Tag Archives: privacy

Censorship & Alternate Sites

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Elites Panic as Information Control Flounders

by Zen Gardner – May 20, 2015

5 25

by James Corbett
TheInternationalForecaster.com

Do you want the good news first or the bad news?

Alright, here’s the bad news: Google is about to start ranking sites according to their conformity with mainstream opinion. Or at least that’s what the headlines would have you believe.

The usual sources in the controlled corporate media are telling you that this is a good thing and that only “Anti-science advocates are freaking out about Google truth rankings,” but if that seems like a remarkably blase attitude to take when facing the prospect of a 1984-like reality where the modern-age Ministry of Truth (Google) is going to determine the “truth” of controversial subjects and rank search results accordingly, then keep in mind that such articles are written by the likes of Joanna Rothkopf, daughter of mini-Kissinger and author of “Superclass,” David Rothkopf.

New Scientist–the website that broke the story with their article “Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links“–also framed the story, predictably enough, as “science” versus “anti-science,” starting their article by lamenting the fact that “Anti-vaccination websites make the front page of Google, and fact-free ‘news’ stories spread like wildfire.” The article rejoices in the fact that the good chaps at Google have come up with a bulletproof answer to this mess: “rank websites according to their truthfulness.”

The slightly good news is that, ironically enough, the New Scientist article seems to be a perfect example of a fact-free story spreading around the internet like wildfire. While the story does link to a research paper from a Google research team that outlines a “novel multi-layer probabilistic model” for assigning a “trustworthiness score” to web pages, it neglects to mention that the idea is still very much a theoretical work-in-progress at the moment and is nowhere near ready to be launched. If you have a fetish for multivariate equations, dynamically selected granularity, and line graphs comparing calibration curves for various data analysis methods, have at it! For the rest of us who are not fluent in boffin-speak, the gist of it is this:

Google research paper extract

First, a page is harvested for its “knowledge triples.” These are connected triplets of information consisting of a subject, predicate and object. The paper itself helpfully provides the example: Obama – Nationality – USA. A “false value” (again according to the paper itself) would be Obama – Nationality – Kenya. These knowledge triples are assessed for their (Google-determined) accuracy and the page is assigned a KBT (Knowledge-Based Trust) score, which Google could use in place of (or perhaps in some combination with) the traditional PageRank score to determine how high in the search results the web page should place.

The paper uses a list of 15 gossip websites to demonstrate that using this method, sites with disputed and often incorrect information (gossip sites) might rank high in traditional search results, which are weighted toward popularity, but low in the KBT results. But even the paper itself admits there’s a long way to go before this KBT method would be usable by Google to rank billions of web pages.

This is good news for those alt media websites (and their readers) who realize that they are the ones directly in the crosshairs of this technology. Given that Google is nothing other than an American intelligence adjunct (and has been since its inception), would we expect anything resembling a fair assessment of the “truthfulness” surrounding the most politically controversial subjects of our time?

The Federal Reserve is a private cartel created by the banksters for the express purpose of manipulating the money supply and controlling the economy? CONSPIRACY THEORY! No Google for you!

Governments always and throughout history use false flag terrorism in order to justify their wars of aggression? SLANDER! Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to the bottom of the search results!

google-bouncer-blog-small-fileGoogle and every other major Silicon Valley firmis in bed with the DOD and/or the CIA and/or the NSA? BLASPHEMY! You have been excommunicated from the church of Google.

You get the idea.

But here’s the really good news: even if Google does launch such a system, it is doomed to failure. The internet is one of the last, best bastions of the free market in action that we have in our stultified, regulated, controlled, manipulated economy. Google’s popularity did not come about because government goons pointed a gun at everyone’s head and forced them to use it. They didn’t even create a licensing system for operating search engines, a favorite government trick for keeping genuine competition out of the market. It became popular because it was a million times more useful than AskJeeves or Yahoo! or any of the other outdated, clunky, dysfunctional search “portals” that dominated the web in the late 1990s. Granted, the power of Google’s PageRank may have come directly from the NSA’s own engineers, as some have speculated, but the fact remains: people use it because they can find what they want quickly and easily with minimal fuss.

