A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a news story in which it was reported that the NSA had “built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place.”
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In an encouraging sign of greater concern for privacy rights following the revelations by Edward Snowden, Yahoo announces that it is increasing its encryption measuresto protect users’ data.
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During Jacob Appelbaum’s talk about how he suspected that Apple might be colluding with the NSA to enable the agency to spy on people, he spoke about how they could take control of your cell phones, saying “They would be able to break into this phone, almost certainly, and turn on the microphone” and that the NSA builds fake cell phone towers to grab and store data. One of the things that Edward Snowden revealed was that the NSA had the capability to remotely turn on the cameras in people’s computers so that they could spy on them.
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It is clear that there are rumblings of great discontent around the world about how the internet is being hijacked by government spying agencies and I suggested that it may lead to some kind of organized revolt. As usual, I am behind the times because reader John Horstman informs me that there is already a project in the works known as Reset the Net that calls upon everyone to do their bit to reclaim the promise of the internet as a free and open space
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I have been railing at the way that the US has used the war on terror to undermine basic civil liberties. In its efforts to hide its misdeeds, the war it has waged on whistleblowers and the reporters who convey their revelations has been nothing short of disgraceful.
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Laura Poitras has a new story out in Der Spiegel today about how the NSA and GCHQ targeted 122 world leaders for spying, in addition to leading German telecommunications companies and particularly their engineers, using a hitherto secret court order to do so.
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Today is the day that NSA director Keith Alexander leaves his post. I would be very happy about this except that it is very likely that his replacement will be cut from the same cloth of being a smooth liar.
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Jacob Appelbaum, a US computer security researcher who works with WikiLeaks and about whom I wrote back in 2012 because of the harassment he receives every single time he returns to the US after traveling abroad, gave a presentation at the 30C3 Conference held in Germany in December 2013.
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Ryan Gallagher and Peter Maas at The Intercept have an important story about how the NSA has been hunting and hacking the systems administrators of companies.
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