Displaying items by tag: NSA

What do Apple, Microsoft (Including Skype), Google (YouTube), Facebook, Yahoo, and PalTalk have in common? Well they all participate knowingly in one rather invasive program run by the NSA under the guise of National Security. The program called PRISM was started in 2007 in the last moths of the George W. Bush’s administration the program creates a cooperative system with the listed companies to allow the NSA to query systems for information. Ostensibly the program is intended to protect the US from foreign threats including terrorism, but it has such a wide license that it has already been shown to have captured data about US citizens. To make matters worse certain members of Congress knew about the project back in 2007 and even granted the DOJ the power to force companies to comply in 2008.

So the FBI has started a new club and one that involves the US Marshals, the DEA and apparently even the NSA. This clubs whole purpose is to find ways to monitor and decrypt data that transferred through electronic communications. Sounds fairly innocuous right? After all these law enforcement agencies should have the tools they need to investigate crimes and to prevent threats to national security. The problem comes from the fact that the club (called either the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center or Domestic Communications Assistance Center) might have been around since 2008 without anyone telling anybody.

Well we knew it would come to this, despite growing outcry against the Cyber Intelligence and Sharing Protection Act the House of Representatives (who are they representing?) is holding a debate on this controversial bill. We have talked about CISPA in the past and the bills that led up to what is nothing more than a revocation of your right to private communication in the past and what the implications of a bill so loosely outlined will mean in the coming months.

There is an old saying; “ I cannot give you what I do not have and I cannot tell you what I do not know”. It is with this philosophy in mind that a new Internet Service Provider is seeking to hit the market. The man behind this new company also happens to be one of the only ISP owners to ever fight and win against an FBI request for subscriber information; Nicholas Merrill.

Symantec, perhaps in an effort to reclaim some of their reputation, has released a report claiming that some people involved in the DDoS attacks after the MegaUpload take down may have been tricked into downloading a data stealing virus. In a post on Symantec’s own blog they have built a nice (and plausible) timeline of events complete with images (although no links) showing how this happened right around the 20th of January. Many news sites have picked this up and are busy wirting articles about how Anonymous has been hacked... Now the question is, is any of this true?

In the very recent past the NSA and other governmental agencies have tried to show Anonymous as a terrorist organization. To do this they are using very basic definitions of the term; after all a terrorist uses fear to achieve their goals. However, if you can qualify Anonymous as a terrorist organization based on the loose definition and the fact that fear of them uncovering the truth has led to changes in many areas then you can also classify the MPAA, RIAA, NSA and other organizations as terrorist too.

The National Security Agency has just released a report to the powers that be in the US that expresses concern that the online activist group Anonymous could go after the US power grid in the next 3-5 years (we told you things like this would happen). This report was put together by their counter terrorism group and while it lacked any details in the body of the report (like the axis for attack) and forgot to mention there are other people out there that would like to do this (like foreign countries and real Terrorists) it does raise some real concerns.