At that point at which Google stops being useful for its intended purpose (helping people to look for information), people will start to look for alternatives. And alternatives do exist.

Ixquick.com is a privacy-protecting search engine that returns results drawn from a wide range of other search engines.

DuckDuckGo is another popular alternative search engine focusing on privacy protection that uses a number of innovative tools to make searching quicker and easier.

SigTruth is an “Alternative Media Search Engine for Liberty Minded People” that uses Google’s own custom search abilities against itself by returning only alt media website results on various topics.

Truthinessdict

 

 

 

 

And even the news that Google might at some point start using its “truthiness” score to downgrade the alt media has spurred others in the alt media (like Mike Adams) to announce the creation of their own search engines.

This is how the free market of ideas is meant to work, and if and when Google starts returning sanitized propaganda, those who are uninterested in sanitized propaganda will vote with their feet (fingertips?).

But here’s the best news of all: what this urge to categorize sites by “truthfulness” (and all of the back-slapping, high-fiving articles about this news from the dying establishment mouthpiece media) really shows is just how desperate the would-be gatekeepers are becoming in their fight to put the alt media genie back in the bottle. And even better yet, this is by no means the first sign that the gatekeepers are losing their war to keep the people in the dark on the topics that matter.

In 2008, arch-globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski started lamenting how, for the first time in human history “all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive.” This, as he stressed in speeches and articles at the time, means that it is no longer possible to dominate people in the same ways that they have been dominated for centuries.

In 2011, Hillary Clinton admitted that the US was losing the information war to alternative media outlets of all stripes.

In 2013, PopularScience.com had to turn off comments on all of their articles because, they said, a “decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics” like catastrophic man-made climate change.

internet-bringing-down-nwo-house-of-cardsAnd poll after poll after poll in year after year after year continues to chart the decline of the dinosaur print/radio/tv media and the rise of the internet as a source of daily news and information for the majority of the public.

Yes, there are dark skies and reasons to be concerned about what’s coming in the inevitable digital clampdown. But there are bright spots as well, and these deserve to be noted, highlighted and celebrated. After all, the people have had a taste for real information and now more people than ever before see through the increasingly clumsy propaganda of the establishment. And that makes the propaganda increasingly useless for setting the political agenda.

The internet revolution toothpaste is out of the tube, and it’s going to be one heck of a job getting it back in. And that’s good news.

+++

ZenGardner.com

from:    http://www.zengardner.com/elites-panic-information-control-flounders/

Is Your TV Spying on You?

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health

1984 is here: Samsung admits its TVs might spy on you, warns against carrying out sensitive conversations

Monday, February 09, 2015 by: J. D. Heyes

NaturalNews) In the prescient 1984 tome, author George Orwell wrote about a supposedly “fictitious” future in which the civilized world lived in what can only be called a surveillance society, in which “the government” would be able to keep watch on the citizenry 24-7, and through a variety of technological means.

It turns out that Orwell’s premonitions were a lot more realistic than even he likely imagined.

Today, surveillance cameras are everywhere, at least in the modern world. Police have a range of listening devices and surveillance technology, some of which can see through your walls and into your home. And federal spy agencies like the NSA routinely intercept and track Internet and wireless communications.

Now, it seems, even your household goods can spy on you. As reported by Britain’s Daily Mail, you might want to keep a lid on what you say this evening when you sit down in front of your television.

Samsung has issued a warning to owners of its Internet-connected “smart TV” — anything they say while sitting in the vicinity of the device could be overheard.

As the Mail reported further:

The popular televisions are voice activated, so users can switch channels or ask for suggestions of what to watch simply by giving a verbal command.

However, the technology which allows this to happen has a worrying side effect: it records everything else that goes on near the television.

Privacy? What privacy?

According to a clause in Samsung’s privacy policy, buyers should beware:

“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

For instance, that means that the TVs might be able to record a family argument that took place in the living room; executives discussing strategy in corporate boardrooms equipped with such smart TVs are at risk of sharing confidential information.

