NSA, FBI collecting content from Google, Facebook, other services
The U.S. National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have access to servers at Google, Facebook, and other major Internet services, collecting audio, video, email, and other content for surveillance, the Washington Post and the Guardian reported on Thursday.
The surveillance is taking place in real time under a classified program called PRISM, which was begun in 2007 to investigate foreign threats to the U.S., the reports said. Most of the major Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Apple, and AOL as well as Google and Facebook, knowingly participate in PRISM, according to the Post and the Guardian. But all the companies denied the Post's claims that the NSA had "direct access" to their servers,ma Liam the Post dropped in later versions of its story. Read more...
FBI seized US anonymisation server
The FBI carried out a midweek raid in New York to confiscate a server belonging to the European Counter Network (ECN), which was running a mixmaster service for sending out anonymised email. The details are revealed in an announcement by alternative providers Riseup Networks and May First/People Link, which run the data centre which hosted the seized server. The seizure is reported to be part of a US police investigation into repeated bomb threats at the University of Pittsburgh. The providers and activist groups associated with them have accused the police of adopting a sledgehammer approach, as their actions have also resulted in numerous civil rights projects hosted on the server being taken offline. Read more...
FBI reveals 1991 probe of Steve Jobs
The FBI today made public a background investigation of Steve Jobs in 1991, when he was being considered by the George H. W. Bush administration for a spot on the President's Export Council.
The council is a group that advises the President on international trade. Current members include the CEOs of such U.S. firms as Boeing, UPS, Verizon, Walt Disney and Xerox.
In 1991, Jobs was the CEO of NeXT, the computer company he founded after being forced out of Apple. Subsequently, Jobs returned to Apple, which he co-founded in 1976, where he remained until his death last October at age 56. Read more...
FBI seeks Big Brother-’Minority Report’ hybrid
Recognizing just how powerful a tool social-networking sites have become in orchestrating protests, rallies, and riots in the United States and beyond, the FBI is in the early stages of designing a complex system for monitoring tweets, Facebook status updates, Google+ posts, and the like in real time, all in the name of identifying and heading off potential security threats.
The FBI wouldn't be the first organization to sift through troves of public social networking data for discovering and predicting trends, such as health outbreaks or box-office sales. However, privacy advocates may well be concerned by the prospect of the government building a system that's one part Big Brother from "1984" and one part PreCrime Unit from "Minority Report" -- especially if the FBI (or any other organization, really) were to combine the public social media data with user data it could acquire in any numbers of ways through other channels. Read more...
FBI rejects FOIA request for Carrier IQ info
The FBI has denied a request for the release of information regarding its use of Carrier IQ's software, saying that releasing the information could interfere with ongoing law enforcement operations.
The response does not make it clear whether the agency is using Carrier IQ for investigative purposes, or whether the documents it has, are related to an investigation of the controversial software.
The request under the Freedom of Information Act was filed Dec. 1 by Michael Morisy, co-founder of MuckRock, a website that helps people file FOIA requests with the government. Morisy asked the FBI for any manuals, documents or other written material it might have related to the FBI's use of data gathered by Carrier IQ. Read more...
How The FBI Caught an Actor Uploading Movie Screeners To Pirate Bay
In April 2011, the FBI raided the apartment of a Screen Actor’s Guild member suspected of uploading several pre-release screeners of Hollywood blockbusters to The Pirate Bay. The man, an actor, has now agreed to plead guilty and potentially faces three years in prison. There were claims he could’ve been connected to a release group but as his amateurish online actions show, nothing could be further from the truth. Read more...
Anonymous, LulzSec vow to hack on
In a defiant statement addressed largely at FBI director Steve Chabinsky, members of the Anonymous and LulzSec hacktivist groups vowed to continue with their hacking campaigns and dared law enforcement to try and stop them.
The statement comes just two days after the FBI arrested 14 alleged members of Anonymous in connection with a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against PayPal last year.
The immediate provocation appears to have been some comments made by Chabinsky in a NPR report following the recent arrests.
In it, Chabinsky is quoted as saying that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable. "[Even if] hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts." Read more...
FBI casts broad net in Anonymous crackdown
Dealing with civil unrest is a tricky business -- even more so when the civil unrest takes place online.
For nearly a year, the Anonymous movement -- and it's far more of a movement than the "group" that law enforcement keeps going on about -- has caused companies headaches while worldwide law enforcement agencies have appeared to do little.
Unrest with no consequences breeds more unrest. So it's no surprise that the LulzSec group formed to caused havoc earlier this year, using run-of-the-mill techniques to pick off easy targets such as Sony Pictures, PBS, and even a chapter of the public-private group, InfraGard. Following its 50 days of discord, LulzSec opted to retire, but its success could easily convince more people to form loose-knit hacktivist groups. Read more...
‘Anonymous’ arrests tied to PayPal DDoS attacks, FBI says
The FBI said this afternoon that it had arrested a total of fourteen individuals thought to belong to the Anonymous hacking group for their alleged participation in a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) against PayPal last year.
The defendants, all of whom are in their 20s or early 30s, were arrested on no-bail arrest warrants in a series of raids in Alabama, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts and five other states. All of them were charged in an indictment that was unsealed in federal court in San Jose today. Read more...
Credit card numbers stolen in Kiplinger breach
Kiplinger Washington Editors - the publisher of well-known business and economic publications such as the The Kiplinger Letter and the Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine - has suffered a breach that resulted in the compromise of customer information of their online subscribers.
"The database that was attacked included customer contact information, e-mail addresses and passwords," it says in the statement posted online following the breach. "In some cases, encrypted credit card numbers were also accessed. An investigation by outside forensic experts suggests that the hackers did not target customer names and addresses." Read more...
With FBI raid, law enforcement circles LulzSec
Time may be running out for the members of LulzSec as police continue to step up their inquiries into the hacking group.
On Monday, the U.S. Federal Bureau of investigation executed a search warrant at a Hamilton, Ohio, residence -- a raid that local media has linked to the ongoing investigation of LulzSec. The raid comes two days after LulzSec ended a 50-day hacking rampage by posting internal documents belonging to AT&T and data stolen from gaming forums and a NATO website. Read more...