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Privacy

NSA Has Ability To Hide Spying Software Deep Within Hard Drives

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives. That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations. Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria.

‘Privacy Critical To Human Freedom’

During a unique conversation hosted by the New School and the New York Times on Thursday, the three people most responsible for bringing the story of mass global surveillance programs orchestrated by the U.S. National Security Agency were brought together for the first time since they first met in a Hong Kong hotel in 2013. Filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald sat with the New York Times media columnist David Carr on stage while the whistleblower himself, Edward Snowden, appeared via videolink from Russia where he remains under asylum protection. "Yes, governments possess extraordinary powers—but at the end of the day there are more of us than there are of them." —Edward Snowden

FBI Monitored African-American Writers For Decades

Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work. Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay. The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.

Samsung’s Smart TV Can Spy On You Even When Off

Is your Samsung smart TV spying on you? Korean connected telly maker Samsung has been embroiled in a micro-scandal for allegedly failing to protect the privacy of its customers. Samsung smart TV sets like the £850-ish UE50H6400 feature voice controls that let you change the channel, search for new TV shows and browse the interface without having to use that clunky old remote. But much like voice controls on phones, smart TV voice-activated commands are a little rusty. In our experience, voice activated controls don’t respond that well and most of the time it’s simply been easier for us to reach for the good old-fashioned remote control. Like any manufacturer worth its salt, Samsung isn’t content to let the situation stand as it is and so it’s constantly striving to improve its voice recognition software.

Court: US-UK Surveillance Scheme Illegal For 7 Years

The regime that governs the sharing between Britain and the US of electronic communications intercepted in bulk was unlawful until last year, a secretive UK tribunal has ruled. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) declared on Friday that regulations covering access by Britain’s GCHQ to emails and phone records intercepted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) breached human rights law. Advocacy groups said the decision raised questions about the legality of intelligence-sharing operations between the UK and the US. The ruling appears to suggest that aspects of the operations were illegal for at least seven years – between 2007, when the Prism intercept programme was introduced, and 2014.

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet

Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents. The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATION, are the first from the trove of files provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to show that the Canadian government has launched its own globe-spanning Internet mass surveillance system.

Game Plan To End Global Mass Surveillance

For years, we’ve been working on a strategy to end mass surveillance of digital communications of innocent people worldwide. Today we’re laying out the plan, so you can understand how all the pieces fit together—that is, how U.S. advocacy and policy efforts connect to the international fight and vice versa. Decide for yourself where you can get involved to make the biggest difference. This plan isn’t for the next two weeks or three months. It’s a multi-year battle that may need to be revised many times as we better understand the tools and authorities of entities engaged in mass surveillance and as more disclosures by whistleblowers help shine light on surveillance abuses.

Illinois Schools Demand Students Social Media Passwords

In 2013, Illinois passed a lawrequiring schools to ask elementary and secondary students to provide passwords to their social media accounts if they believe that they violated a rule or policy. The policy went into effect this month, and one school district, the Triad Community Unit School District #2, already sent out letters to parents informing them of the new policy. “It’s one thing for me to take my child’s social media account and open it up, or for the teacher to look or even a child to pull up their social media account, but to have to hand over your password and personal information is not acceptable to me,” said Sarah Bozarth, one of the parents in the district. “The district understands student privacy interests," Superintendent Leigh Lewis told The Washington Post, "and will not haphazardly request social media passwords unless there is a need, and will certainly involve parents throughout the process."

Judge Orders NYPD To Release Records On X-Ray Vans

A state judge has ordered the New York City Police Department to release records on a secretive program that uses unmarked vans equipped with X-ray machines to detect bombs. The ruling follows a nearly three-year legal battle by ProPublica, which had requested police reports, training materials, contracts and any health and safety tests on the vans under the state's Freedom of Information Law. ProPublica filed the request as part of its investigation into the proliferation of security equipment, including airport body scanners, that expose people to ionizing radiation, which can mutate DNA and increase the risk of cancer. Richard Daddario, then the NYPD's deputy commissioner of counterterrorism, told the court in 2013 that releasing the documents would hamper the department's ability to conduct operations and endanger the lives of New Yorkers. Disclosing them, he said, would "permit those seeking to evade detection to conform their conduct to the times, places and methods that avoid NYPD presence and are thus most likely to yield a successful attack." But Supreme Court Judge Doris Ling-Cohan called the NYPD's argument "mere speculation" and "patently insufficient" to outweigh the public's right to know.