Privacy advocates are understandably upset and concerned, noting that the technology is ripe for abuse by government agencies and “Big Brother” in general (coincidentally, the name of the authoritarian state in Orwell’s novel).

“This thing is going to be in your house, listening in on you,” Renate Samson, of Big Brother Watch, a campaign group named after this very notion, said, as quoted by the Mail. “Samsung say they are providing you with a service, but really the only service you need from a television is to watch programmes.”

More than half of all smart TVs sold in Britain are made by Samsung, the Mail noted.

The problem is in the technology, which was sold as a convenience. The TVs “listen” for simple commands, such as those to switch channels or turn up the volume. But it can process more complicated commands as well, after recording users’ speech and sending it on to a third-party company called Nuance, which is located in the U.S.

Nuance then sends the voice data to a computer server, which then translates the spoken word into text and spits out a response.

As further reported by the Daily Mail:

To give these complex commands, viewers must press a button on the remote control as they speak, and during that time, anything within ‘earshot’ will be collected.

The data is encrypted, but can be listened to by authorised Nuance staff.

The technology giant remained tight-lipped about whether it then keeps users’ data, only saying that it does not sell information on, and that it operates within privacy laws, which vary by country.

Professor Peter Sommer, a digital forensics expert who has lectured at the London School of Economics, said there was ‘no reason’ Samsung would not be storing up data.

“The fear is they could be building up a pattern of your preferences, or learning your voice,” he told the Mail.

Even when interactivity is turned off, the TV can collect data

Users do have the option of stopping the recording of their conversations by Samsung; they can turn the voice recognition feature off. But even then, the South Korean-based technology giant can still collect some information.

“While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it,” says the company’s privacy statement.

The Samsung smart TVs are not the only video and television technology capable of monitoring your activity. As Natural News editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, reported last year, Amazon Fire TV (and similar services) has the capability to act as a spying device.

Sources:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

http://www.naturalnews.com

 

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048759_smart_TVs_surveillance_Big_Brother.html#ixzz3T3xwXu5E

The Power Grid & You

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Industry’s Own Words: 6 Admissions Of In-Home Surveillance Using Smart Meters

Josh del Sol
Activist Post

A look at what utility companies, PUCs, and the former CIA director have to say about the ‘smart’ meters, data-mining, and surveillance — sans propaganda.

It’s always a drag to find out when a friend is saying one thing to your face, and another to your back. As uncovered in our film Take Back Your Power, the way in which most utilities are now delivering the lies and propaganda — with your individual rights, security, and potentially health on the line — is elevating the trait of “two-faced” to a completely new level.

It’s important to note that the first 4 of these references have to do with the smart meters / grid infrastructure capabilities as of this time. According to the sum of my research over the past 3 years, the plan involves achieving a greater and greater level of granularity and extraction of in-home data over time — see #5 and #6 below as examples (as well as my article on Google’s Nest acquisition). So as far as privacy and surveillance go, according to utilities’ own documentation and writings, ‘smart’ meters are effectively a trojan horse.

1) US Congressional Research Service report, “Smart Meter Data: Privacy and Cybersecurity” (February 2012)

With smart meters, police will have access to data that might be used to track residents’ daily lives and routines while in their homes, including their eating, sleeping, and showering habits, what appliances they use and when, and whether they prefer the television to the treadmill, among a host of other details.

Source: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42338.pdf – see page 7 (page 10 of the PDF)

2) Colorado Power Utility Commission report, “Smart Metering & Privacy: Existing Law and Competing Policies” (Spring 2009)

First, the privacy concerns are real, and should be addressed proactively in order to protect consumers. Second and related, a salient privacy invasion—were it to happen and get press—could create significant opposition to smart grid deployment efforts.

Source: http://www.dora.state.co.us/puc/DocketsDecisions/DocketFilings/09I-593EG/09I-593EG_Spring2009Report-SmartGridPrivacy.pdf – see page 6

3) California Public Utility Commission press release, “California Commission Adopts Rules to Protect the Privacy and Security of Customer Electricity Usage Data” (July 2011)

Our action today will protect the privacy and security of customer usage data while enablingutilities and authorized third-parties to use the information to provide useful energy management and conservation services to customers.

