.

Review: Facebook Home

It’s not simply the case that ­Zuckerberg is sneaky in his promotion of sharing and creepy in his ambivalence about privacy. Rather, he is a true believer. Privacy lowers the value of the social graph. If one sincerely believes in the merits of the graph, then one should be suspicious of privacy, because privacy is selfish.

via Review: Facebook Home | MIT Technology Review.

Reporters use Google, find breach, get branded as “hackers”

Call it security through absurdity: a pair of telecom firms have branded reporters for Scripps News as “hackers” after they discovered the personal data of over 170,000 customers—including social security numbers and other identifying data that could be used for identity theft—sitting on a publicly accessible server. While the reporters claim to have discovered the data with a simple Google search, the firms’ lawyer claims they used “automated” means to gain access to the company’s confidential data and that in doing so the reporters violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with their leet hacker skills.

via Reporters use Google, find breach, get branded as “hackers” | Ars Technica.

Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again

With the help of independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Ars used Skype to send four Web links that were created solely for purposes of this article. Two of them were never clicked on, but the other two—one beginning in HTTP link and the other HTTPS—were accessed by a machine at 65.52.100.214, an IP address belonging to Microsoft.

via Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again | Ars Technica.