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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the NSA's bulk call records database as a "vital" counterterrorism tool. While this wouldn't make the program legal even if true, it also seems clear that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has relied, rather uncritically, on the government's assertions of "necessity" to draw the strained conclusion that every American's phone records are "relevant" to FBI counterterrorism investigations. It's thus worth pointing out how extraordinarily weak the case for the program's utility really is. Feinstein begins by recycling the claim that if only the NSA program...

The technical disasters of the Obamacare exchange debacle over the past two weeks are not an accident, but rather a way to disguise the costs of healthcare plans and weed out people who don’t qualify for a federal subsidy, Forbes reports. Tech experts examining the Obamacare federal health exchange, Healthcare.gov, are becoming increasingly convinced that the traffic bottlenecks and site crashes experienced over the first two weeks were not by accident, wrote Forbes. An HHS spokesperson recently told The Wall Street Journal that implementation of a feature enabling users with the option to preview premiums was delayed as a way...

We've long suspected that the NSA, the world's premiere spy agency, was pretty good at breaking into computers. But now, thanks to an article by security expert Bruce Schneier—who is working with the Guardian to go through the Snowden documents—we have a much more detailed view of how the NSA uses exploits in order to infect the computers of targeted users. The template for attacking people with malware used by the NSA is in widespread use by criminals and fraudsters, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, so it's important to understand and defend against this threat to avoid being a...

...[W]e ran a story in March 2012 which exposed the NSA's unprecedented domestic espionage project, codenamed Stellar Wind, and specifically the $1.4+ billion data center spy facility located in Bluffdale, Utah, which spans more than one million square feet, uses 65 megawatts of energy (enough to power a city of more than 20,000), and can store exabytes or even zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is 100 million times larger than all the printed material in the Library of Congress), consisting of every single electronic communication in the world, whether captured with a warrant or not. Yet despite all signs to...

The online anonymity network Tor is a high-priority target for the National Security Agency. The work of attacking Tor is done by the NSA's application vulnerabilities branch, which is part of the systems intelligence directorate, or SID. The majority of NSA employees work in SID, which is tasked with collecting data from communications systems around the world. According to a top-secret NSA presentation provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, one successful technique the NSA has developed involves exploiting the Tor browser bundle, a collection of programs designed to make it easy for people to install and use the software. The...

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he will push legislation to end the NSA's controversial program to collect records on all U.S. phone calls. He argued that the program invades Americans' privacy rights while doing little to thwart terrorist attacks. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued that the phone data program is critical for protecting national security. "I will do everything I can to prevent this program from being canceled," Feinstein said during the hearing....

Valerie Plame warns the "CBS This Morning" co-hosts that the NSA surveillance program should not just worry terrorists, but all of us.

The flood of stories on government spying will not be slowing soon -- in fact the majority of the most important documents detailing how the U.S. National Security Agency collects personal data have not been published yet, journalists from U.K. newspaper The Guardian said on Tuesday. The British newspaper responsible for breaking many of the stories surrounding the government surveillance program known as Prism said that there are thousands of relevant documents that it has obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Of those documents, the majority of ones that should, and will, be published still remain, said Glenn Greenwald,...

Over the last three years, the FBI has dramatically expanded its No-Fly List of suspected terrorists, including blacklisting innocent Americans who present no threat to security.... The FBI's violation of these Americans' due process rights is, in and of itself, abusive and unlawful. After all, preventing people from correcting the errors that led to their inclusion on a blacklist does not make our skies any safer, but it does harm constitutionally protected rights to travel and reputation—as a federal court recently recognized. And a closer look into the experiences of several ACLU clients shows another, even darker side to the...

A new leak published by The Guardian reveals more details about the NSA's Marina metadata program, including the program's ability to look back at a full year of metadata for millions of web users, regardless of whether the users are the target of an investigation. The metadata can include anything from browsing history to more detailed account activity in the case of web-based email, including contact lists and potentially even account passwords. The Marina program had been mentioned in previous leaks, but the new revelations, pulled from an NSA training document, show how the data was centrally stored and managed....