I support today’s decision because it adopts reasonable privacy and security rules and expandsconsumer and third-party access to electricity usage and pricing information. I hope this decision stimulates market interest.

Source:http://smartenergyportal.net/article/california-commission-adopts-rules-protect-privacy-and-security-customer-electricity-usage-d

4) SF Chronicle article, “California Utilities Yield Energy Use Data” (July 2013)

California’s electric utilities last year disclosed the energy-use records and other personal information of thousands of customers, according to reports the companies filed with state regulators.

The vast majority of those disclosures – 4,062 – were made by one utility, San Diego Gas and Electric Co. In 4,000 of those cases, the information was subpoenaed by government agencies.

New digital smart meters being installed throughout the state can measure a home’s energy use hour by hour, showing when residents leave for work, go to sleep or travel on vacation. Older analog meters, which measured cumulative energy use over the course of a month, couldn’t do that.

“Before smart meters, what happened inside houses couldn’t be revealed unless there was a police officer inside with a warrant,” Ozer said.

Source: http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Calif-utilities-yield-energy-use-data-4611159.php

5) Raab & Associates, Steering Committee report (February 2013) – Under the heading “Strategic (3-10 years)”:

New tools for mining data for intel

Under the heading “Transformational (10+ years)”:

Centralized intel combined with widespread local/distributed intel

and

Data mining and analytics becomes core competency

Source: http://magrid.raabassociates.org/articles/raab%20subcommittee%20update%20draft.ppt

View slide 17 only (PDF): http://www.takebackyourpower.net/documents/RaabDraft-17.pdf

6) Wired.com, “CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher” (15 Mar 2012)

‘Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,’ Petraeus said, ‘the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.

“Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.”

Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/

* * *

Did we really think that the technocratic oligarchy would stop at collecting information about how we use our phones, who we call, and where we’re located? If we did, we were naive. Plainly, there is a corporate intention to effectively colonize your home.

However, there is also a rising awareness, and resistance, as new solutions are uncovered. The first step is to remove your consent, in writing.

The following is actually written into the California Civil Code. Not only do these provide a strong clue at how the corporatocracy functions (and gets away with what it does), but they also outline a basis for remedy: (notes in parentheses, italics)

California Civil Code (2009)

1619. A contract is either express or implied. (If you didn’t say no, you said yes.) 

3515. He who consents to an act is not wronged by it. (The way they do business is in writing. If you didn’t send them a letter or notice to remove your consent, you have agreed to their terms, and thus have agreed to a reduction in rights.)

3521. He who takes the benefit must bear the burden. (Utilities and their executives – and many public servants – are taking the benefit. They must, according to their law, accept the liability for all harm if the liability is enforced.) 

3523. For every wrong there is a remedy. (We are not bound into something which would have us be as slaves, if we do not want to be.) 

3527. The law helps the vigilant, before those who sleep on their rights.

What statutes are YOUR utilities and governments bound by?

from:    http://www.activistpost.com/2014/04/industrys-own-words-6-admissions-of-in.html

NSA Monitoring, yep, Just about Everything

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Confirmed: NSA has broken into Google, Yahoo data centers and now monitors all web searches, Gmail

Friday, November 01, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes

NaturalNews) If the reports earlier this summer detailing how the National Security Agency monitors all data passing through the nation’s internet service providers and tech companies was a little too much to digest or accept, that’s understandable.

After all, this is America, right? And the NSA isn’t supposed to be spying on Americans.

Only, it does, as a new report proves beyond any doubt.

According to The Washington Post, the NSA has managed to secretly hack into the main communication links that connect Yahoo! and Google data centers to the rest of the world, as per documents obtained from former NSA contractor-turned-fugitive Edward Snowden, as well as interviews with insider officials.

The paper said:

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.

MUSCULAR, PRISM data collection programs

A top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, provided details about how the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records daily from Yahoo and Google internal networks to databases located at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.

