FISA | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Wed, 05 Oct 2016 08:34:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png FISA | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 Yahoo said to be complicit in email scanning for U.S. intelligence https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/jon-martindale/yahoo-said-to-be-complicit-in-email-scanning-for-u-s-intelligence/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/security-software/jon-martindale/yahoo-said-to-be-complicit-in-email-scanning-for-u-s-intelligence/#respond Wed, 05 Oct 2016 08:34:19 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=307859 If you're a Yahoo email user, you should be aware that in 2015 the web giant built a specialised piece of software to scan all incoming emails to all Yahoo mail accounts, searching for certain phrases and statements related to U.S. intelligence. Three former employees have claimed to have seen the surveillance in action and said …

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If you're a Yahoo email user, you should be aware that in 2015 the web giant built a specialised piece of software to scan all incoming emails to all Yahoo mail accounts, searching for certain phrases and statements related to U.S. intelligence. Three former employees have claimed to have seen the surveillance in action and said it was the reason for Yahoo information security officer, Alex Stamos, leaving that same year.

“Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States,” is the only statement Yahoo has released on the matter. However Reuters cites three ex-Yahoo workers as sources, as well as a fourth person said to be ‘familiar with the matter.' It claims Yahoo's legal department was contacted by a federal agency, though it remains unconfirmed if it was FBI or NSA.

It also remains unclear what information Yahoo was tasked to find or who it related to. It's possible that since it was said to be using intelligence information as a marker, that perhaps it was helping to discover the identity or location of a whistleblower or leaker, like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

yahoo

What's staggering with this news though isn't necessarily that the surveillance took place – surveillance of email is hardly new – but the scale of it. Scanning every incoming email means that not only did Yahoo breach the privacy of every one of its users without a warrant, but it also did so for anyone who emailed its customers. That's arguably data it had no right to.

When asked it if had received similar requests with regards to its Gmail service, Google said that it had never and would never comply with any such demands. Microsoft too said it had never engaged in any email scanning.

It could be that Yahoo believed if it fought the demand, that it would lose. In 2007 it previously contested a similar request for specific email accounts without a warrant. Yahoo purportedly challenged it and lost, so perhaps it wanted to avoid a similar instance in 2015.

Regardless, it's claimed that the discovery of this clandestine surveillance is why chief information security officer at Yahoo, Alex Stamos, resigned in 2015.

It will be interesting to see if this revelation has any impact on Yahoo's pending sale to media giant Verizon.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: This is a pretty gross use of power and a clear indication of why encryption is so important in protecting the privacy of individuals around the world. 

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US Department of Justice indefinite data retention denied https://www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-martindale/us-department-of-justice-indefinite-data-retention-denied/ https://www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-martindale/us-department-of-justice-indefinite-data-retention-denied/#respond Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:38:15 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=181559 The United States' Department of Justice (DOJ) recently tried to extend its right to hold on to harvested metadata on US and foreign nationals from five years, to forever, citing reasons such as defending against government lawsuits and requiring evidence gathered by its snooping schemes. However, to the surprise of many, FISA court judge Reggie …

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The United States' Department of Justice (DOJ) recently tried to extend its right to hold on to harvested metadata on US and foreign nationals from five years, to forever, citing reasons such as defending against government lawsuits and requiring evidence gathered by its snooping schemes. However, to the surprise of many, FISA court judge Reggie Walton, has denied the request, meaning all collected metadata must still be destroyed after five years.

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I like how they felt the need to get all flamboyant with the “of,” font.

Mr Walton not only put the kibosh on this potential infringement on civil liberties, but also dismantled the DOJ's reasoning too. Taking each of the government's cited cases in turn, he showed that none of them showed any reason to preserve metadata records without precedent, instead suggesting that they demonstrated how in some instances, personnel may have a duty to ignore corporate document destruction policies. He asserted that there was simply no cases that propped up the government's position of wanting to preserve metadata records for all time.

As TechDirt points out, this isn't the first time this judge has pointed out the problems with the DOJ's collection of metadata, suggesting that in any other legal situation, its mass data harvesting would be considered unconstitutional. What's even more ridiculous, is in asking for data to be held indefintely, it didn't even use the same excuses it needed to collect the metadata in the first place – the prevention of terrorism – further undermining its position, which already has very little legal precedent for any of it.


“See you in five years.”

Acquiescing to this latest request, Walton ruled, would not only make it much more likely that at some point in the future, the data held would be abused – since it would imply be around long enough for abuse to take place – but there's also a much higher chance of it being leaked or stolen.

Of course though, any evidence that the metadata might hold which could incriminate the government, the NSA, DOJ or any other affiliated organisation, can now be legally deleted under this precedent – all the DOJ needs to do is hang on to it long enough. If it comes under legal threat, delaying for five years could see evidence legally destroyed, with precedent.

KitGuru Says: Perhaps this isn't such a loss for the US government after all. It was in a bit of a win, win scenario, regardless of the judge's ruling.

