NSA

There is no need for spies anymore /  by Richard

Lately, it has emerged that the Smart TVs like the ones from Samsung and game consoles like Microsoft's are recording what we do and transmit this to 3rd parties, no matter whether you are aware of it or not.

You can read this in "clear" in their Terms and Conditions, that you probably already agreed on...

“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 through your use of Voice Recognition”
— Samsung Global Privacy Policy - SmartTV Supplement

Spies like James Bond, really no longer exists

2400 years ago, Sun Tzu said there are five kinds of spies. 1) The local spy, is a serviceman or employee working in the enemies district. 2) The insider spy, is having a local official working for you. 3) a converted spy, is an enemies spy captured and bribed/threatened to become a double agent. 4) Doomed spies, are basically, bait for the enemy 5) surviving spies, are ones that come back with intelligence.

More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches, beside your iPad, computer.

97% of the world population has a cellular phone and 67% of these are smartphones with a GPS, camera and a microphone. The majority of the western world is online on Facebook and Twitter - telling everybody were they are and what they do. Most of us pay with credit cards, as well as most cities are monitoring the traffic via number plate recognition software.

“We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher”
— CIA Director David Petraeus

So of course, governmental agencies are tapping into all this data like CIA Director David Petraeus explains how he cannot wait to spy on you through them, as he said in WIRE's article two years ago!

Apparently, the quantity of data collected is so big that the government spy agencies can't handle it, according to a Independent report described in The Guardian.

Indeed we have bugged our homes and we are carrying around all necessary equipment to monitor our-self 24/7. But the irony in all this, is that it's us who stand in a line for hours, spending hundreds of dollars of our own money, to finance this!

I guess we are all smart people now, with our smartphones and smart TVs ;)

But if NSA was on Wall Street /  by Richard

Recently Citigroup agreed with prosecutors on a mega $7 billion fine. Analysts estimate Citi has around $3 billion in reserve; the reported deal would be mostly in cash with some money set aside to help struggling borrowers. OK maybe its a step in the right direction. But if the NSA can monitor all communications both domestic and foreign, then how come that no one on Wall Street has gone to jail yet, after America's biggest financial scandal of all time?

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Google in the sky /  by Richard

For a company whose mission is to “organize the world’s information” the sky is important. I am not talking about Google Maps. Google Sky and Google Earth, I am talking about the high-altitude bird’s-eye view of our blue planet and it's consumers.

Google is investing in low-cost communications and high--resolution imagery projects such as: Titan Aerospace, making high-altitude solar-powered drones, Project Loon, the internet via high-altitude balloons and lately Skybox Imaging, that builds small satellites that can make high-resolution photos and videos. And probably will Google buy a stake in space project Virgin Galactic as well.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported the firm plans to spend $1 to $3 billion to launch a fleet of 180 small internet satellites.

Once Google got real-time coverage of the entire globe from space, you start getting data that was previously only available to the NSA. Perhaps, we will reach a point where Google can do things that could change the future, and on a daily basis...

Google is committed to the future and in predicting it. Another Google investment is in Recorded Future, a company that seeks to interpret the information on the Web for clues about what's to come.

It doesn't mean that Google competes with the NSA, even if the Skybox sounds a bit like Skynet. Google is investing in how to refine its targeted advertising software, but what a precision they will have!

Strategy to Cut Methane Emissions /  by Richard

According to a fact sheet published by the White House last month, part of the Obama Administration’s effort to curb greenhouse gases involves cutting “cow emissions.” The Financial Times reports that scientists now have a interest in developing “a next-generation anti-methane gas backpacks.” for cows.

Seriously, have everybody gone completely crazy?

Imagine a Taliban on his camel riding and controlling a herd of “methane cows” charging toward the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington...

Wouldn't the NSA get nervous from such green initiative? Cows are now more dangerous than the internet!

Taliban Cows - Milka bin O’Leary

Taliban Cows - Milka bin O’Leary

NSA safe Telegram ... /  by Richard

New, nice and fresh; Telegram is like SMS, but more powerful. You can send messages, photos and videos to people who are in your phone contacts (and have Telegram). You can also create groups. Telegram is cloud-based, decentralized and heavily encrypted. As a result, you can access your messages from several devices and store an unlimited number of photos and videos in the cloud. 

And if you like the nitty gritty stuff: Telegram's encryption is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie–Hellman secure key exchange.

I Wonder what NSA’s General Keith Alexander think of Telegram? Or is this one a spy app?

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Digital Fortress, owner Pavel Durov is also the founder of Russia’s largest social network, Vkontakte. Pavel's US-based software company’s has just rolled out Telegram for iOS and Android, but a Mac OS X and a Windows version are on its way.

Basically, the average Internet user is screwed /  by Richard

Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer and author on security topics, last month took on a side gig: helping the Guardian newspaper pore through documents purloined from the U.S. National Security Agency by contractor Edward Snowden, lately of Moscow.