In the 30 days prior, the report noted, field collectors processed and returned 181,280,466 new records, ranging from “metadata,” which can provide information about who actually sent and received emails and when and content like text, video and audio.

The Post reported:

The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.

The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process.

But apparently, even that access – authorized by the USA Patriot Act – isn’t good enough. Obviously, the NSA wants no oversight of its activities at all.

The Post said the MUSCULAR project looked to be “an unusually aggressive use” of NSA capabilities against American tech companies. To be sure, the NSA is built to conduct high-tech spying, and has a wide range of digital tools at its disposal, but has no previous reputation of using them at will against U.S. firms.

Despite the revelations, no one in government wanted to talk about them on the record. “White House officials and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, declined to confirm, deny or explain why the agency infiltrates Google and Yahoo networks overseas,” the Post reported.

Privacy? What privacy?

Google released a statement saying the company was certainly “troubled by allegations of the government intercepting traffic between our data centers, and we are not aware of this activity.”

“We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we continue to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links,” the company said.

A spokeswoman from Yahoo added: “We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency.”

According to earlier releases of top secret information by Snowden, the PRISM program is used by the NSA to gather incredible amounts of online communications records through legal means; tech companies, via warrants issued by the secret FISA court, are compelled to turn over data matching the court’s approved search terms.

That program is authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

“Intercepting communications overseas has clear advantages for the NSA, with looser restrictions and less oversight. NSA documents about the effort refer directly to ‘full take,’ ‘bulk access’ and ‘high volume’ operations on Yahoo and Google networks,” the Post reported. “Such large-scale collection of Internet content would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.”

In today’s online, interconnected world, America, you have no more privacy. That should be crystal clear by now.

Oh, and the NSA’s spying and data storage capability is only going to increase. The agency is building a massive new facility in Utah for just those purposes, among others: http://nsa.gov1.info.

Latest NSA Leak

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Why the Latest NSA Leak Is the Scariest of All

Paul Wagenseil, TechNewsDaily Senior Editor   |   September 06, 2013
woman's cold blue eyes staring out through mesh of binary code
Credit: Juergen Faelchle/Shutterstock.com

The National Security Agency programs revealed yesterday (Sept. 5) in three media reports were perhaps the most important revelations yet this summer, and have profound implications for everyone who uses the Internet.

The reports make clear that the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been methodically undermining the vast encryption-based “web of trust” that makes possible secure online financial transactions, communications and other sensitive transmissions.

The spy agencies’ activities have gone on for more than a decade. Like a silent but pervasive cancer, they have penetrated and weakened every corner of the Internet.

“Not only does the worst possible hypothetical … appear to be true,” wrote Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green on his blog last night, “but it’s true on a scale I couldn’t even imagine.”

“The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: We can no longer trust them,” wrote American encryption expert Bruce Schneier on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian.

MORE: 13 Security and Privacy Tips for the Truly Paranoid

Subterfuge by any means necessary

The surveillance programs, named “Manassas,” “Bullrun” and “Edgehill” after battles in the American and English civil wars, not only built powerful computers to crack encryption protocols.

They also coerced technology companies into handing over encryption keys, infiltrated NSA and GCHQ personnel onto corporate staffs, broke into the computer servers of uncooperative companies to steal information and ensured that some companies built “backdoors” into their technology so that the spy agencies would always have access.

Perhaps most egregiously of all, the NSA and GCHQ deliberately poisoned publicly distributed encryption standards, used by hundreds of millions of people across the world every day, so that the standards would be secretly — but fatally — flawed.

“The (actually substantial) goodwill that NSA built up in the public crypto community over the last two decades was wiped out today,” tweeted University of Pennsylvania cryptography expert Matt Blaze.

The implications are that, if they wanted to, the spy agencies could access nearly every Internet-based purchase, money transfer, email, Internet phone call, instant message or file transfer made by anyone, anywhere.

Early hints of secret tampering

The programs were revealed by documents provided in June to The Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who has since taken refuge in Russia.

