Govt finally reveals how it plans to target encryption - Security. The government will target encrypted communications with a wide range of methods that could require service providers to build new tools, run government-built software, or facilitate access to targeted devices. An exposure draft of the legislation, published today [pdf], explicitly bans the use of “backdoors” or “systemic weaknesses or vulnerabilities” to access encrypted communications. “The Australian government has no interest in undermining systems that protect the fundamental security of communications,” it said. However, the government plans to compel a range of companies that make up end-to-end communications services "to enable access to a particular service, particular device or particular item of software". The targeted provider must come up with a method "which would not systemically weaken these products across the market.
" The government acknowledged the legislation would involve weakening the security of services. Three forms of notices Section 317E This includes: Broad brush use. Yahoo email caught secretly scanning user emails to build psych profiles to sell to advertisers. (Natural News) We all know that tech companies collect our data and use it to make money through advertising. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where we pretty much expect the things we search for and the sites we visit to be used for these purposes.
However, if you use Yahoo Mail or AOL Mail, even your email is no longer off limits. The owner of Yahoo Mail and AOL mail, Verizon, is offering a new service for advertisers that involves constantly scanning the 200 million inboxes of those who use Yahoo Mail. Verizon reportedly told advertisers they search people’s emails to find clues about the goods and services they might be interested in buying. PJ Media reports that those are the only two email services that are selling their users out in this way at the moment. Gmail used to scan emails but stopped doing so entirely last year.
According to communications between Verizon and advertisers, they placed their users in different categories according to the mail they receive. PJMedia.com. ‘Surveillance society’ fears as govt targets Facebook, Google. Julian Assange -- 'Google is Not What it Seems' -- They 'Do Things the CIA Cannot' Julian Assange cautioned all of us a while back, in the vein of revelations similar to those provided by Edward Snowden, that Google — the insidious search engine with a reputation for powering humanity’s research — plays the dark hand role in furthering U.S. imperialism and foreign policy agendas.
Now, as the Wikileaks founder faces days of questioning by a Swedish special prosecutor over rape allegations inside his Ecuadorian Embassy haven in London today — and particularly in wake of the presidential election — Assange’s warning Google “is not what it seems” must be revisited. Under intense scrutiny by the U.S. State Department for several controversial Wikileaks’ publications of leaked documents in 2011, Assange first met Google Executive Chairman, then-CEO, Eric Schmidt, who approached the political refugee under the premise of a new book. Advertisment “Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do . . . Five Eyes nations stare menacingly at tech biz and its encryption • The Register.
Officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will discuss next month plans to force tech companies to break encryption on their products. The so-called Five Eyes nations have a long-standing agreement to gather and share intelligence from across the globe. They will meet in Canada with a focus on how to prevent "terrorists and organized criminals" from "operating with impunity ungoverned digital spaces online," according to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. In the most forthright call yet from a national leader to break encryption, Turnbull told Parliament: "The privacy of a terrorist can never be more important than public safety – never.
" Turnbull's comments reflect a more vague but similar response from UK prime minister Theresa May earlier this week in which she said she was focused on "giving the police and the authorities the powers they need to keep our country safe. " Not so much Focus. Paranoid defence controls could criminalise teaching encryption. You might not think that an academic computer science course could be classified as an export of military technology. But under the Defence Trade Controls Act – which passed into law in April, and will come into force next year – there is a real possibility that even seemingly innocuous educational and research activities could fall foul of Australian defence export control laws. Under these laws, such “supplies of technology” come under a censorship regime involving criminal penalties of up to ten years imprisonment. How could this be? The story begins with the Australian government’s Defence and Strategic Goods List (DSGL).
Regulation of military weapons is not a particularly controversial idea. Disturbingly, the DSGL risks veering wildly in the direction of over-classification, covering activities that are completely unrelated to military or intelligence applications. Encryption: an essential tool for privacy How the DSGL covers encryption The bar is currently set low. Brief reprieve. Proposed State Bans on Phone Encryption Make Zero Sense. American politics has long accepted the strange notion that just a pair of states—namely Iowa and New Hampshire—get an outsize vote in choosing America’s next president. The idea of letting just two states choose whether we all get to have secure encryption on our smartphones, on the other hand, has no such track record. And it’s not a plan that seems to make much sense for anyone: phone manufacturers, consumers, or even the law enforcement officials it’s meant to empower.
Last week, a California state legislator introduced a bill that would ban the retail sale of smartphones with that full-disk encryption feature—a security measure designed to ensure that no one can decrypt and read your phone’s contents except you. The bill is the second piece of state-level legislation to propose that sort of smartphone crypto ban, following a similar New York state assembly proposal that was first floated last year and re-introduced earlier this month. Crypto Has No Borders Pressuring Congress. Encryption Bill: Bad for Privacy, Security and Business. OTR Protocol Patched Against Remote Code Execution Flaw. From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities. THERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media, and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.
The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. One system builds profiles showing people’s web browsing histories. Radio radicalization The Black Hole Domestic spying. Metadata laws may close piracy loopholes. HTTPS can be set as your super-cookie. A UK consultant has demonstrated how a feature of the secure Web protocol HTTPS can be turned into a tracking feature that is, in the case of some browsers, ineradicable. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), described in RFC 6797 (here), is a mechanism that helps sites redirect users from the insecure HTTP version to the encrypted HTTPS version.
