Tag: privacy

CIA Secretly Owned World’s Top Maker of Encryption Devices – Reports

The US and West German intelligence agencies clandestinely owned the world’s leading manufacturer of encryption devices, Swiss-based Crypto AG, enjoying throughout the Cold War direct access to closely guarded secrets of more than 120 countries, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the newspaper quoted a CIA report as saying. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

For decades, since World War II and well into the 21st century, Crypto was selling sophisticated equipment for coded correspondence to state clients all over the world, among them Iran, India and Pakistan, countries of Latin America and the Vatican, the report said.

According to the publication, from 1970 the CIA and the National Security Agency together with their German partners controlled nearly every aspect of the company’s operations, including “hiring decisions, designing its technology, sabotaging its algorithms and directing its sales targets.”

Keep reading

Facebook leaks full names, phone numbers, email addresses, and other info on half a BILLION users

The personal data, including phone numbers and emails, of more than 500 million Facebook users has been leaked online. The social media company claims that the data was obtained through a vulnerability that has since been fixed.

A user in a low-level hacking forum published the personal data of over 533 million Facebook users. The leaked data includes Facebook IDs, full names, phone numbers, email address, and other personal identifiable information. It affects Facebook users from 106 countries, including data on over 33 million users in the US and 11 million users in the UK.

Business Insider verified the authenticity of the leaked data by matching several of known user’s phone numbers to the Facebook IDs listed.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the data was illegally obtained via a vulnerability that was fixed back in 2019. Whether or not the data is a few years old, it could still be used by cybercriminals for identity theft and other scams.

Keep reading

Metadata: The Digital Fingerprint You Had No Idea Is Attached To Every Photo You Take

In a day and age where everyone is walking around carrying a portable GPS/supercomputer in their pockets, it should be of no surprise that location data can help track you at almost any given point in the day.

But while this may be semi-expected, one way in which people may not know they’re offering up information is through photographs.

Such was the topic of a new BBC report, which delved into exactly how much information people are offering up with their photo metadata – the digital “fingerprint” that’s attached to every digital photo you take.

Metadata became a national issue when comparisons of two photographs of former President Trump at Walter Reed Medical Center were scrutinized closely to try and determine whether they were staged or not, BBC notes. Metadata also led to authorities being able to detain John McAfee in 2012, after a photograph’s location data revealed he was in Guatemala at the time.

This data “automatically and parasitically burrows itself into every photo you take,” BBC notes. And while it’s not impossible to get rid of, most people don’t even realize that it’s there before widely sharing their photographs on social media. And while some platforms remove sensitive information, like where a photo was taken, others don’t.

The tool has become useful for police investigations, who often use it to place criminals at a scene. But the data can clearly be a slippery slope and be used for nefarious purposes, as well.

Keep reading

Smartphones share our data every four and a half minutes, says study

Android handsets and iPhones share data with their respective companies on average every 4½ minutes, with data being sent back even when idle in a pocket or handbag, according to a new academic study.

The Trinity College Dublin research has raised fresh privacy concerns about smartphones, with the research claiming there was little difference between Apple and Google when it came to collecting certain data.

The study, which was published by Prof Doug Leith at Trinity’s Connect Centre, claimed iPhones offered no greater privacy than Google devices.

However, the study noted that Google handsets collected “a notably larger volume of handset data than Apple” with 1MB of data being sent from idle Google Pixel handsets every 12 hours, compared with 52KB sent from the iPhone.

Among the data potentially sent back by the handsets were the insertion of a SIM and handset details such as the hardware serial number, IMEI, Wifi MAC address and the phone number.

Keep reading

Google repeatedly hands over user data to law enforcement without a warrant

Google is turning over user data to US law enforcement, even when requests for that come without a warrant, in the form of requests that are not court-ordered.

That emerges from information shared with the LA Times by an anonymous Google user, who said they were notified about this in an email from the tech giant, who said the request came from the Department of Homeland Security, without including the request itself in the email.

When this Google user asked to see the document, it turned out to be an administrative subpoena issued by the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while the data the agency was requesting from Google included the user’s name, home, email, and IP addresses, as well as sources of payment associated with the account.

And here, the term “account” covers any Google service and app, such as Gmail, Google Pay, YouTube, etc.

In the original email that arrived from the giant’s Legal Investigations Support, the user was advised that this data would indeed be handed to the agency as requested unless they obtained a federal court stamped motion to quash the subpoena within seven days.

For most people, Just Futures’ co-founder Paromita Shah suggested, this is a task they would be unlikely to accomplish, as it requires hiring a lawyer and going to federal court, and do it all in such a short period
of time.

According to available data from the company’s transparency report covering the first half of 2020, Google received 15,500 subpoenas and complied in turning over “some data” in 83% percent of cases.