The Guardian, which has come under pressure from GCHQ to stop publishing Snowden material, shared the documents with The New York Times and the American nonprofit online outlet Pro Publica.

All three publications simultaneously posted stories on their websites yesterday afternoon.

The media outlets, wary of undermining national security in both countries, did not specify which encryption protocols have been compromised. (The spy agencies had asked that the stories not be published at all.)

But at least one has already been identified: Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, or Dual_EC_DRBG, a random-number generator developed by the NSA and endorsed by the U.S. federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007. (Random-number generators are essential to the operation of many encryption protocols.)

That same year, Schneier noted that Dual_EC_DRBG was subtly flawed in a way that permitted the holder of a secret key — an unknown numerical constant — to completely undermine encryption protocols based on it.

“Not only is [Dual_EC_DRBG] a mouthful to say, it’s also three orders of magnitude slower than its peers. It’s in the standard only because it’s been championed by the NSA,” Schneier wrote in a November 2007 Wired article. “We have no way of knowing whether an NSA employee working on his own came up with the constants — and has the secret numbers.”

Schneier, a source for some Tom’s Guide articles, revealed yesterday that he has been helping The Guardian analyze the Snowden documents, and for that purpose had even bought a new computer that “has never been connected to the Internet.”

“What I took away from reading the Snowden documents was that if the NSA wants in to your computer, it’s in. Period,” Schneier wrote in an opinion piece published on the Guardian website yesterday.

How to protect yourself — maybe

On the Guardian site, Schneier offered advice to readers seeking to keep their data private: Use the anonymizing Internet service Tor, encrypt emails and other communications and use open-source encryption software instead of commercial encryption products.

“My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly backdoors,” Schneier wrote, “and many foreign ones probably do as well.”

Yet even Schneier’s informed recommendations may be only hopeful guesses. Because the Snowden documents did not name all the encryption protocols, pieces of software and technology companies compromised by the NSA and GCHQ, few people know what’s safe and what’s not.

Tor only offers partial security, and the Times’ story implied that the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) open-source security standard, which underlies nearly all secure Web transactions, had been compromised.

Likewise, the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) open-source encryption standard, which Schneier also recommended, is so old, so widely used and was once such an irritant to the U.S. government that it would be first on a list of things for the NSA to crack.

However, just because the NSA and GCHQ could be watching you, it doesn’t mean they are.

“Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA — so it probably isn’t,” wrote Schneier.

If everyone sees it, no one can lie

It’s likely some of the newer open-source technology, such as the Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 Web-security standard (meant to replace SSL but not yet widely adopted), or the free RedPhone and Secure Text Android apps, are not compromised. Their code is openly available for expert review and revision.

It’s also likely that closed-source technology developed by major U.S. or British corporations has been compromised. The paranoid rants dating back to the 1990s about NSA backdoors in Microsoft software or Intel chips suddenly make sense.

Even the story published last month by the German magazine Die Zeit, which suspected that Microsoft’s Trusted Computing chips were secret NSA backdoors, and which we dismissed as exaggerated, no longer seems unreasonable.

“I’m no longer the crank,” wrote Green on his blog yesterday, referring to his own speculation about NSA activities. “I wasn’t even close to cranky enough.”

MORE: Beat the FBI: How to Send Anonymous Email Without Getting Caught

Undermining your security to keep you secure

The NSA and GCHQ will argue that undermining every possible piece of encryption and security is necessary for the greater good of keeping the U.S. and Britain free from terrorism, and that their adversaries in Russia and China are trying to do the same thing. (Some intelligence experts think Snowden has been a Russian agent all along.)

“Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, said in a statement today (Sept. 6) and posted on Pro Publica’s website. “Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that. … The fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news.”

“The stories published yesterday, however, reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity,” the statement said. “Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.”

But the collateral damage from these programs may be worse than a terrorist attack. From now on, suspicion will be cast on all products from major U.S. technology companies — the key players in an industrial sector in which the U.S. is trying to maintain dominance.

Why should consumers, business or foreign governments trust software from Microsoft or McAfee, hardware from Intel or Cisco, or anything from Apple? Why buy American when cheaper Chinese products are no less secure?

