Spying // Current TV

Russian jailed for passing missile data to CIA

A Russian space engineer has received a 13-year jail sentence on charges of passing... more

Sexirobot
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10 hours ago
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Rewritten Headlines: Drug Sniffing Dogs to Red Wine

It's news you can use if you really don't care about news.

TonyDiGerolamo
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1 month ago
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Your Smartphone Is Spying on You

An Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ built into most smartphones that doesn't just track your location; it secretly records your keystrokes, and there's nothing you can do about it. Is it time to put on a tinfoil hat? That depends on how you feel about privacy.

[Related: Facebook and Google Join Forces to Oppose Privacy Bill]

The reason for this invasive Android app seems reasonable enough at face value. Even though it's on most Android, BlackBerry and Nokia devices, most users would never know that Carrier IQ is running in the background, and that's sort of the point. Described on the company's website as software to gain "unprecedented insight into their customers' mobile experience," Carrier IQ is ostensibly supposed to help mobile carriers and device manufacturers gather data in order to improve their products.

Tons of applications do this, and you're probably used to those boxes that pops up on your screen and ask if you want to help the company by sending your data back to them. If you're concerned about your privacy, you just tap no and go about your merry computing way. As security-conscious Android developer Trevor Eckhart realized, however, Carrier IQ does not give you this option, and unless you were code-savvy and looking for it, you'd never know it was there. And based on how aggressive the company has been in trying to keep Eckhart quiet about his discovery, it seems like Carrier IQ doesn't want you to know it's there either.

[Related: Did Eric Schmidt Step Down Because He 'Screwed Up' on Social Media?]

Eckhart first raised a red flag about Carrier IQ about two weeks ago when he started investigating reports that a software update on the HTC EVO 3D included "user behavior logging" code. The code had worried some geek bloggers when it showed up a couple months ago, but HTC and Sprint insisted that it wasn't much different than normal error-logging software and certainly didn't gather granular data like "contents of messages, photos, videos, etc." Eckhart wrote an exhaustive blog post about his startling findings -- CarrierIQ collected lots data, including keystrokes, and there way for the user to opt out "without advanced knowledge" -- and CarrierIQ flipped out. The company sent Eckhart a cease-and-desist letter demanding that he keep his mouth shut and threatening legal action. But after the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took a look at the case and determined that Eckhart was working within his First Amendment rights, it backed off but still denied that they recorded keystrokes.

[Related: Google's Ice Cream Sandwich Will Make Android All Better]
This week, Eckhart fired back with a 17-minute long video showing in painstaking detail how much data CarrierIQ collects, effectively undercutting the company's denial. It was even logging contents of text messages! Wired posted the video on Tuesday night and cemented its status "as one of nine reasons to wear a tinfoil hat." The magazine explains how CarrierIQ even undercuts other companies' security measures:

The video shows the software logging Eckhart’s online search of “hello world.” That’s despite Eckhart using the HTTPS version of Google which is supposed to hide searches from those who would want to spy by intercepting the traffic between a user and Google. … It’s not even clear what privacy policy covers this. Is it Carrier IQ’s, your carrier’s or your phone manufacturer’s? And, perhaps, most important, is sending your communications to Carrier IQ a violation of the federal government’s ban on wiretapping?

more..http://news.yahoo.com/smartphone-spying-204933867.htmlAn Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ... more

cabinettags
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2 months ago
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Strange case of Kentucky soldier charged with espionage

American Army Specialist William Millay, a 22-year-old military policeman from... more

Monkey_Films
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3 months ago
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3 comments

FBI To Record ALL Internet Talk Radio

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is rolling tape. The agency has awarded a... more

maasanova
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4 months ago
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Report: Google, Twitter, Facebook Co-opted For Surveillance...( Article)

(Reuters) – Internet companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook are... more

factoverfiction
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4 months ago
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0 comments

Your Electrical Meter is Watching You

Smart meters send wireless info about your life to government agencies.

Progresshiv
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5 months ago
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9 comments

BREAKING: Court allows ACLU challenge to FISA Amendments Act warrantless wiretapping law to proceed

Source: ACLU (via Twitter) BREAKING: Court allows ACLU challenge to FISA Amendments... more

KB723
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5 months ago
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18 comments

ACLU report on Obama and civil liberties

Remember when Obama undoing what Bush did and getting back to the Consitution was cool and popular? Turns out Obama has still been as bad as Bush and even worse in some cases.

***

Last week, the top lawyer and 34-year-veteran of the CIA, John Rizzo, explained to PBS' Frontline that Obama has "changed virtually nothing" from Bush policies in these areas, and this week, the ACLU explains that "most [Bush] policies remain core elements of our national security strategy today."

