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

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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.

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Skype has long claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted", an architectural category that suggests conversations over the service would be difficult or impossible to eavesdrop upon, even given control of users’ Internet connections. But Skype’s 2005 independent security review admits a caveat to this protection: "defeat of the security mechanisms at the Skype Central Server" could facilitate a "man-in-the-middle attack" (see section 3.4.1). Essentially, the Skype service plays the role of a certificate authority for its users and, like other certificate authorities, could facilitate eavesdropping by giving out the wrong keys.

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Automatic license plate readers are the most widespread location tracking technology you’ve probably never heard of. Mounted on patrol cars or stationary objects like bridges, they snap photos of every passing car, recording their plate numbers, times, and locations. At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons (to act on arrest warrants, find stolen cars, etc.). But increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years.

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By now, we US citizens are all very very aware that our metadata is being harvested by "the man." It’s not the actual email or phone calls, but metadata still matters. And if you’ve wondered what it looks like, MIT’s Immersion project can help you out. The service that lets you snoop on your email metadata just like a government agency.

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