A statement made a month ago by Ladar Levison, founder of the small secure email provider Lavabit, which shut down in response to government pressure, has even more resonance today.

“I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States,”

Levison said in a note explaining the Lavabit closure.

from:     http://www.livescience.com/39477-most-important-nsa-leak.html

 

 

 

Anti-Facial Recognition Invention

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Privacy Visor Confuses Face Recognition Camera

Jan 23, 2013 03:09 PM ET // by Jesse Emspak

“Hiding behind your glasses” just took on a whole new meaning.

At Tokyo’s National Institute of Informatics, Isao Echizen, an associate professor in the Digital Content and Media Sciences Research Division, unveiled a privacy visor — a set of glasses that prevents cameras with face-recognition software from recognizing you.

Echizen designed the glasses with near-infrared LEDs placed around the eyes and the bridge of the nose, two areas that computers use to pick out faces. Near-infrared is invisible to people, but many cameras can pick it up. The lights add digital “noise” to the image and when the computer tries to match the image with ones in a database, it gets confused and is unable to complete a match

Echizen told BBC News that the purpose is to protect people from being tagged and identified in photographs without their knowledge. The EyeSee mannequins, for example, use face recognition software to log when shoppers come in and build a database of people’s age, gender or race.

At the same time, he didn’t want to run into the problem of wearing a mask, which protects privacy but outside of 18th century Venetian masquerade balls, is considered a bit unusual.

Makeup could also fool face recognition software, as demonstrated with the CV Dazzle project, but that too could be problematic, since the designs are a bit outré.

Along with artist Adam Harvey’s stealth hoodie, these glasses are yet another indication that people are thinking more carefully about privacy – or the lack thereof – in a connected world.

Credit: National Institute of Informatics

from:     http://news.discovery.com/tech/gear-and-gadgets/glasses-foil-face-recognition-software-130123.htm

Is SKYPE Watching You?

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Did Microsoft Give Skype The Ability To Snoop On Calls?

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online

Microsoft is stuck in another swarm of controversy again, with reports claiming that it now has the ability to spy on its users via Skype.

Reports suggest that since Microsoft purchased Skype, the online video chat company, it has shifted its answer when asked whether it could conduct wiretaps.

Skype has been known in the past to go on record saying it could not conduct wiretaps due to its “peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques,” which has effectively frustrated law enforcements who have wanted to use the service for their benefit.

However, since its May 2011 Microsoft purchase, the language Skype uses to answer questions about whether its technology is used for wiretaps has changed.

Microsoft has switched some of the peer-to-peer network technology to work on its dedicated Linux servers instead, making it easier to “wiretap” conversations.

With a peer-to-peer network, each user is a “node” that helps to connect other users, while some users are “supernodes” that hold more responsibility for traffic. Some of the “supernodes” have been switched to the Linux servers instead.

Some hackers claim that Microsoft is re-engineering these supernodes to make it easier for law enforcement to monitor calls.

“It is essentially a man-in-the-middle attack, and it is made all the easier because Microsoft—who owns Skype and knows the keys used for the service’s encryption—is helping,” Tim Verry of ExtremeTech wrote in a story earlier in July.

Mark Gillett, Skype’s Corporate VP of Product Engineering & Operations, told Verry that the changes were made to “improve the Skype user experience.”

“We believe this approach has immediate performance, scalability and availability benefits for the hundreds of millions of users that make up the Skype community,” he told Verry.

However, a December 2009 Microsoft patent application describes “recording agents” that legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The patent application is said by Slashdot to be one of Microsoft’s more elaborate and detailed patent papers.

“The document provides Microsoft’s idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties,” Slashdot shows in a post. This patent was granted to Microsoft a month after Skype was purchased, in June 2011.

Ryan Gallagher of Slate wrote that when he tried asking Microsoft whether it could facilitate wiretap requests, it would not confirm or deny the question, saying that Skype “co-operates with law enforcement agencies as much as is legally and technically possible.”

from:    http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112662597/skype-snooping/
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