Apr 14
What’s alleged to be Banksy’s latest piece of artwork has popped up on the side of a house in Cheltenham, and it depicts security agents spying on a public phone—right round the corner from the UK’s intelligence center, GCHQ.
Feb 27
It’s been a while since we’ve had a shocking NSA revelation, so you probably thought all the madness was over. Welp, you were wrong. Very, very wrong.
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Feb 18
In the latest unsurprising privacy news, it appears that the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ spied on people w
Posted in: Today's ChiliIn the latest unsurprising privacy news, it appears that the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ spied on people who viewed the WikiLeaks website.
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Feb 05
New documents leaked by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News suggest that the UK’s spy agency, GCHQ, launched a DDoS attack on the hacker collectives Anonymous and LulzSec.
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Jan 27
Another day, another round of leaks from former CIA technical analyst Edward Snowden. This man blew the whistle on U.S. National Security Agency’s electronic spying programs, and he continues to leak highly classified documents. Documents provided to The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica reveal that the NSA has been siphoning off personal data through popular mobile applications, internally referred to as “leaky apps.” Apparently the NSA has collaborated with its British counterpart on this program, the Government Communications Headquarter or GCHQ.
NSA Reportedly Siphoning Off Personal Data Through Popular Mobile Apps original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Jan 27
Newly published slides from the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ show that the spy agencies delight in scooping up data from "leaky" smartphone apps. That means that you’re being watched when you do everything from playing Angry Birds to uploading Facebook photos.
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Dec 09
For the NSA, you real life isn’t enough. No, as well as reading your emails and monitoring your phone calls, its agents have been deployed inside MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life, as well as Xbox Live.
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Sep 20
When Belgian prosecutors suggested that Belgacom was the target of foreign espionage, many blamed the NSA — it has a history of snooping on other countries, after all. Those accusations may have been off the mark, however. Der Spiegel has revealed documents leaked by Edward Snowden which hint that the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was responsible. The intelligence agency reportedly tricked key Belgacom staff into visiting a malware-loaded website that hijacked their PCs. GCHQ could then spy on smartphones, map the network and investigate secure VPN connections. Neither Belgacom nor Belgium has responded to this latest Snowden leak, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the apparent evidence speeds up their investigation.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Internet
Via: Ars Technica
Source: Der Spiegel (translated)
Sep 05
American and British spy agencies can thwart internet security and encryption
Posted in: Today's Chili
As reporters at the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica dig deeper into the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, new and disturbing revelations continue to be made. Two programs, dubbed Bullrun (NSA) and Edgehill (GCHQ), have just come to light, that focus on circumventing or breaking the security and encryption tools used across the internet. The effort dwarfs the $20 million Prism program that simply gobbled up data. Under the auspices of “Sigint (signals intelligence) enabling” in a recent budget request, the NSA was allocated roughly $255 million dollars this year alone to fund its anti-encryption program.
The agencies’ efforts are multi-tiered, and start with a strong cracking tool. Not much detail about the methods or software are known, but a leaked memo indicates that the NSA successfully unlocked “vast amounts” of data in 2010. By then it was already collecting massive quantities of data from taps on internet pipelines, but much of it was safely protected by industry standard encryption protocols. Once that wall fell, what was once simply a torrent of scrambled ones and zeros, became a font of “exploitable” information. HTTPS, VoIP and SSL are all confirmed to have been compromised through Bullrun, though, it appears that some solutions to the NSA’s “problem” are less elegant than others. In some cases a super computer and simple brute force are necessary to peel back the layers of encryption.
Filed under: Internet
Source: New York TImes, Guardian, ProPublica
Aug 04
Last month a string of highly classified documents were leaked by former CIA technical analyst Edward Snowden. Those documents revealed that the UK’s GCHQ was apparently tapping in to undersea fiber optic cables that go through the country for collecting data. At that time it was not known if any telecommunication companies were aiding the program, which is known as Tempora. According to German newspaper Süddeutsche, which claims to have received documents from none other than Edward Snowden, Verizon Wireless allegedly aided the GCHQ’s Tempora program.
Apart from Verizon, four small providers, BT and Vodafone have also been named in the report. The documents are said to be from 2009. Previous information leaked about Tempora reveals that the program is capable of intercepting some 600 million “telephone events” daily, apart from collecting petabytes of internet data. The companies mentioned in the report have declined to comment on this situation. Verizon is one of the biggest providers in the U.S., one can only imagine what it customers would think knowing that their provider is allegedly aiding UK’s eavesdropping efforts. The report claims that data collected through Tempora is shared between GCHQ and US’s very own National Security Agency.
Verizon Wireless Allegedly Aided UK’s Tempora Eavesdropping Program original content from Ubergizmo. 
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