The team behind Stop Watching Us says: "Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S. Congress that we want them to rein in the NSA. On October 26th, the 12th anniversary of the signing of the US Patriot Act, we're taking the next step and holding the largest rally yet against NSA surveillance. We’ll be handing the half-million petitions to Congress to remind them that they work for us -- and we won’t tolerate mass surveillance any longer."...

Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the embattled National Security Agency (NSA), says he is willing to share cyberattack information with the private sector—an offer seen as a Trojan horse by at least one expert.... Revelations of massive NSA data gathering from telecom and Internet companies has sparked a fierce national debate on whether the spy agency's antiterrorism activities have gone too far in collecting information on innocent Americans. In claiming the NSA has done nothing illegal, Alexander blamed calls from Capitol Hill to restrict government surveillance on "sensationalized" reporting and "media leaks," Politico reported he said in his speech. However,...

During his Ironman 21-hour speech, Sen. Ted Cruz read excerpts from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, name-dropped "libertarians" at least six times, and yielded to Sen. Rand Paul, who invoked Frederic Bastiat's "What is Seen and Unseen," a favorite among libertarians. Ted Cruz, who retained remarkable composure over the long night, seems in all things deliberate. Political leaders seem to have become more comfortable talking about libertarians, even identifying themselves as such. Libertarians may have reached a tipping point within the Republican Party. Last week, a FreedomWorks study on public opinion found that libertarian views within the Republican Party are at...

Pay-as-you-drive insurance plans, where premiums are based on an individual's actual driving habits, pose a potential privacy risk for motorists, a recent study has found. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Denver, Colorado, found that driving habits data such as speed, time of travel, number of miles driven, braking and acceleration data could paint a surprisingly detailed picture of an individual's movement in a specific time period. Insurance companies often like touting the fact that no location data is collected under usage-based insurance plans. But that only creates a false sense of privacy among users of such...

A sensor previously used for military operations can now be tuned to secretly locate and record any single conversation on a busy streetEVERYONE knows that to have a private chat in the NSA era, you go outdoors. Phones, the internet, email and your office can all be compromised with ease. But soon even that whispered conversation in the park may no longer be safe from prying ears.Carrying out covert audio surveillance along a city street or a wooded path, say, currently requires parabolic microphones, which look like large, clear salad bowls and need a direct, unobstructed view of the subject....

They really want to protect your privacy. Honest, guv. Infamous US spy agency the NSA is looking to appoint a Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer. The challenging position is an internal posting, aimed at potential candidates who already work at the top secret spy agency. The new role parcels separate responsibilities of NSA's existing Civil Liberties and Privacy (CL/P) protection programs in a single job function, as job ad 1039797 explains.... The ongoing Snowden revelations about the NSA's indiscriminate spying on private communications over the internet make the role particularly challenging. Anyone applying for the role would do well to...

Since February, CVS Caremark has been pushing its pharmacists to enroll customers in a prescription-drug rewards program. The benefit to customers is the opportunity to earn up to $50 a year in store credits that can be used to buy shampoo, toothpaste or other products. The benefit to CVS is persuading pharmacy customers, through questionable means, to give up federal privacy safeguards for their medical information and permitting the company to share people's drug purchases with others. "It's very troubling," said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "Your medical information is...

The National Security Agency pays AT&T T -0.38%, Verizon and Sprint several hundred million dollars a year for access to 81% of all international phone calls into the US, according to a leaked inspector general’s report, which has been reported by the Washington Post, AP, and the New York Review of Books. In fact., this secret report says that “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies, underscoring that the U/S. has the “home-field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide communications,” the New York Review of Books reported in its August 15 issue.... AT&T charges $325 for each activation...

