Friday, December 27

Tag: surveillance

This Cryptomining Tool Is Stealing Secrets
28Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

This Cryptomining Tool Is Stealing Secrets

As the Israel-Hamas war raged on this week and Israel expanded its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, the territory's compromised internet infrastructure and access to connectivity went fully dark on Friday, leaving Palestinians without access to ground or mobile data connections. Meanwhile, researchers are bracing for the fallout if Hamas makes good on its threats to distribute hostage execution videos online. And TikTokkers are using a niche livestreaming feature and exploiting the Israeli-Hamas conflict to collect virtual gifts from viewers, a portion of which goes to the social media company as a fee.As the worst mass shooting in Maine's history unfolded this week and the gunman remained at large, disinformation about the situation and the suspect flooded social media, adding to the a...
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A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise
24Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

A Powerful Tool US Spies Misused to Stalk Women Faces Its Potential Demise

A federal law authorizing a vast amount of the United States military’s foreign intelligence collection is set to expire in two months, pulling the plug on history’s most prolific eavesdropping operation and the primary means by which US spies intercept the private communications of people deemed threatening, or simply interesting, by the US government—the world’s foremost surveillant.The US National Security Agency (NSA) relies heavily on the statute, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, when compelling the cooperation of communications giants that oversee huge swaths of the world’s internet traffic, intercepting hundreds of millions of phone calls and email messages each year, and eavesdropping on the personal conversations of targeted foreign individuals and anyone...
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How Hamas Caught U.S. and Israeli Intelligence Unaware
19Oct By adminNo Comments
World

How Hamas Caught U.S. and Israeli Intelligence Unaware

Hamas’s attack on Israel should be a wake-up call to U.S. intelligence services. That a terrorist attack of this magnitude—with seismic implications for global security—came as a surprise to many in Washington shows that we need to reassess our own operations sharply to ensure that America has a comprehensive threat picture that can provide early warnings and prevent national-security tragedies. The Israelis will no doubt examine this lapse thoroughly. Several possible reasons come to mind for why Israel and its allies, including the U.S., failed to report on the exact nature, timing and scale of the attack.Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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Israel’s Failure to Stop the Hamas Attack Shows the Danger of Too Much Surveillance
9Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Israel’s Failure to Stop the Hamas Attack Shows the Danger of Too Much Surveillance

Though details of exactly how the attack happened are still emerging, it seems that oversights related to grappling with this signal-and-noise conundrum played a role.“In retrospect, there was some information, but, like happens in all intelligence failures, it wasn't given sufficient consideration. It was misunderstood,” says Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser. “I think in the last days, from my understanding, there were some warning signs. And actually, the intelligence establishment had been warning for the past about half-year that there was going to be a significant conflict with Hamas, that they were bent on escalating the situation. But then they misread the signs.”Colin Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and securit...
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Apple’s Encryption Is Under Attack by a Mysterious Group
8Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Apple’s Encryption Is Under Attack by a Mysterious Group

Does the public have a right to see gruesome photos of animal test subjects taken by a public university?That question underpins an ongoing court battle between UC Davis and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, an animal welfare group, which is fighting for the release of photos of dead monkeys used in tests of Elon Musk–owned Neuralink’s brain-chip implants. A WIRED investigation this week revealed the extent to which Neuralink and UC Davis have gone to keep images of the tests secret.Also this week, an investigation by the Markup, copublished with WIRED, analyzed crime predictions by Geolitica (formerly PredPol) in Plainfield, New Jersey, and found that they accurately predicted crime less than 1 percent of the time. As WIRED previously reported, Geolitica is shutting down...
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Your Internet Browser Does Not Belong to You
3Oct By adminNo Comments
Technology

Your Internet Browser Does Not Belong to You

In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Erica Bina, programmers working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created Mosaic, the first browser designed for the mass market. Mosaic, which was easy to install and use and was backed by responsive customer support, showed inline images (earlier browsers displayed pictures in separate windows because they were aimed at users downloading charts and figures rather than looking at pictures).Mosaic was the first application to make the internet feel truly browsable. Writing in WIRED in 1994, Gary Wolfe described the ways Mosaic had changed the internet’s texture for everyday users: “you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition. Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful...
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Mozilla: Your New Car Is a Data Privacy Nightmare
10Sep By adminNo Comments
Technology

Mozilla: Your New Car Is a Data Privacy Nightmare

Eighty-four percent of the brands that researchers studied share or sell this kind of personal data, and only two of them allow drivers to have their data deleted. While it is unclear exactly who these companies share or sell data to, the report points out that there is a huge market for driver data. An automotive data broker called High Mobility cited in the report has a partnership with nine of the car brands Mozilla studied. On its website, it advertises a wide range of data products—including precise location data.This isn’t just a privacy nightmare but a security one. Volkswagen, Toyota, and Mercedes-Benz have all recently suffered data leaks or breaches that affected millions of customers. According to Mozilla, cars are the worst category of products for privacy that they have ever ...
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Top US Spies Meet With Privacy Experts Over Surveillance ‘Crown Jewel’
9Sep By adminNo Comments
Technology

Top US Spies Meet With Privacy Experts Over Surveillance ‘Crown Jewel’

Senior United States intelligence officials met privately in Virginia yesterday with over a dozen civil liberties groups to field concerns about domestic surveillance operations that have drawn intense scrutiny this summer among an unlikely coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the US Congress.The closed-door session, convened at the Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus—a sprawling complex housing the bulk of the nation’s counterterrorism infrastructure—comes amid a backdrop of political furor over past misuses of a powerful surveillance tool by, principally, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Republican lawmakers, who remain aggrieved over the FBI’s botched operation to surveil a former Trump campaign aide amid its 2016 Russia investigation, have formed an extraordi...
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