Hasta La Gadget!

Thanks to the NSA PRISM revelations we’ve all lost our innocence about government cyber-spying, but how far down that rabbit-hole has law-enforcement gone? Revelations from the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas show that such tactics are old hat for another US anti-crime department: the FBI. For instance, one ex-official said that the bureau’s analysts (shown above) can routinely turn on the microphones in laptops and Android devices to record conversations without a person’s knowledge. On top of such in-house expertise, a private sector cottage industry has sprung up around cyber surveillance, marketing programs that can also hack handheld devices and PCs. One company even markets “zero day” bugging software that exploits unknown security holes — meaning crime lords can’t just patch their browsers to avoid detection.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Filed under: Misc, Internet

Comments

Source: WSJ

Edward Snowden—the former NSA contractor who revealed so much about the U.S. government’s system to spy on Americans without warrants—has escaped into Russia. Snowden had been trapped in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for 39 days. According to Reuters, the 30-year-old American left by taxi and is now in a safe undisclosed location.

Read more…

The Washington Post has unearthed more slides describing the US government’s PRISM surveillance program—and they help confirm the extent of the operation.

Read more…

Today we’re publishing—for the first time—the FBI’s drone licenses and supporting records for the last several years. Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement.

Read more…

While it may not come as much of a surprise to some people, the FBI has confirmed and admitted that they perform surveillance with drones on US soil. FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee today that they use drones for surveillance in the US, but “in a very, very minimal way, and

Read The Full Story