If a user puts into their browser, it's HSTS that sends them to The problem is, someone thought it might be troublesome if the User Agent – that is, your browser – had to go through a redirect every time a user visited the https: site. So the authors of HSTS created a mechanism for browsers to remember the HSTS policy of sites they've visited. That's what Sam Greenhalgh has identified as a kind of super-cookie, here. His point is that an HSTS “pin” is set for each HTTPS-redirected site you use, it's unique to user and site, and it's readable from your browser settings by any site. FISA Judge To Yahoo: If US Citizens Don't Know They're Being Surveilled, There's No Harm.
A legal battle between Yahoo and the government over the Protect America Act took place in 2008, but details (forced from the government's Top Secret file folders by FISA Judge Reggie Walton) are only emerging now. A total of 1,500 pages will eventually make their way into the public domain once redactions have been applied. The most recent release is a transcript [pdf link] of oral arguments presented by Yahoo's counsel (Mark Zwillinger) and the US Solicitor General (Gregory Garre). Zwillinger opens up the arguments by questioning the government's methods of determining who should be placed under surveillance. Why I show this to you is because I think it's a perfectly fair question for you to ask the Solicitor General of the United States how a name gets on this list. This isn't reviewed by a -- the FISA Court.
From this arbitrary beginning springs a wealth of errors. [REDACTED] of the accounts we have been given do not exist. MR. Eric Schmidt: "We Know Where You Are. We Know Where You've Been. We Can More Or Less Know What You're Thinking About." (GOOG) Google CEO Eric Schmidt really has a knack for expressing relatively benign ideas in a way that makes him and his company look incredibly creepy. The Atlantic has posted video of the full interview in which Eric talked about 'the creepy line', and it is chock full of unsettling sound bytes.
In particular, he had the following to say on privacy: With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don't need you to type at all. That sounds absolutely terrifying. Check it out: Join the conversation about this story » See Also: Warning: Enrolling in Obamacare allows government to link your IP address with your name, social security number, bank accounts and web surfing habits - NaturalNews.com.
(NaturalNews) We have already established that Healthcare.gov is not a functioning database application that allows people to shop for competing health plans. It is actually a government-run Trojan Horse that suckers people into creating accounts where they hand over: • Name and address• Email address and password• Social security number• Private bank account details• Employer details and other information During the enrollment process, your computer also hands over your IP address which is then tied to your social security number.
This IP address is then handed over to the NSA thanks to its new mega-black-hole data center in Utah, where your IP is cross-referenced with all website visits, including: • "Anti-government" websites• Porn sites• Gambling sites• File sharing sites• "Terrorism" support sites• Encryption service sites like Hushmail• Chat rooms, message boards and more Ponder the implications of this for a moment... As far as I'm concerned, the IRS can fine me all they want. Australia’s metadata grab will create modern-day Stasi files. Until the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the East German state security service – the Stasi – conducted surveillance and kept files on a third of the country’s population.
One of those people was activist and dissident Ulrike Poppe, whose communications and activities were spied on by Stasi operatives constantly for 15 years. Much of the data that is contained in Poppe’s Stasi files, compiled during the Cold War, would today be considered “telecommunications metadata”. From locations, movements and meetings to relationships, affiliations and associates. Phone calls made and letters sent, as well as newspapers read and movies watched. Today it can be easily gleaned from the mass aggregation and retention of data collected and processed by the telecommunications companies that facilitate almost every interaction, communication and action we make. Just like the spying perpetrated by the Stasi, metadata retention is a form of surveillance that is unacceptable in a democratic country. To Nobody's Surprise, Australian “Terrorism” Law May Be Used for Copyright Enforcement.
As we foreshadowed, a new law requiring mandatory data retention by ISPs was introduced into the Australian federal parliament last week. In the few days since then, there have been claims and counter-claims about whether data obtained under the new law would be limited to use in fighting major crimes (such as terrorism, as the government originally claimed), or if it could be used to target citizens who download and share files online.
The current party line, from flip-flopping Attorney-General George Brandis (whom some may remember from this train-wreck interview in which he attempted to define “metadata”) is that the new laws “can't be and they won't be” used to prosecute file sharers, because copyright infringement is only a civil offense. Except, of course, when it isn't. The only solution is the obvious one—not to require the collection and retention of the data in the first place. Surveillance Self-Defense | Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications. Newly Revealed NSA Program Allows Online Global Internet Mapping. MOSCOW, September 15 (RIA Novosti), Ekaterina Blinova - The NSA's "Treasure Map" project is aimed at conducting global cyber attacks and mapping the Internet in its entirety to include end users' devices, Der Spiegel has revealed.
"The breathtaking mission is described in a Treasure Map presentation from the documents of the former intelligence service employee Edward Snowden... It instructs analysts to 'map the entire Internet – Any device, anywhere, all the time. " the media outlet reports.The report claims thatthe NSA's program allows the creation of an "interactive map of the global Internet" available to the US surveillance agency. "One can imagine it as a kind of Google Earth for global data traffic, a bird's eye view of the planet's digital arteries".
An examination of classified documents has indicated that the US surveillance service is keeping at least two German telecom providers, Deutsche Telekom AG and Netcologne, under close observation. Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security | World news | Guardian Weekly. Skype with care – Microsoft is reading everything you write. Your Interest in Privacy Will Ensure You're Targeted By The NSA. FBI Can Turn On Your Webcam Without You Knowing It. Secret Service to Track Twitter Users in Real Time.
Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance | Business. Google codifies its right to crawl through your emails. Push for Australians' web browsing histories to be stored. Federal government departments monitor social media lives of millions of australians. U.S. Surveillance Is Not Aimed at Terrorists. NSA's 'TURBINE' Full-Disclosure. U.S. gives big, secret push to Internet surveillance | Politics and Law.