Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the …
There seems to be no end to warrantless surveillance : According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of …
Generative AI is going to be a powerful tool for data analysis and summarization. Here’s an example of it being used for sentiment analysis. My guess is that it isn’t very good yet, but that it will get better. [...]
Apple has warned leaders of the opposition government in India that their phones are being spied on: Multiple top leaders of India’s opposition parties and several journalists have received a notification from Apple, saying that “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to …
Fascinating story of a covert wiretap that was discovered because of an expired TLS certificate: The suspected man-in-the-middle attack was identified when the administrator of jabber.ru, the largest Russian XMPP service, received a notification that one of the servers’ certificates had expired. However, jabber.ru found no expired …
Interesting article about the Snowden documents, including comments from former Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He told Computer Weekly that: As …
Susan Landau published an excellent essay on the current justification for the government breaking end-to-end-encryption: child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). She puts the debate into historical context, discusses the problem of CSAE, and explains why breaking encryption isn’t the solution. [...]
Amnesty International has published a comprehensive analysis of the Predator government spyware products. These technologies used to be the exclusive purview of organizations like the NSA. Now they’re available to every country on the planet—democratic, nondemocratic, authoritarian, whatever—for a price. This is the legacy of not …
Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And …
Citizen Lab discovers alleged attack using ‘zero-click exploit’ on individual employed by DC organization An individual employed by a Washington DC-based organization with international offices was targeted with powerful hacking software made by NSO Group, researchers have claimed, raising new concerns about the proliferation of spyware that can infect …
A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago: So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, let’s start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs …
License plate scanners aren’t new. Neither is using them for bulk surveillance. What’s new is that AI is being used on the data, identifying “suspicious” vehicle behavior: Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in this …
This is why we need regulation: Zoom updated its Terms of Service in March, spelling out that the company reserves the right to train AI on user data with no mention of a way to opt out. On Monday, the company said in a blog post that there’s …
Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws. All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. You’re told how to cross the street, how fast to drive …
The French police are getting new surveillance powers : French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. [...] Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones …
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a …
In 2013 and 2014, I wrote extensively about new revelations regarding NSA surveillance based on the documents provided by Edward Snowden. But I had a more personal involvement as well. I wrote the essay below in September 2013. The New Yorker agreed to publish it, but the Guardian asked …
Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, changing the scale and scope of surveillance. [...]
Just another obscure warrantless surveillance program. US law enforcement can access details of money transfers without a warrant through an obscure surveillance program the Arizona attorney general’s office created in 2014. A database stored at a nonprofit, the Transaction Record Analysis Center (TRAC), provides full names and amounts …
No details, though: According to the complaint against him, Al-Azhari allegedly visited a dark web site that hosts “unofficial propaganda and photographs related to ISIS” multiple times on May 14, 2019. In virtue of being a dark web site—that is, one hosted on the Tor anonymity network—it …
Eufy cameras claim to be local only, but upload data to the cloud. The company is basically lying to reporters, despite being shown evidence to the contrary. The company’s behavior is so egregious that ReviewGeek is no longer recommending them. This will be interesting to watch. If Eufy …
European parliament is investigating powerful surveillance tool used by governments around the world Victims of spyware and a group of security experts have privately warned that a European parliament investigatory committee risks being thrown off course by an alleged “disinformation campaign”. The warning, contained in a letter to MEPs …
Here in 2022, we have a newly declassified 2016 Inspector General report—”Misuse of Sigint Systems”—about a 2013 NSA program that resulted in the unauthorized (that is, illegal) targeting of Americans. Given all we learned from Edward Snowden, this feels like a minor coda. There’s nothing really …
This technique measures device response time to determine distance: The scientists tested the exploit by modifying an off-the-shelf drone to create a flying scanning device, the Wi-Peep. The robotic aircraft sends several messages to each device as it flies around, establishing the positions of devices in each room. A …
It’s Iran’s turn to have its digital surveillance tools leaked : According to these internal documents, SIAM is a computer system that works behind the scenes of Iranian cellular networks, providing its operators a broad menu of remote commands to alter, disrupt, and monitor how customers use their …