Page 36 of 93
Firechat is a secure wireless peer-to-peer chat app:
Firechat is theoretically resistant to the kind of centralized surveillance that the Chinese government (as well as western states, especially the US and the UK) is infamous for. Phones connect directly to one another, establish encrypted connections, and transact without sending messages to servers where they can be sniffed and possibly decoded.
StealthGenie is a Pakistani company that sells a smartphone app that allows a remote party to monitor the phone. The CEO was just indicted in the US:
“Selling spyware is not just reprehensible, it’s a crime,” Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Criminal Division, said in a statement. “Apps like StealthGenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers who want to know every detail of a victim’s personal life—all without the victim’s knowledge.”
This is likely to be a big deal. The company should have sold the spyware only to governments. That would have been okay.
Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute has a lengthy audio interview on NSA surveillance and reform. Worth listening to.
In 2008, Yahoo fought the NSA to avoid becoming part of the PRISM program. It eventually lost the court battle, and at one point was threatened with a $250,000 a day fine if it continued to resist. I am continually amazed at the extent of the government coercion.
New Zealand is spying on its citizens. Edward Snowden weighs in personally.
The NSA and GCHQ are mapping the entire Internet, including hacking into Deutsche Telekom and other companies.
EDITED TO ADD (9/18): Marcy Wheeler comments on the second story, noting that the NSA uses this capability to map MAC addresses.
WikiLeaks has organized the trove of documents about corporations aiding government surveillance around the world. It’s worth wandering around through all this material.
EDITED TO ADD (9/12): I made a mistake. WikiLeaksdidn’t do the organizing; Silk did.
Researchers are able to recover sound through soundproof glass by recording the vibrations of a plastic bag.
Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.
In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant.
This isn’t a new idea. I remember military security policies requiring people to close the window blinds to prevent someone from shining a laser on the window and recovering the sound from the vibrations. But both the camera and processing technologies are getting better.
News story.
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”:
The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.
The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.
Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there was another.
Everyone’s miscounting. This is the third leaker:
Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law-review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing.
New America Foundation has a new paper on the costs of NSA surveillance: economic costs to US business, costs to US foreign policy, and costs to security.
News article.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.