Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - U.S. justices limit police right to search cell phones (reuters.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The court said on a 9-0 vote that the right of police to search an arrested suspect at the scene without a warrant does not extend in most circumstances to data held on a cell phone.

Here is a link to the actual judgement. (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/13-132_8l9c.pdf)

Submission + - HackingTeam Mobile Malware, Infrastructure Uncovered (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: Controversial spyware commercially developed by Italy’s HackingTeam and sold to governments and law enforcement for the purpose of surveillance, has a global command and control infrastructure and for the first time, security experts have insight into how its mobile malware components work.

Collaborating teams of researchers from Kaspersky Lab and Citizen Lab at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto today reported on their findings during an event in London. The breadth of the command infrastructure supporting HackingTeam’s Remote Control System (RCS) is extensive, with 326 servers outed in more than 40 countries; the report also provides the first details on the inner workings of the RCS mobile components for Apple iOS and Android devices.

Submission + - NSA Spook-Turned-Twitter-Pundit Goes Dark After Dick Pic Surfaces (gawker.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: A well-known conservative pundit and secrecy expert who once worked as an NSA officer has deleted all of his social media accounts after screenshots leaked this weekend that appeared to show him sending sexy messages and a shot of his soft penis to a Twitter follower who was not his wife. John Schindler is a professor at the Naval War College who has written conservative analyses on global security for Politico and Foreign Policy while scrapping with leftists and libertarians online. A former naval officer who worked as a counterterrorism operative at the NSA for more than a decade, Schindler has long defended that agency's secret surveillance efforts while attacking information activists like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Glenn Greenwald.

Submission + - Emails Show Feds Asking Florida Cops to Deceive Judges (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Police in Florida have, at the request of the U.S. Marshals Service, been deliberately deceiving judges and defendants about their use of a controversial surveillance tool to track suspects, according to newly obtained emails. At the request of the Marshals Service, the officers using so-called stingrays have been routinely telling judges, in applications for warrants, that they obtained knowledge of a suspect’s location from a “confidential source” rather than disclosing that the information was gleaned using a stingray.

Submission + - How Secret Partners Expand NSA's Surveillance Dragnet (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as “third-party partners,” are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables. The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners “provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment.” This allows the agency to covertly tap into “congestion points around the world” where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.

Submission + - German Intel Agency Helps NSA Tap Fiber Optic Cables in Germany 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Der Spiegel has written a piece on the extent of collaboration between Germany's intelligence agency, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and the U.S.'s National Security Agency (NSA). The sources cited in the piece do reveal BND's enthusiastic collusion in enabling the NSA to tap fiber optic cables in Germany, but they seem inconclusive as to how much information from the NSA's collection activity in the country is actually shared between the NSA and BND. Of note is evidence that the NSA's collection methods do not automatically exclude German companies and organizations from their data sweep; intelligence personnel have to rectro-actively do so on an individual basis when they realize that they are surveilling German targets. Germany's constitution protects against un-warranted surveillance of correspondence, either by post or telecommunications, of German citizens in Germany or abroad and foreigners on German soil.

Submission + - Was 'Watch Dogs' for PC Handicapped on Purpose? (metafilter.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Many PC gamers were disappointed that Ubisoft's latest AAA game Watch_Dogs did not look as nice as when displayed at E3 in 2012. But this week a modder discovered that code to improve the game on PC is still buried within the released game, and can be turned back on without difficulty or performance hits. Ubisoft has yet to answer whether (or why) their PC release was deliberately handicapped.

Submission + - How Nest Is Using Data From Its Army of 'Smart' Smoke Alarms (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Consider that each Protect is packed full of sensors, some of which are capable of much more than they're doing right now: What could go wrong?

"From heat and light sensors to motion sensors and ultrasonic wave sensors.This simple little device could scrape an incredible amount of data about your life if Nest asked it to: From when you get home, to when you go to bed, to your daily routine, to when you cook dinner. Now imagine how a device like that would interlock with another that you keep on your wrist, like the forthcoming Android Wear. Together, they would create a seamless mesh of connectivity where every detail of what you do and where you go is recorded into a living, breathing algorithm based on your life."

Submission + - Local cops in 15 US states confirmed to use cell tracking devices (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: A new map released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union shows that fake cell towers, also known as stingrays, are used by state and local law enforcement in 15 states. Police departments in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Tucson, Los Angeles, and even Anchorage, among others, have been confirmed to use the devices. Beyond those states, 12 federal law enforcement agencies, ranging from the FBI to the National Security Agency, also employ them. Relatively little is known about precisely how police decide when and where to deploy them, but stingrays are used to track targeted phones and can also be used to intercept calls and text messages. However, privacy advocates worry that while the devices go after specific targets, they also often capture data of nearby unrelated people.

Submission + - N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents. The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

Submission + - WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA (wikileaks.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: "The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country "X". "

" We do not believe it is the place of media to "aid and abet" a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population. Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan. The Intercept stated that the US government asserted that the publication of this name might lead to a ’rise in violence’. Such claims were also used by the administration of Barack Obama to refuse to release further photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq."

Submission + - The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

Submission + - Australia asked Americans for more help to spy on Australian citizens (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: Documents from the US National Security Agency, published by Glenn Greenwald on Tuesday in his book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State, reveal new details of Australia’s close relationship with the US spy agency. In an extract on 21 February 2011 from the acting deputy director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate, which has since been re-named the Australian Signals Directorate, the director pleads for additional surveillance on Australians. “We would very much welcome the opportunity to extend that partnership with NSA to cover the increasing number of Australians involved in international extremist activities – in particular Australians involved with AQAP,” the extract said.

Submission + - Greenwald: The best is yet to come. (gq.com) 1

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the Snowden documents story says that even bigger revelations are yet to come according to Glenn Greenwald's interview with GQ. 'I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There's a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I'm saving that.' Given everything that has come out since June of last year, what do Slashdotters think the finale will be?

Slashdot Top Deals

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

Close