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Submission + - British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA's Data Pools (firstlook.org)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA’s table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb.

Submission + - Google+ Is Walking Dead (techcrunch.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: "According to two sources, Google has apparently been reshuffling the teams that used to form the core of Google+, a group numbering between 1,000 and 1,200 employees. We hear that there’s a new building on campus, so many of those people are getting moved physically, as well — not necessarily due to Gundotra’s departure. As part of these staff changes, the Google Hangouts team will be moving to the Android team, and it’s likely that the photos team will follow, these people said. Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform, we’re hearing. We’ve heard Google has not yet decided what to do with the teams not going to Android, and that Google+ is not “officially” dead, more like walking dead: “When you fire the top dog and take away all resources it is what it is.” It will take copious amounts of work for it to un-zombie, if that’s even a possibility."

Submission + - Identity Dominance: The U.S. Military's Biometric War in Afghanistan (publicintelligence.net)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: "For years the U.S. military has been waging a biometric war in Afghanistan, working to unravel the insurgent networks operating throughout the country by collecting the personal identifiers of large portions of the population. A restricted U.S. Army guide on the use of biometrics in Afghanistan obtained by Public Intelligence provides an inside look at this ongoing battle to identify the Afghan people."

Submission + - Due to license plate reader error, cop approaches innocent man, weapon in hand (arstechnica.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: "The latest incident happened near the border of Kansas and Missouri. According to the Prairie Village Post, earlier this month lawyer Mark Molner was driving through a Kansas City suburb on his way home from his wife’s sonogram. All of a sudden, his BMW was blocked in front by a police car as another officer on a motorcycle pulled up behind him. (His pregnant wife witnessed the incident from a nearby parked car.) According to what Molner told the Post, one of the officers then approached his car with his gun out. “He did not point it at me, but it was definitely out of the holster,” Molner told the Post. “I am guessing that he saw the shock and horror on my face, and realized that I was unlikely to make (more of) a scene.”

I guess they did not shoot first because the guy in question was white..

Submission + - Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied on a Whole City (theatlantic.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: n a secret test of mass surveillance technology, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department sent a civilian aircraft* over Compton, California, capturing high-resolution video of everything that happened inside that 10-square-mile municipality. Compton residents weren't told about the spying, which happened in 2012. "We literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people," Ross McNutt of Persistence Surveillance Systems told the Center for Investigative Reporting, which unearthed and did the first reporting on this important story. The technology he's trying to sell to police departments all over America can stay aloft for up to six hours. Like Google Earth, it enables police to zoom in on certain areas. And like TiVo, it permits them to rewind, so that they can look back and see what happened anywhere they weren't watching in real time.

Submission + - FBI to have 52 million photos in its NGI face recognition database by next year (arstechnica.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images. We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes. Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints. This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a “mug shot” photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.

Submission + - Utah cops warrantlessly search prescription drug records (arstechnica.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: The warrantless search of Utah's database chronicling every controlled substance dispensed by a pharmacist resulted in charges against one paramedic that have nothing to do with the original investigation. Instead, the authorities discovered an employee whose records exhibited "the appearance of Opioid dependence" and lodged prescription fraud charges against paramedic Ryan Pyle. Now Pyle faces a maximum five-year prison sentence if convicted of the felony. "To me, it's outrageous government conduct," Pyle's attorney, Rebecca Skordas, said in a telephone interview Monday.

Submission + - Facebook Is Ripping Chat Out Of Its Mobile App (techcrunch.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: Facebook is taking its standalone app strategy to a new extreme today. It’s starting to notify users they’ll no longer have the option to send and receive messages in Facebook for iOS and Android, and will instead have to download Facebook Messenger to chat on mobile. Facebook’s main apps have always included a full-featured messaging tab. Then a few months ago, users who also had Facebook’s standalone Messenger app installed had the chat tab of their main apps replaced with a hotlink button that would open Messenger. But this was optional. If you wanted to message inside Facebook for iOS or Android, you just didn’t download Messenger. That’s not going to be an option anymore.

Submission + - More on the "Cuban Twitter" Scam (firstlook.org)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: These ideas–discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets–appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

The documents in the archive show that the British are particularly aggressive and eager in this regard, and formally shared their methods with their U.S. counterparts. One previously undisclosed top-secret document–prepared by GCHQ for the 2010 annual “SIGDEV” gathering of the “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance comprising the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S.–explicitly discusses ways to exploit Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media as secret platforms for propaganda.

Submission + - NSA infiltrated RSA security more deeply than thought (reuters.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: A group of professors from Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois and elsewhere now say they have discovered that a second NSA tool exacerbated the RSA software's vulnerability. The professors found that the tool, known as the "Extended Random" extension for secure websites, could help crack a version of RSA's Dual Elliptic Curve software tens of thousands of times faster, according to an advance copy of their research shared with Reuters.

Submission + - Dropbox's new policy of scanning files for DMCA issues (arstechnica.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: This weekend, though, a small corner of the Internet exploded with concern that Dropbox was going too far, actually scanning users' private and directly peer-shared files for potential copyright issues. What's actually going on is a little more complicated than that, but shows that sharing a file on Dropbox isn't always the same as sharing that file directly from your hard drive over something like e-mail or instant messenger. The whole kerfuffle started yesterday evening, when one Darrell Whitelaw tweeted a picture of an error he received when trying to share a link to a Dropbox file with a friend via IM. The Dropbox web page warned him and his friend that "certain files in this folder can't be shared due to a takedown request in accordance with the DMCA."

Submission + - The inside story of MIT and Aaron Swartz (bostonglobe.com)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: That cooperation with law enforcement also extended to a senior MIT network engineer who monitored traffic to and from Swartz’s laptop and appeared to be looking to Pickett for instructions. On Jan. 5, having collected 70 gigabytes of network traffic, he e-mailed the agent, “I was just wondering what the next step is.” Swartz’s lawyers argued that MIT, by monitoring Swartz and turning over materials to law enforcement without a court order, violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Abelson, who wrote MIT’s own review, disagreed, and legal experts interviewed by the Globe differed on whether those arguments had merit. They were never ruled on by the judge in the case.

Submission + - GCHQ and NSA Targeted Private German Companies (spiegel.de)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: Documents show that Britain's GCHQ intelligence service infiltrated German Internet firms and America's NSA obtained a court order to spy on Germany and collected information about the chancellor in a special database. Is it time for the country to open a formal espionage investigation? The headquarters of Stellar, a company based in the town of Hürth near Cologne, are visible from a distance. Seventy-five white antennas dominate the landscape. The biggest are 16 meters (52 feet) tall and kept in place by steel anchors. It is an impressive sight and serves as a popular backdrop for scenes in TV shows, including the German action series "Cobra 11."

Also see this post

NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders (https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/29/der-spiegel-nsa-ghcq-hacked-german-companies-put-merkel-list-122-targeted-leaders/)

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