According to Schneier the NSA is collecting data from all of the cloud providers we use: Google and Facebook and Apple and Yahoo, etc. We see the NSA in partnerships with all the major telcos in the U.S., and many others around the world, to collect data on the backbone. We see the NSA deliberately subverting cryptography, through secret agreements with vendors, to make security systems less effective. The scope and scale are enormous.

The NSA’s actions are making us all less safe. They’re not just spying on the bad guys, they’re deliberately weakening Internet security for everyone—including the good guys. It’s sheer folly to believe that only the NSA can exploit the vulnerabilities they create. Additionally, by eavesdropping on all Americans, they’re building the technical infrastructure for a police state.

We’re not there yet, but already we've learned that both the DEA and the IRS use NSA surveillance data in prosecutions and then lie about it in court. Power without accountability or oversight is dangerous to society at a very fundamental level.

Basically, the average user is screwed. You can’t say  “Don’t use Google”—that’s a useless piece of advice. Or “Don’t use Facebook,” because then you don’t talk to your friends, you don't get invited to parties, you don’t get laid. It’s like libertarians saying “Don’t use credit cards”; it just doesn't work in the real world.

The Internet has become essential to our lives, and it has been subverted into a gigantic surveillance platform.

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NSA is destroying USA's IT-Industry /  by Richard

According to a recent estimate by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the US cloud industry could lose $22 billion to $35 billion of revenues in the next years, simply due to concerns over NSA surveillance of U.S.-based cloud data centers.

Are you going to trust your customers data to Salesforce.com if you are an European oil company dealing with people in the Middle East?

The resent report in the Guardian, the Times said that the NSA spends more than $250 million of US citizens tax money, a year on a program working with technology companies to “covertly influence” product designs.

Despite earlier US assurances that its Department of Defense does not “engage in economic espionage in any domain,” a new report suggests that the intelligence agency NSA spied on Brazilian state-run oil giant Petrobras.

Dear Americans talk to your politicians in Washington, before its to late.

Your IT-industry is one of your biggest income sources, where the US is the world leader within the IT industry!

The United States has been a leader in scientific research and technological innovation since the late 19th century. I really like the USA, it's the land of entrepreneurship with economic freedom. Did Steve Jobs grow up in China? Or did Burma or India produce Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, or Mark Zuckerberg? Could Sergey Brin have co-founded Google while remaining in Russia?

Also Al Gore said that the NSA's collection of US citizens' phone records was "not really the American way".

The IT Industry Competitiveness Index 

The IT Industry Competitiveness Index 

lost business for US cloud companies /  by Richard

The US Congress created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 1978 as a check on executive authority. Recent disclosures about vast data-gathering by the government have raised concerns about the legitimacy of the court’s actions.

This secret court overseeing the government's surveillance program has given the National Security Agency authority to continue collecting metadata in bulk from telephone records, which has been in place for years, must be renewed every three months. According to the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which said authorization was renewed two weeks ago.

According to a recent survey by the industry organization Cloud Security Alliance, the exposure of NSA collecting metadata is having a real impact on the US cloud service providers in the form of lost overseas customers.  Several Swedish municipalities use Microsoft and Google today but is reevaluating another services that comply with EU laws.

Also Al Gore said that the NSA's collection of US citizens' phone records was "not really the American way".

Interesting is that the NSA with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees' email? The agency says it doesn't have the technology.

Anyway here is the list of Congressmen who voted for & against the amendment to stop NSA collecting metadata:

spy on my online life /  by Richard

In recent days, there are several solutions that have popped up to help us to communicate privately, such as The Guardian Project a year old, or Hemlis (meaning secrets in Swedish) a month old. Private messaging apps aren't new, apps like PGP, Wickr or iCrypt already enable users send encrypted messages to one another.

The Guardian Project is an Android solution mainly targeting the freedom fighter or journalists, like in Syria or Egypt... Giving them a tool to communicate with the “free world” without having the local secret police tracking them or their info. Hemlis is an iOS and Android solution for anybody who what’s a private communication.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, needs your help to create a private messaging app.

In this video (under) explaining the app's purpose, Peter Sunde references the recent PRISM scandal, the NSA program that taps into major internet companies's data and accesses user emails, photographs and other documents.

your metadata for you /  by Richard

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been collecting metadata about millions of phone calls exploded as a public issue. Is it a harmless way for the government to track dangerous patterns or a tightening net around our lives?

When Google hands over email records to different governmental agencies, it includes basic envelope information, or metadata, that reveals the names and email addresses of senders and recipients in your account.

For César Hidalgo, this national conversation about metadata couldn’t come too soon. A professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, Hidalgo has been obsessed with communications metadata for years. To him, metadata isn’t merely a technical issue, or a political one, but an emotional one—a cloud of knowledge about your behavior that, once you confront it, can literally change your life. 

To make metadata more visceral, he and a group of graduate students launched a new online project to help people visualize their own metadata, or at least one small corner of it. Thanks to the researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, you can now use a tool called Immersion, that asks users for their Gmail address and password; it then scans every e-mail in their accounts and scrapes the metadata to create a portrait of their personal network.

Check it out, the NSA Director, General Keith Alexander has :)

César Hidalgo (left) with Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagdish at the MIT Media Lab.