An important New York Times investigation from today reporting that the NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country," coupled with leaked documents published by the Guardian, seriously calls into question the accuracy of crucial statements made by government officials about NSA surveillance.
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Silent Circle, an email provider which guarantees end-to-end secure email, has announced that it’s going the same way as Edward Snowden’s beloved Lavabit
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Silent Circle’s thing has always been the promise of end-to-end secure communications, and that drive is apparently causing it to shut down the Silent Mail email service. Reasons cited in a blog post by CTO Jon Callas include the insecure nature of email protocols and preemptively avoiding the outside (read: FISA) pressures that prompted Lavabit to close its doors. Silent Circle says it hadn’t received any “subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else”. Still, CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch he believed the government would come knocking due to certain high profile users of the service. Its phone, video and text products remain operational and claim to be “secure as ever”, if you’re wondering.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Silent Circle
Chromecast is a pretty neat little gadget, but there are some things you might not want showing up in your browser history — we’ll leave it to your imagination as to what those things might be. With that in mind, the folks at Android Central have put together a brief walkthrough to explain how to use incognito tabs with Chromecast. It’s pretty much the same way you’d access any extension in Chrome’s disposable browser session: just type in “Chrome://extensions,” find the Google Cast section and select the “Allow in incognito” option. While we’re the last people to judge how you choose to use your dongle, some things should probably be kept private.
Filed under: Misc, Home Entertainment, Peripherals, Google
Via: Android Central
Source: Google
The unfortunate side effect of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s email provider Lavabit pulling the plug rather than complying with the feds
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It looks like Edward Snowden is going to have to find a new email service as the one he supposedly used — Lavabit — has abruptly closed its doors. The company’s owner, Ladar Levison, posted an open letter on the site today, saying, “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit.” Levison also claimed to be unable to speak to the specifics surrounding the situation, stating that a Congressionally approved gag order prevented him from doing so. While Lavabit’s situation seems pretty dire, it might not be curtains just yet. In his message, Levison stated that he would take his fight to reinstate Lavabit to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. To read the missive in full, head on over to the source link below.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Boing Boing
Source: Lavabit
There’s a story in the New York Times today that details how the NSA hasn’t just been tracking communications to and from (potential) foreigners of interest—it’s actually tracking all emails and text messages that potentially mention these targets. That dragnet just got a lot wider. This is the actualization of the tired and at one time absurd "oops better not say bomb on email" jokes.
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Creepy new feature alert! Creepy new feature alert! Buried in the Settings menu of the latest beta version of iOS 7 is the somewhat unsettling ability to see everywhere you’ve been since upgrading the operating system. It makes you wonder: Who else can see these maps?
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The plot has either thickened or thinned back out in the quest to discover who’s been hacking into the anonymous TOR network through a security vulnerability in Firefox. After claiming on Monday that it was the NSA
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After startling news that someone—probably a government agency
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