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Thousands of websites to protest mass surveillance https://www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-martindale/thousands-of-websites-to-protest-mass-surveillance/ https://www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-martindale/thousands-of-websites-to-protest-mass-surveillance/#respond Mon, 10 Feb 2014 09:10:52 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=176812 It only feels like yesterday that the world and his dog's website voluntarily blacked themselves out to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills, but while those bits of restrictive legislation are thankfully long gone, new threats have emerged. Today the problem is mass surveillance, with citizens of every country the world over now realising that …

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It only feels like yesterday that the world and his dog's website voluntarily blacked themselves out to protest the SOPA and PIPA bills, but while those bits of restrictive legislation are thankfully long gone, new threats have emerged. Today the problem is mass surveillance, with citizens of every country the world over now realising that their privacy online is nothing to many western governments, specifically the US and UK. With that in mind, thousands of websites are going to be posting a protest banner on 11th February to incite all visitors to get in touch with their local politicians and ask them to oppose further and current freedom restricting bills.

Backed by organisations like The EFF, Greenpeace and Amnesty International, the protest already has over 5,000 websites signed up, including huge community driven ones like tumblr, Reddit and imgur. Each of these sites will tomorrow host a banner offering the phone number and email of your local (American) politician and urge you to get in touch to show your displeasure at the FISA Improvements act, which would see the NSA's powers to collect data expanded and also give any law enforcement agency within the US the right to look at data records of citizens.

“Together we will push back against powers that seek to observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action. Together, we will make it clear that such behaviour is not compatible with democratic governance. Together, if we persist, we will win this fight,” reads the Day We Fight Back, website. It also urges everyone to support the USA Freedom Act, which would see the collection of US phone records ended in its current form and would make it much harder for any future organisations to collect data on a mass scale.

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You'll be seeing this  a lot tomorrow. 

If like me though you're not based in the US, you'll instead be urged to contact your local politician to protest spying on your country's citizens. There's also a lot of other ways you can help out, like linking the Day We Fight Back site on Facebook and Twitter, or posting up one of several specific images to draw people to the main site.

Kitguru Says: I always know the form-like response I'll get from my local MP. He'll ignore my points and just tell me that GCHQ and other agencies are important to the security of the nation. Still, it's worth a shot. At least I might take up a bit of his time. 

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US Congressman wants to shackle NSA spying https://www.kitguru.net/channel/jon-martindale/us-congressman-wants-to-shackle-nsa-spying/ Fri, 11 Oct 2013 13:57:55 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=157330 Maybe it's time we put our scepticism aside for a second and considered that maybe not all politicians are liars and charlatans. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the US' Patriot Act, has called for the NSA's ability to survey its own citizens to be severely curtailed and has even put forward …

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Maybe it's time we put our scepticism aside for a second and considered that maybe not all politicians are liars and charlatans. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the US' Patriot Act, has called for the NSA's ability to survey its own citizens to be severely curtailed and has even put forward a bill to the House of Representatives to lock it down with legislation.

This is rather ironic in reality, as Sensenbrenner was one of the key components in George W. Bush's administration, for helping push forward the idea of giving intelligence agencies more powers or surveillance, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. However, he now believes that those powers have been abused and he wants to “put their metadata program out of business.”

The bill he's putting forward, known as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-Collection and Online Monitoring Act (shorthand version: USA Freedom Act), has been seen by The Guardian newspaper, which says it brings together many other efforts by similarly minded politicians to put an end to NSA snooping.

While the bill does focus on restricting NSA data collection to known terrorist suspects and removes a loophole that could allow the NSA to survey Americans if they happen to be in conversation with someone of a foreign nation, perhaps the most significant change being put forward, is to government secrecy. The USA Freedom Act would make it so that the government can no longer enact “secret laws,” and would give legal rights to consumers and corporations to disclose information they had been forced to share with the government or its agencies.

Specifically, it would limit the Patriot Act, to entirely prevent the collection of business phone call metadata, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would see its language changed so that it wouldn't be possible to blanket collect information and instead would require justification for all phone call surveillance.

sensenbrenner
SWALK

If this passes, it will be big news for companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Google and many others, who according to similarly legally embattled (and somewhat hero) Lavabit founder, Ladar Levison have been fighting the government to disclose information on surveillance and data sharing for sometime, but have been unable to do so because of a gag order.

While the aims of the bill are lofty and opposition is great, Sensenbrenner believes that now is the time to reel in the NSA's power: “Opinions have hardened with the revelations over the summer, particularly the inspector general's report that there were thousands of violations of regulations, and the disclosure that NSA employees were spying on their spouses or significant others, which was very chilling,” he said in an interview.

Opposition to the bill has proposed that instead of blocking data collection, the NSA should become more transparent in its data gathering. Sensenbrenner believes this is simply a “fig leaf” approach to the problem and has even used it as an opportunity to question the Intelligence Committee's commitment to monitoring and managing the NSA's reach.

The Freedom Act also uses efficiency to criticise the actions of the NSA, calling on statistics recently outed by Obama's director of national intelligence, John Clapper, who said that the NSA had mislead the government over how effective the data gathering had been. Instead of previously cited figures of over 40 terrorist plots stopped because of the snooping, in-fact,it was closer to one or two – despite the cost of untold billions of dollars in surveillance.

“The haystack approach missed the Boston marathon bombing, and that was after the Russians told us the Tsarnaev brothers were bad guys,” added Sensenbrenner.

KitGuru Says: It's great to see this sort of pro-privacy support in parliament over there. My god do I wish I felt anywhere near as represented by a single British politician. 

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