MIT Technology Review: Bruce Schneier – NSA Spying is Making Us Less Safe Prominent cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier, who has been working with The Guardian on the disclosures of NSA surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden, gave an interview detailing what the disclosures have truly revealed, how the actions have made Americans less safe, that more huge revelations "might" be coming, and that the average person interested in privacy should advocate for political change. Also, the New York Times' editorial board has reacted to recent disclosures showing that the NSA weakened software encryption standards and apparently can decrypt anything. The...

In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a "back door" into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.... The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the agency now has access to the codes that protect commerce and banking systems, trade secrets and medical records, and everyone's...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will test its crowd-scanning facial recognition system, known as the Biometric Optical Surveillance System, or BOSS, at a junior hockey game this weekend, according to the Russian news agency RT. With assistance from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, DHS will test its system at a Western Hockey League game in Washington state. The test will determine whether the system can distinguish the faces of 20 volunteers out of a crowd of nearly 6,000 hockey fans, to evaluate how successfully BOSS can locate a person of interest.

The National Security Agency's director of information assurance today said the "way to achieve confidence in cyberspace" is to increase collaboration between the government and the high-tech industry--remarks that rang ironic given former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's revelations about how NSA works with industry. NSA documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA's goal is to build backdoors into commercial products and weaken encryption to make it easier for surveillance, allegations that the U.S. government has not even tried to refute. When asked about that today, NSA director of information assurance Debora Plunkett, who gave the keynote address at the...

Verizon has a big plan for the Internet. And if that doesn't worry you, it should. The company is trying to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's Open Internet Order, which prevents Internet service providers from blocking, throttling or otherwise discriminating against online content. And in court last Monday, Verizon lawyer Helgi Walker made the company's intentions all too clear, saying the company wants to prioritize those websites and services that are willing to shell out for better access. She also admitted that the company would like to block online content from those companies or individuals that don't pay Verizon's tolls.......

The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses "It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us. Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible...

1. Transparency uber alles. One of the main reasons that Barack Obama's approval ratings are in the crapper is because of his epic failure to live up to his promise to run what he guaranteed would be the most transparent administration EVAH. That's especially true when it comes to national security issues. Even the most hardened anti-terror hawks have been shocked by revelations of widespread secret drone strikes, extra-judicial kill lists, a war on leakers and journalists, and ubiquitous snooping on Americans.... 2. Legal authority is not optional. Whether we're discussing the use of drones, metadata dragnets, or anything else...

A federal surveillance court on Tuesday released a declassified opinion upholding the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s sweeping collection of billions of Americans’ phone records for counterterrorism purposes.The gathering of “all call detail records” from phone companies is justified as long as the government can show that it is relevant to an authorized investigation into known — and, significantly — unknown terrorists who may be in the United States, the Aug. 29 opinion states.Moreover, the government need only show that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” the records will be relevant to the investigation, a lower burden than required...

A suburban Los Angeles school district is now looking at the public postings on social media by middle and high school students, searching for possible violence, drug use, bullying, truancy and suicidal threats. The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40,500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14,000 middle and high school students' posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the...

The National Security Agency isn't just snooping into phone and online communications. It also appears to be keeping a close eye on credit card transactions. Why? And what can they see? The presumed purpose of NSA's credit card tracking is to help it stop terrorism. Agents hope to ferret out terrorists who are buying bomb ingredients, visiting hotbeds of radicalism, and moving funds illicitly. But the program's reach is so broad, some say it will inevitably sweep up purchases made by innocent American citizens, as well.... Technically, there are safeguards in place to keep American citizens out of the NSA's...

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau officials are seeking to monitor four out of every five U.S. consumer credit card transactions this year — up to 42 billion transactions – through a controversial data-mining program, according to documents obtained by the Washington Examiner. A CFPB strategic planning document for fiscal years 2013-17 describes the “markets monitoring” program through which officials aim to monitor 80 percent of all credit card transactions in 2013. “This is one step closer to a Big Brother form of government where they know everything about us,” said Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis.

