Mar 19
Tech giants in the US were not as innocent, or at least not as ignorant, as they claim. This was the revelation dropped by NSA general counsel Rajesh De appearing … Continue reading
Feb 12
It’s fun to imagine the spy games that must have been involved in Edward Snowden’s exposure of the NSA’s massively invasive surveillance techniques. But, as NBC reports, a lot of that information came the way you might snoop on your significant others’ email: He stole some poor sap’s password.
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Jan 17
Obama NSA reform plan revealed
Posted in: Today's ChiliPresident Obama has defended the NSA’s spying actions, arguing that the continuing pace of technological advancement means surveillance is essential, though revealing a “series of concrete and substantial reforms” he … Continue reading
Dec 14
A pension fund has sued IBM for $12.9 billion in revenue losses caused by the recent revelation of its partnership with the US Congress and the NSA to spy on Chinese customers. Many of China’s companies pulled out of business arrangements with IBM after it became known that IBM was using its technology to collect […]
Dec 04
The NSA is using billions of cellphone location records every day to track potential suspects worldwide, according to the latest leaks from government agency data, including the movements of US citizens despite not specifically going out of its way to collect them. “We are getting vast volumes” of information on cellphone location – amounting to […]
Nov 26
Fiber-optic cable taps, not clandestine agreements with big cloud data users like Google and Yahoo, may have given the NSA its treasure-trove access to internet traffic, insiders suspect, with the government agency potentially targeting interconnects rather than data centers themselves. While data centers are heavily secured, the fiber-optic cable links between them are traditionally unencrypted, […]
Oct 30
The Washington Post reports that, according to new documents leaked by PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has been secretly tapping
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Oct 04
The US National Security Agency is working to undermine the security of Tor, the open-source internet anonymity tool, using targeted Firefox hacks and keyloggers in a – so-far believed to be unsuccessful – attempt to peel open the clandestine system. Leaked NSA documents, including presentations titled “Tor Stinks”, were among the cache of information leaked […]
Sep 28
NYT: NSA monitors, graphs some US Citizens’ social activity with collected metadata
Posted in: Today's Chili
Just how does the NSA piece together all that metadata it collects? Thanks to “newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials,” The New York Times today shed light on how the agency plots out the social activity and connections of those it’s spying on. Up until 2010, the NSA only traced and analyzed the metadata of emails and phone calls from foreigners, so anything from US citizens in the chains created stopgaps. Snowden-provided documents note the policy shifted later in that year to allow for the inclusion of Americans’ metadata in such analysis. An NSA representative explained to the NYT that, “all data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period.”
During “large-scale graph analysis,” collected metadata is cross-referenced with commercial, public and “enrichment data” (some examples included GPS locations, social media accounts and banking info) to create a contact chain tied to any foreigner under review and scope out its activity. The highlighted ingestion tool in this instance goes by the name Mainway. The NYT article also highlights a secret report, dubbed “Better Person Centric Analysis,” which details how data is sorted into 164 searchable “relationship types” and 94 “entity types” (email and IP addresses, along with phone numbers). Other documents highlight that during 2011 the NSA took in over 700 million phone records daily on its own, along with an “unnamed American service provider” that began funneling in an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records that August. In addition to that, Snowden’s leak of the NSA’s classified 2013 budget cites it as hoping to capture “20 billion ‘record events’ daily” that would be available for review by the agency’s analysts in an hour’s time. As you might expect, the number of US citizens that’ve had their info bunched up into all of this currently remains a secret — national security, of course. Extended details are available at the source links.
Via: The Verge
Source: New York Times
Sep 28
The New York Times is reporting that the NSA is using all the data it’s collecting on US citizens to make giant "social networks" of everyone their targets know.
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