Tag Archives: NSA

In 2013, the United States riled up a lot of people, as Edward Snowden released a bevy of classified NSA documents to the press, which revealed the extent of the spying perpetrated by the NSA and its international contemporaries. However one person it really angered was German chancellor, Angela Merkel, …

For the first time in the history of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – a court designed specifically to look into complaints against Britain's intelligence agencies – it has found the actions of GCHQ unlawful in its dealings with the NSA and how it spied on British citizens for many years, hoovering …

Along with MEGA, the successor to MegaUpload, one of the tools that internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has been keen to develop since the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013, was an encrypted chat service. Since it came to light that companies like Skype were working with the NSA and could be …

A lot of privacy advocates got a little worried during the press-conference where US President Barack Obama addressed the Sony hack, as he stated that the security breach was exactly why extra online powers needed to be given to intelligence agencies to thwart those responsible. However, just a few weeks later and …

Following the NSA leaks, many people out there on the internet have suddenly become very conscious of their privacy and security. The sheer extent of unwarranted government surveillance going on behind the scenes was somewhat shocking. However, Google thinks that things may change for the better next year with surveillance …

You hear about white hat hackers getting corporate gigs all the time. They perform some kind of impressive security breach, finding some flaw in something important and bam, if they aren't thrown in jail for it, they're suddenly working at Google, or one of its contemporaries. The same happens in the …

The US government is attempting to fight back against the new encryption technologies used on smartphones. An official at the US Department of Justice stated that tragedy would ensue if the authorities did not have unwarranted access to devices such as a suspect's phone. The Wall Street Journal reports that …

WhatsApp has revealed that going forward, it will be encrypting every chat message sent via the service by default, signalling another step in the right direction for privacy online. The rollout was announced today and is described by the App maker as the “largest deployment of end-to-end encryption ever”. There …

While Edward Snowden's whistle blowing document dumps to the likes of The Guardian have given us invaluable information about how the intelligence agencies of the US and British governments see the public and their rights, the reveals were always a little to big for one man alone. Some of the …

Annie Machon, ex-member of the MI5 British Intelligence agency and partner of MI6 whistle blower, David Shalyer, who exposed investigations into British Politicians for socialist ties in the late 90s, has spoken out against the current climate of surveillance in Britain and the US. Not only did she claim that …

Over the past year, the world has become much more aware of the way government's sniff out data on potential criminals: in short, everything is recorded. Edward Snowden's revelations about this have helped create a growing tide of disquiet with regards to overly intrusive surveillance and especially when it comes …

Twitter has filed a lawsuit against the US government, alleging that its First Amendment rights to free speech are being violated by rules that prevent the company from disclosing the amount of national security requests it receives. Twitter is currently able to publish the amount of national security letters and …

It looks like Microsoft is fighting to keep customer and user information safe as the company is refusing to yield to a warrant granting US authorities access to email accounts, stating that the US has no power over its customers in foreign countries. This fight started off back in April when …

If you've ever lamented the fact that your friends on Facebook or some other social platform don't seem particularly interested in discussing Edward Snowden and the revelations he made last year that opened everyone's eyes to the reach of government intelligence agencies, it might just be that they prefer to …

Edward Snowden is back in the news again today, after detailing to Wired during an extensive interview, that the NSA is working on a system that will not only be able to pinpoint DDOS and other more nefarious attacks against the US and shut them down automatically, but potentially even launch …

The Human Rights Watch and American Civil Liberties Union have come out with a report to condemn the actions of the US government and spy agencies like the NSA, which have been mass collecting data on American and international citizens. The 120-page document is titled, “With Liberty to Monitor All: …

At least it looks like the public and open rights groups aren't the only ones that find GCHQ's snooping antics leave a bad taste in their mouth. The Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has had its annual award ceremony where it gives props to some of the best and brightest …

Vodafone has revealed the extent of government snooping on its mobile network today, it turns out that many government agencies have full access to Vodafone's 400 million customers, being able to snoop on conversations and general user data at any time without warning. The 40,000 word document that was published …

It was this very week in 2013 that first saw revelations of the NSA, GCHQ and the US government's advanced spying regime first hit the internet, as Edward Snowden divulged masses of secretive documents to Guardian journalists and ultimately, to the world, from his hideout in Hong Kong. Since then …

While Obama might be happy to keep telling people that the NSA isn't interested in reading your texts, the kind of legislation that makes it possible for countries like the US and the UK to spy on citizens and store huge amounts of metadata on who's calling who and when, …

When the NSA spying revelations were first revealed, it was clear American metadata was being used when it came to tracking down terrorists – though it wasn't particularly useful – but Obama and others made bold statements that suggested “nobody [at the NSA] is listening to [American] telepohone calls.” However now …

TED talks are known for making us think about issues in a different or deeper way and bringing ideas to the fore, but rarely are they something we've already been talking about for almost a year. However that's what happened yesterday with a TED talk in Vancouver, when out from …

Google might often be painted as the big, corporate version of the NSA, gathering up huge amounts of data on its users and then selling that on to advertisers, but it got hit pretty hard by the PRISM revelations too, just like Facebook, Yahoo and many others. To help show …

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 …

Unfortunately we now live in a world where government intelligence agencies like the NSA, GCHQ, the GCSB and more are perfectly within their (pseudo) legal rights to record data from our phones and internet connections on the off chance that we might be a terrorist. Apparently it goes far further …

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 …

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks from early 2013, the western world and specifically US and British citizens, have come to accept that the NSA and GCHQ have no doubt snooped in our conversations, metadata, Facebook posts and more, with the excuse that they're protecting us from terrorism. …

Since Edward Snowden dropped the bombshell last year that the NSA and other intelligence agencies (we're looking at you – while you look at us – GCHQ) around the world were snooping through our digital underwear drawers, there's one person we all wanted to hear from: Obama. While he's not …

The New American Foundation think tank has just released a new report which suggests that the NSA's mass surveillance programs have almost no impact on the prevention of Terrorism and that more traditional methods like local law enforcement, community tip-offs and informants are much more effective. To determine how effective …

Digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is often at the forefront of defending consumer rights and the privacy of individuals online, so it's no surprise that in the wake of increasing NSA snooping revelations and the ongoing lack of consequences for those actions, it's calling for a full scale …