U.S. technology companies warn they could lose between $21.5 billion to $35 billion in global cloud computing contracts over the next three years due to negative fallout from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs on Internet users, including emails. A new report from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, estimates that U.S. cloud computing companies could lose 10% to 20% of the cloud computing market to European or Asian companies due to U.S. spying. That means major players including Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) could be hurt.... Some tech companies...

Internet security experts are calling for a campaign to rewrite Web security in the wake of disclosures that the U.S. National Security Agency has developed the capability to break encryption protecting millions of sites. But they acknowledged the task won't be easy, in part because internet security has relied heavily on brilliant government scientists who now appear suspect to many. Leading technologists said they felt betrayed that the NSA, which has contributed to some important security standards, was trying to ensure they stayed weak enough that the agency could break them. Some said they were stunned that the government would...

I'm currently working on what I believe are several significant new NSA stories, to be published imminently here, as well as one very consequential story about NSA spying in Brazil that will first be broadcast Sunday night on the Brazilian television program Fantastico (because the report has worldwide implications, far beyond Brazil, it will be translated into English and then quickly published on the internet).... There has been some excellent commentary on the implications of the NSA/GCHQ encryption story we published this week. The LA Times' Jim Healey says the story is "the most frightening" yet, and explains why he...

Now that we have enough details about how the NSA eavesdrops on the internet, including today's disclosures of the NSA's deliberate weakening of cryptographic systems, we can finally start to figure out how to protect ourselves.... At this point, I feel I can provide some advice for keeping secure against such an adversary.... 1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it's work for them.... 2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it's true that the NSA targets encrypted connections--and it may have explicit exploits...

Government and industry have betrayed the internet, and us. By subverting the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered and robust surveillance platform, the NSA has undermined a fundamental social contract. 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 to be ethical internet stewards. This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community....

Microsoft Windows 10 might become a cloud based operating system (OS) according to a leaked road-map. The road-map shows that Microsoft will no longer release service packs but instead will release major updates every year which also increases the version number of the OS. The next major improvement should be Windows 9, this should bring back the Aero interface in a new form. This should also be a version in which Microsoft will merge its ARM CPU based Windows RT platform with Windows Phone. This version of Windows could also be the last version of Windows as we know it....

Drivers face having their cars fitted with devices that slam on the brakes if they go over the speed limit, under draconian new road safety measures being drawn up by officials in Brussels. All new cars would have to include camera systems that “read” the limits displayed on road signs and automatically apply the brakes. And vehicles already on the road could even be sent back to garages to be fitted with the “Big Brother” technology, meaning that no car in the UK would be allowed to travel faster than 70 mph—the speed limit on motorways. Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin...

HUMBOLDT, AZ — A man says that within hours of making an impassioned post on Facebook, he was being interrogated by police and the FBI. Blaine Cooper, 33, contacted policestateusa.com with a concerning story about how his sentiments posted on Facebook had drawn the attention of the federal government. He showed me the comment and told me that within 24-hours of posting it, he was being contacted by the police and FBI. His colorful comment was in reference to what he believes is an “American Police State,” in which the power of the federal government is growing in a direction...

President Barack Obama pledged he’d appoint “outside experts” to review the country’s surveillance practices, but he’s since tapped largely insiders for the key posts. The group, formed to examine the policies and procedures at the National Security Agency as it tracks terrorism suspects’ digital communications, is composed mostly of Washington types, many with connections to the very intelligence establishment they’re now tasked with scrutinizing in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks. There’s Michael Morell, a CIA veteran who once led the agency on an interim basis; Richard Clarke, a top counter-terrorism official in the Clinton and Bush administrations; and Cass...

'Marco Rubio threatens everything in his path'

I have seen this running today on FOX and I think it's creepy. So you get a 'testing kit' and send it off to a lab??? To find out about myself?

