Scary. Insane. Ridiculous. Invasive. Wrong. The Washington Post reports that the FBI has had the ability to secretly activate a computer’s camera "without triggering the light that lets users know it is recording" for years now. What in the hell is going on? What kind of world do we live in?
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The FBI has released an official memo indicating that hackers related to Anonymous have been accessing federal government computers in various agencies for almost a year and stealing data.
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The US Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, and other US government agencies were infiltrated by the Adobe software breaches that came to light last month, the FBI said in a memo this week. The memo, which was distributed throughout the affected agencies, said that the breaches actually started in December […]
As of Friday afternoon, the FBI had managed to seize 144,000 bitcoins from Silk Road’s founder. Worth some $28.5 million in current exchange rates, that’s the largest ever seizure of the cryptocurrency. But based on the Bitcoin trail uncovered in recent weeks, over $50 million could still be missing
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Welp, that settles that. Anybody who was wondering if authorities were going to keep going after the arrest of Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht and start targeting users don’t need to wonder anymore. Multiple arrests have now been made worldwide, and it looks like more are on the way.
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Ross Ulbricht’s arrest last week
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This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, but the NSA has reportedly been trying (and failing) to break into the Tor network for years. It turns out that Tor, a suite of tools to protect anonymity online, is just too secure as an infrastructure. Individual users, however, are less secure.
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When Lavabit shut down in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks, it left a big question unanswered: just what did the US government want that was supposedly so egregious? Thanks to newly unsealed court documents obtained by Wired, we now know much more of the story. The FBI had served Lavabit an order requiring that it hand over Snowden’s encryption keys, helping the agency install a device that would collect metadata from its suspect’s email connections. Lavabit repeatedly turned down the requests since it could have given access to data from every user of the service — at one point it did serve up the SSL keys, but printed out on 11 pages in 4pt type — which led to threats of criminal contempt charges and fines. We all know what happened afterward — company founder Ladar Levison chose to shutter Lavabit rather than comply with the FBI’s demands. While the new details aren’t shocking given the government’s desire to catch Snowden, they help explain Levison’s past statements; he felt that it was better to defend Lavabit in court than risk violating the privacy of his customers.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Wired
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Light just reached one of the darker corners of the web: the FBI has seized Silk Road, a site infamous for hosting anonymized, Bitcoin-based drug and gun sales. The move follows a sting operation that also led to the arrest of site founder Ross Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts) for alleged hacking, money laundering and narcotics trafficking. While the seizure isn’t likely to stop online contraband purchases, it’s potentially a big blow. At current Bitcoin values, Silk Road generated $1.2 billion in revenue from just two years of operation — the kind of cash that we’d expect from a large, legitimate e-commerce venture. The FBI’s move also demonstrates that anonymizing technology like Tor won’t always keep law enforcement at bay.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Brian Krebs (Twitter), The Verge
Source: Nicholas Weaver (PDF)
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