In North America, the Canadians have long had to play country mouse to the flashier city mouse of the U.S. It’s the latter that gets all the attention, while the former sits quietly in a corner. But recent stories have shown just how big a player the Canadians are becoming—at least in the surveillance realm.
The post Canada Joins World Powers in Spying on Smartphone and Download Data appeared first on WIRED.
The Justice Department is agreeing to pay $134,000 to a New York woman to resolve an incident in which the Drug Enforcement Agency created a counterfeit Facebook profile and posted risqué personal pictures the agency obtained from her mobile phone without consent, according to federal court documents [PDF] filed Tuesday.
The woman, who at the time went under the name Sondra Prince, eventually was sentenced to probation and six months of home confinement. The DEA created a phony Facebook profile in her name and maintained it for at least three months in 2010 in a bid to nab other suspects connected to an alleged drug ring. At one point in the litigation, the government said the counterfeit account was for “legitimate law enforcement purposes.”
Richard Hartunian, the US attorney for the northern district of New York, said in a statement that the settlement “demonstrates that the government is mindful of its obligation to ensure the rights of third parties are not infringed upon in the course of its efforts to bring those who commit federal crimes to justice.” He said the deal “also takes into account emerging personal privacy concerns in the age of social media, and represents a fair resolution of plaintiff’s claims.”
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The use of a radar device that can see through walls has been questioned by privacy experts in the US.
The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British sister agency of the National Security Agency, captured e-mails of some journalists out of 70,000 message intercepted in 10 minutes during a November 2008 test.
According to The Guardian, which on Monday cited some of its Snowden documents as its source (but did not publish them), the e-mails were scooped up as part of the intelligence agency’s direct fiber taps.
Journalists from the BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Sun, NBC, and The Washington Post were apparently targeted.
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David Cameron, the British Prime minister, is one-upping his Western allies when it comes to anti-encryption propaganda. Ahead of national elections in May, Cameron said that if re-elected, he would seek to ban encrypted online messaging apps unless the UK government is given backdoors.
“Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Cameron said Monday while campaigning, in reference to apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat, and other encrypted services. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.'”
He said the Paris attacks, including the one last week on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, underscored the need for greater access.
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In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, a number of European Union ministers have called for a new online tool that would enable “swift reporting of material that aims to incite hatred and terror and the condition of its removing, where appropriate/possible.”
How exactly would this reporting take place? European officials don’t explain in their three-page Sunday statement, but one of the signatories was Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.
The Belgian official endorsed a 2013 quixotic EU-funded plan called CleanIT, which spent €400,000 ($473,000) to hold a bunch of meetings and produce a final report without creating anything concrete. And while CleanIT is not mentioned by name in the new statement, the reporting description sounds very much like it.
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Since 2008, the bureau has been assuming a larger role in the government’s warrantless surveillance program, according to a newly declassified report.
OAKLAND, CA—Newly discovered court documents from two federal criminal cases in New York and California that remain otherwise sealed suggest that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is pursuing an unusual legal strategy to compel cellphone makers to assist investigations.
In both cases, the seized phones—one of which is an iPhone 5S—are encrypted and cannot be cracked by federal authorities. Prosecutors have now invoked the All Writs Act, an 18th-century federal law that simply allows courts to issue a writ, or order, which compels a person or company to do something.
Some legal experts are concerned that these rarely made public examples of the lengths the government is willing to go in defeating encrypted phones raise new questions as to how far the government can compel a private company to aid a criminal investigation.
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How might the UK identify individual internet users?
Piecing together new information from various researchers, it’s clear the ‘Regin” malware is one of the most sophisticated nation-state spy tools ever found.
The post Researchers Uncover Government Spy Tool Used to Hack Telecoms and Belgian Cryptographer appeared first on WIRED.
Sophisticated malicious programs used to spy on individuals and businesses represent a “challenge” to security firms, say experts
Days after a BuzzFeed journalist revealed that an Uber executive floated the idea of using its “God mode” ability to snoop on journalists who write about the ridesharing service, rival firm Lyft has changed its policy to prevent most employees from doing something similar.
Erin Simpson, a Lyft spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement by e-mail that the company’s “longstanding policy prohibits employees or contractors from accessing any user personal information except to the extent such use is necessary to do their job.”
As of Thursday, the company has “proactively made additional updates to further safeguard our community members’ privacy, including the development of tiered access controls that further limit access to user data to a smaller subset of employees and contractors. Ride location data is restricted to an even smaller subset of people.”
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A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device.
According to the Charlotte Observer, the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used.
The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time.
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Six members of the United Kingdom’s National Union of Journalists—including comedian and journalist Mark Thomas—have filed suit against London’s Metropolitan Police after discovering that their daily activities were being monitored and recorded in a police database. The database is gathered by the National Domestic Extremists and Disorder Intelligence Unit, a task force led by the Metropolitan Police Service that tracks political and religious groups in the UK and monitors protests.
In an interview on BBC Radio 4, Thomas said that the surveillance was discovered through information uncovered by a request under the UK’s Data Protection Act—a law similar to the US’ Freedom of Information Act. “The police are gathering information under the domestic extremist list about journalist and NUJ members, “ he said. “And we know this because six of us have applied to the police using the Data Protection Act to get some of the information the police are holding on us on these lists. And what they are doing is monitoring journalists’ activities and putting them under surveillance and creating databases about them.”
Thomas has used the Data Protection Act in the name of both journalism and comedy. In 2001, he launched a contest in which he encouraged people to do creative performances in front of surveillance cameras and then submit the videos to him after obtaining them through Data Protection Act requests.
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A Virginia-based law enforcement data sharing ring, which allows signatory police agencies to share and analyze seized “telephone intelligence information,” was first proposed by federal prosecutors, according to new documents obtained by Ars. Federal involvement suggests that there could be more such databases in other parts of the country.
“It’s unsurprising to see the feds encouraging local law enforcement agencies to create these localized databases,” Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. “In fact, there’s a whole division within the Department of Justice that focuses on educating and advancing local law enforcement interests, the National Institute of Justice. And so I would imagine there are others.”
As Ars reported last month, according to a memorandum of understanding (MOU) first published by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the police departments from Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Suffolk all participate in something called the “Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network,” or HRTASN.
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Fifteen people have been arrested, including four in the UK, in connection with the hijacking of computers.
Data privacy watchdogs are warning the public about a Russian website that provides links to breached webcams, baby monitors and CCTV feeds.
Amnesty International has released a program that can spot spying software used by governments to monitor activists and political opponents.
Tonight, the lame duck senate still run by the democrats voted on the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan-backed bill to usher in NSA reform.
The post Critical NSA Reform Bill Fails in the Senate appeared first on WIRED.
The UK’s major ISPs commit to new measures to block online extremism, No 10 says, but ISPs say no specific agreement is yet in place.