At some point very soon, this basic truth will be impossible to deny with a straight face even for the most hardened loyalists of both parties, each of whom have been eager, for their own reasons, to deny it (and even the two differences cited there, though positive, are wildly exaggerated by Obama defenders: the torture techniques authorized by Bush were no longer in use and the CIA black sites were empty by the time Obama was inaugurated; by contrast, there is ample evidence that the Obama administration continues to use torture by proxy and rendition/CIA-black-sites by proxy as well).

The report is broken down into sections/chapters, and here are a few highlights:

The ACLU then devotes an entire chapter to the way in which immunity for America's torturers -- bestowed jointly by President Obama and a judicial branch meekly deferential to his and Bush's claims of state secrecy -- has contaminated and degraded the entire justice system and made the future reintroduction of torture a virtual inevitability:

This Surveillance State, like most other Bush/Obama Terrorism policies, is justified by a never-ending orgy of fear-mongering. But other than the enrichment of the private Security State industry (see here and here).

A separate chapter is devoted to what the ACLU calls "A Massive and Unchecked Surveillance Society." It explains: "Using Patriot Act authority, the Bush Administration started -- and the Obama Administration has continued -- to conduct wholesale 'preventive' surveillance of innocent Americans without judicial review." And "the result is a national surveillance society in which Americans’ right to privacy is under unprecedented siege." But little is known about exactly what is being done by this purely unaccountable hidden government -- what The Washington Post calls "Top Secret America" -- because of this:

Pointing to that core theory of both presidencies, the ACLU dispatches one of the most misleading claims of Obama defenders: that the President's failure to close Guantanamo is due exclusively to Congressional obstructionism; in fact, long before Congress acted at all with regard to that camp, the President announced his intention to continue its core injustice -- indefinite detention -- albeit in a different locale:

During the Bush era, the actions and condemnations of the ACLU received ample positive attention from progressives. That, of course, is no longer true, and this damning report will likely be ignored in most of those circles, just as this truly remarkable comment from the ACLU's Executive Director has been. And, as usual, anyone urging that attention be paid to these facts will be met with demands that eyes be diverted instead to how scary Sarah Palin Christine O'Donnell Michele Bachmann Rick Perry is, and then this will all blissfully fade away in a cloud of partisan electioneering even with the election more than a year away.

Either way, this creeping unchecked authoritarianism marches forward unabated, and is now -- rather than the province of the right-wing GOP -- fully bipartisan consensus. I really don't understand how progressives think they'll be taken seriously the next time there is a GOP President and they try to resurrect their feigned concern for these matters; they'll be every bit as credible as conservatives who pretend to be deficit-warriors and defenders of restrained government only when the other party is in power.Remember when Obama undoing what Bush did and getting back to the Consitution was cool... more

maasanova
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5 months ago
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Internet Privacy Alert

Recently, the Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee passed an act which would... more

Progresshiv
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7 months ago
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129 comments

USA PATRIOT ACT makes your cell phone a tracking weapon - National Human Rights | Examiner.com

If you own and carry a cell phone, criminals know where you are all the time - when to... more

gdebd
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7 months ago
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1 comment

Google spying on you for NSA? Judge says "None of your business" (Article)

A federal judge has ordered that whether Google is spying for National Security Agency... more

my23rdwish
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7 months ago
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3 comments

domestic spy program has grown far beyond our wildest nightmare

Information leaked from government hacked websites reveal that the US domestic spy... more

figgdimension
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8 months ago
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20 comments

Beautiful Russian Spy Anna Chapman Gets A New Job - Newspaper Editor

Anna Chapman, a well-known beautiful Russian spy, became editor-in-chief of the... more

mcamca
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9 months ago
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1 comment

China's spying seeks secret US info

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The young man stood before the judge, his usually neatly... more

KSirys
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9 months ago
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15 comments

iPhones creates Homeland Security app for spying on Kentuckians

Ongoing Fake War on Terrorism is expanding to apps for your iPhone. ***... more

maasanova
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10 months ago
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Liberty's Easy Slide into Tyranny

No matter how hard we try, no one can control the future, and we cannot assume the... more

Schnookums
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12 months ago
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"CIA Spy" Providing al Qaeda with "Nuclear Fissile Material" & "Biological Agents" Report Says: Raymond Davis - Accused of Double Murder

011-02-20 12:40:00 Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found... more

gerardange
added this
12 months ago
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9 comments

Revealed: How Energy Firms Spy On Environmental Activists

Three large energy companies have been carrying out covert intelligence-gathering... more

toyotabedzrock
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12 months ago
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1 comment

Stealing body fluids from NATO’s top official embarrassing for US: And it’s nasty.

WWH- Never shake hands with Hillary Clinton! WikiLeaks – “Secret spy... more

joeeddy
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12 months ago
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