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government's effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens' constitutional rights. "None of us had any idea whatsoever there was a secret DEA programme that instructed DEA agents to conceal the source," Patrick Nightingale, a...

Just when you think the progressive liberal power grab can't get more blatant, another ugly example rears its head. It appears that under the umbrella of Obamacare, the government will now send agents into your very home to inspect it and you. Yes, you now have someone else to worry about other than the IRS. David Catron reports in The American Spectator that the federal government will "authorize state agencies throughout the nation to send government inspectors to your house if a 'home visit' is deemed appropriate pursuant to HHS guidelines ostensibly meant to 'create social and physical environments that...

There is a new case in the never ending war waged by homosexual activists on people of faith. From the Washington Post: "The state Bureau of Labor and Industries will investigate whether Sweet Cakes by Melissa violated a 2007 state law that protects the rights of gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people in employment, housing and public accommodations, The Oregonian...reported Wednesday. In her complaint, Rachel N. Cryer, 30, said she went to the Gresham bakery on Jan. 17 for an appointment to order the cake. She met with owner Aaron Klein, who asked for the date and names of the...

On Thursday, the Washington Post’s revelation of thousands upon thousands of National Security Agency violations of both the law and supposed privacy protections included this fascinating detail: A “large number” of Americans had their telephone calls accidentally intercepted by the NSA when a top-secret order to eavesdrop on multiple phone lines for reasons of national security confused the international code for Egypt (20) with the area code for Washington (202). Seriously. (snip) The Egypt/Washington industrial-scale wrong number is almost too perfectly poignant a vignette at the end of a week in which hundreds are dead on the streets of Cairo....

First Minister Alex Salmond’s SNP administration wants every child to have a ‘Named Person’ with the legal authority to ensure they are raised in a government-approved manner. There will be a database where children’s personal details can be recorded, stored and shared, and the act named the Children and Young People Bill would permit children who are angry with their parents to report them to their named person.

The government of Scotland is proposing the ultimate invasion of the family in order to “protect” children. According to legislation proposed by the government (and which faces no organized opposition), a social worker will be assigned to monitor each and every child from birth. The government social worker would have the authority and responsibility to “safeguard the wellbeing of the child or young person” through “(i) advising, informing, or supporting the child…, (ii) helping the child…to access a service or support, or (iii) discussing, or raising, a matter about the child” with other government agencies.

Think the NSA data collection on your phone calls and Internet use is scary? Well, here comes Obamacare. On October 1, the law’s insurance exchanges are scheduled to start open enrollment in all 50 states. In order to help people sign up for insurance and to determine which applicants are eligible for subsidies or Medicaid, the exchanges will need to collect both tax and health-care data for more than 7 million Americans. This means a new government bureaucracy will be in possession of these people’s financial, employment, and health information — everything from their income last year to the prescription...

“Warning” If you, your kids or grand kids take pics from your phone—WATCH THIS: YOUTUBE: Smartphone pictures pose privacy risks

...Remember on Friday how one of President Obama's efforts to get people to trust the government more concerning the NSA's surveillance efforts was to create an "outside" and "independent" board to review it all?... ...Except, that was Friday. Today is Monday. And, on Monday we learn that "outside" and "independent" actually means setup by Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper--the same guy who has already admitted to lying to Congress about the program, and has received no punishment for doing so. This is independent? From this we're supposed to expect real oversight?!? This is from the letter sent to Clapper:...

Video at source. A proposed federal rule that would require black boxes or event data recorders (EDRs) in every U.S. automobile may mean “Big Brother” could be in your passenger seat for every drive. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule requires all light passenger vehicles be equipped with an EDR by Sep.1, 2014. Ninety-six percent of new cars already have them - measuring such inputs as speed, lateral acceleration, pedal effort, seat belt use, wheel spin, steering wheel turn and direction. Black box data retrieved from U.S. car accidents in a single day would provide more information than a...