Keep reading

SWISS RESEARCHERS DEVELOP WEARABLE MICROCHIP THAT ELIMINATES BODILY PRIVACY ONCE AND FOR ALL

“In people who suffer from stress-related diseases, this circadian rhythm is completely thrown off and if the body makes too much or not enough cortisol, that can seriously damage an individual’s health, potentially leading to obesity, cardiovascular disease, depression or burnout.” – Adrian lonescu, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), lead Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory researcher While these devices may be helpful in a hospital setting, technology companies fully intent to integrate them into wearable tech like smart watches, pushing us closer to a world where everything we do is being tracked and recorded around the clock. “The joint R&D team at EPFL and Xsensio reached an important R&D milestone in the detection of the cortisol hormone,” said Xsensio CEO Esmeralda Magally. “Xsensio will make the cortisol sensor a key part of its Lab-on-SkinTM platform to bring stress monitoring to next-gen wearables.” These microchips are intended to eventually connect to the ‘internet of things,’ a comprehensive array of devices which track and record us at all times from our homes to our places of work. Former US intelligence chief James Clapper admitted over five years ago that the government ‘might’ use the internet of things to spy on you.

Keep reading

Corporate Media Parrot FBI Talking Points as More Americans Turn to Encrypted Communication Online

Before he became a household name as the accused spoiler of the 2016 election, James Comey, FBI director under President Barack Obama, was already well-known in tech circles as a crusader against strong encryption. Still smarting from Edward Snowden’s exposure of the US government’s massive and illegal domestic spying operations, Comey grabbed any microphone he could during the waning years of Obama’s tenure to warn Americans that encryption technology was putting us all at grave risk by causing law enforcement to “go dark.”

Cryptography is the art of encoding text or other data such that only those who have the secret key can read it. This data can include anything from messages and records to digital currency—but these days encryption most commonly protects account passwords and other sensitive information as it traverses the internet.

Encryption has been around for millennia and, in modern times, it is used on a daily basis by nearly every person living in a technologized society. But like any technology, it can frighten those in power when wielded by the relatively powerless. In the summer of 2015, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that encryption had suddenly inspired the FBI “to consider how criminals and terrorists might use advances in technology to their advantage.”

Sensitive to the public’s lingering outrage at the Snowden revelations, Comey turned to the usual parade of horribles in his attempts to convince Congress that encryption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: “Malicious actors can take advantage of the internet to covertly plot violent robberies, murders and kidnappings,” he warned. “Sex offenders can establish virtual communities to buy, sell and encourage the creation of new depictions of horrific sexual abuse of children.”

Comey preferred to use “horrific sexual abuse of children” and the specter of terrorism to disparage encryption technology—recall the showdown between the FBI and Apple after the perpetrators of a late-2015 massacre in San Bernardino left behind an encrypted iPhone. But the ACLU (4/1/16) quickly exposed his fraud: Researchers uncovered 63 court orders for access to encrypted devices and reported, “To the extent we know about the underlying facts, these cases predominantly arise out of investigations into drug crimes”—rather than terrorists and pedophiles.

In the wake of the January 6 mob attack on the US Capitol Building, this pattern is repeating itself again…only now corporate media are taking up the FBI’s mantle on their own behalf.

Keep reading

So Long as You Carry a Cellphone, the Government Can Track You

Cell phones are convenient devices, handily connecting us with loved ones, paying bills, accessing information—and treacherously reporting on our every move. Worse, even after the Supreme Court weighed in, many government agencies still insist that they have the right to pull up that tracking data to see our whereabouts. It’s increasingly apparent that, if you have your phone in your pocket, you may as well have a GPS beacon strapped to your ankle. If you want anonymity from the government, leave the gadget at home.

That point was illustrated in the wake of the Capitol riot, when the authorities pulled cell phone records to see who was present.

“In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene,” The Intercept reported this week. “Investigators have also relied on data ‘dumps’ from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.”

The data collected by people’s phones and the apps they use, often compiled by marketing firms, is amazingly detailed. An individual “outraged by the events of Jan. 6” supplied data on participants in the day’s events to The New York Times, whose writers were thoroughly creeped out by the information.

“While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance,” Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson wrote.

Marketing databases have become a favorite resource for government agencies, which purchase the information as an attempted end-run around Fourth Amendment protections. The theory has been that, since the data is “voluntarily” provided to a third party there’s no privacy from the government required.

Keep reading

Court Docs Show FBI Can Intercept Encrypted Messages From Deep State-Backed ‘Signal’ App

Recent court documents have indicated that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) possesses a tool allowing them to access encrypted messages on the Signal app.

Signal has rapidly gained in popularity as Silicon Valley monopolists have grown more openly hostile to free speech, but the platform may be vulnerable to backdoors that undermine the privacy protections provided through the encrypted messaging service.

According to documents filed by the Department of Justice and first obtained by Forbes, Signal’s encrypted messages can be intercepted from iPhone devices when those Apple devices are in a mode called  “partial AFU,” which means “after first unlock.”

When phones are in partial AFU mode, Signal messages can be seized by federal authorities and other potentially hostile interests. GrayKey and Cellebrite are the tools typically used by the FBI to gain this sensitive information, an expert has explained.

“It uses some very advanced approach using hardware vulnerabilities,” said Vladimir Katalov, who founded the Russian forensics company ElcomSoft, believing that GrayKey was used by federal authorities to crack Signal.

This vulnerability within the Signal app may not be a design flaw, but rather a deliberate backdoor to allow authorities to access private messages. The app was initially funded with backing from the deep state, after all.

Keep reading