New Snowden Documents Reveal NSA Can’t Hack Everyone

A new wave of U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) document leaks show the agency wasn’t able to spy on everyone thanks to some encryption tools several programs use that successfully thwart digital espionage. German magazine Der Spiegel reported the NSA couldn’t decipher communications such as emails and online chat messages from a handful of services that use encryption beyond the NSA’s code-cracking abilities, based on documents obtained from former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Der Spiegel recently analyzed NSA documents Snowden previously released to news outlets in 2013. “[U]biquitous encryption on the Internet is a major threat to NSA’s ability to prosecute digital-network intelligence (DNI) traffic or defeat adversary malware,” an NSA employee said in an internal training document from 2012.

Hello Censorship If Secret TISA Pact Is Approved

Internet privacy and net neutrality would become things of the past if the secret Trade In Services Agreement comes to fruition. And on this one, the secrecy exceeds even that shrouding the two better-known corporate giveaways, the Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic partnerships. Yet another tentacle in the octopus of multi-national corporations’ attempt to achieve dictatorial control, the Trade In Services Agreement (TISA) is intended to eliminate government regulations in the “professional services” such as accounting and engineering but goes well beyond that, proposing sweeping de-regulation of the Internet and the financial industry. Another snippet of TISA’s text has been leaked, this time by the freedom-of-information organization Associated Whistleblowing Press.

Billion Dollar Surveillance Blimp To Launch Over Maryland

In just a few days, the Army will launch the first of two massive blimps over Maryland, the last gasp of an 18-year-long $2.8-billion Army project intended to use giant airships to defend against cruise missiles. And while the blimps may never stave off a barrage of enemy missiles, their ability to spot and track cars, trucks and boats hundreds of miles away is raising serious privacy concerns. The project is called JLENS – or “Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System.” And you couldn’t come up with a better metaphor for wildly inflated defense contracts, a ponderous Pentagon bureaucracy, and the U.S. surveillance leviathan all in one.

Exposing The FBI

The Burglary tells the story of how, on March 8, 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, eight peace activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in an effort to discover whether the FBI was working, illegally, to suppress American dissent. Spiriting away all the records in the FBI office, these daring men and women soon learned that this federal crime-fighting bureau was, indeed, engaging in a broad range of unlawful activities. They photocopied some of the most revealing documents and mailed them, in the name of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, to members of congress and the press. After receipt of these materials, Betty Medsger, a journalist at the Washington Post, wrote an article published in that newspaper that sparked a public outcry.

What It’s Like To Be the Target Of NYPD Surveillance

It was here, on this corner, on a Friday in the fall of 2013, that Thadeaus received confirmation of something he had long suspected: He was being watched — closely — by the NYPD. The police knew the names of all of the organizations to which he belonged, and had informants inside at least one of them. They knew he would sometimes moonlight as a DJ and dutifully noted which parties he attended, which events he played. He learned from a New York Times journalist that he was under surveillance. The NYPD, he was told, suspected Thadeaus may have been "the bicycle bomber" — a shadowy figure responsible for detonating a makeshift grenade outside a military recruiting center in the middle of Times Square in 2008. Their evidence was thin: They knew he sometimes hung out with other bicycling enthusiasts and activists, and that he was, at one time, the administrator of an anarchist blog that posted a news article about the Times Square bombing several hours after it occurred. . . . Shortly after filing their complaint, a few of the activists involved went out to a café with a retired FBI agent, a man who had gone undercover with right-wing militias during his time with the bureau. They asked him, as someone who had infiltrated and surveilled groups, how they might prevent it from happening to them, or at least identify the informants in their midst. His advice? Don't even try. The NYPD and the FBI, he told them, "have endless resources to create covers for themselves. You should just keep doing the work that you're doing, and don't try to get to the bottom of it, because it will waste your time, it will be a distraction, and it will destroy your organizations."

Global Survey: 83% Say Internet Access Should Be A Human Right

A survey of Internet users in 24 countries has found that 83% believe affordable access to the Internet should be a basic human right, according to the “CIGI-Ipsos Global Survey on Internet Security and Trust.” According to responses, two thirds of Internet users are more concerned today about online privacy than they were compared to one year ago (64%). When given a choice of various governance sources for the Internet, the majority (57%) chose multi-stakeholder model “of technology companies, engineers, non-governmental organizations and institutions that represent the interests and will of ordinary citizens, and governments.”
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Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.