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How the Powerful Try to Rule Through Cybersecurity
How the Powerful Try to Rule Through Cybersecurity
Michael Daugherty is President & CEO of LabMD, an Atlanta-based clinical and anatomic medical laboratory with a national client base. Daugherty exposes how business was cyber bullied by federal contractors in his book The Devil Inside the Beltway, He summarizes his incredible story below:
…click on the above link to view the video…
Edward Snowden tells students mass data collection can hamper attempts to foil attacks
Video appearance of NSA whistleblower sparks debate at Upper Canada College
U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower and international fugitive Edward Snowden told students at Upper Canada College that the mass collection of data by government spy agencies can get in the way of foiling terrorist plots.
Such programs can sometimes take resources away from targeted data collection of specific threats, Snowden, told students at the private school in Toronto, where he was invited to speak.
- CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents
- Canada’s Snowden files: CBC’s stories on the revelations
The problem with mass surveillance is when you collect everything, you understand nothing,” he said during the video conference Monday evening.
Snowden, who exposed the NSA’s domestic spying program in 2013, was the keynote speaker at the World Affairs Conference, which is co-organized by Upper Canada College, where he also took questions from students.
The title of the talk, which also included journalist Glenn Greenwald, was “Privacy vs. Security: A Discussion of Personal Privacy in the Digital Age.”
He told students that electronic spying programs constitute a threat to democracy and ought to be subject to more public debate about limits on how information is collected and used.
“This fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state,” he said.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Recipe for Disaster”: Canadian Government to Expand State Surveillance Powers (Again)
“Recipe for Disaster”: Canadian Government to Expand State Surveillance Powers (Again)
The “spillover effects” of overbroad anti-terror legislation.
We’ve long been lamenting the enormous and still utterly murky – despite the Snowden revelations – spy apparatus in the US that, in collaboration with Corporate America, stretches from many federal agencies to state and local agencies. It’s all there, seamless, borderless, perfect: collecting license-plate data with photos that show who went where with whom to do what, checking out our “secure” data in the Cloud, collecting phone “metadata” that is not supposed to reveal personal details….
“We kill people based on metadata,” explained helpfully Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA. To make us Americans feel better, he added, “But that’s not what we do with this metadata.”
On the corporate side, consumer surveillance technologies and methods, dressed up in appealing terms like Ad Tech, are being perfected, and an entire startup bubble has sprung up to compete with the Big Ones that already master this.
For years, and at every level, laws have been passed in the US to give Big Brother more and more tools to track us in everything we do. Despite these efforts, Big Brother is just slowly limping behind fleet-footed Corporate America.
The article below reveals how the Canadian government is marching in the same direction, perhaps at a different pace, but with equally disturbing undertones.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Source Code Similarities: Experts Unmask ‘Regin’ Trojan as NSA Tool
Source Code Similarities: Experts Unmask ‘Regin’ Trojan as NSA Tool
Earlier this month, SPIEGEL International published an article based on the trove of documents made available by whistleblower Edward Snowden describing the increasingly complex digital weapons being developed by intelligence services in the US and elsewhere. Concurrently, several documents were published as well as the source code of a sample malware program called QWERTY found in the Snowden archive.
For most readers, that source code was little more than 11 pages of impenetrable columns of seemingly random characters. But experts with the Russian IT security company Kaspersky compared the code with malware programs they have on file. What they found were clear similarities with an elaborate cyber-weapon that has been making international headlines since November of last year.
Last fall, Kaspersky and the US security company Symantec both reported for the first time the discovery of a cyber-weapon system which they christened “Regin”. According to Kaspersky, the malware had already been in circulation for 10 years and had been deployed against targets in at least 14 countries, including Germany, Belgium and Brazil but also India and Indonesia.
Symantec spoke of a “highly complex” threat. Many of the targets were in the telecommunications sector, but others included energy companies and airlines. Both Symantec and Kaspersky did not shy away from superlatives when describing the malware program, calling it a “top-tier espionage tool” and the most dangerous cyber-weapon since Stuxnet, the notorious malware program used to attack the Iranian nuclear program.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents
Global sites for sharing movies, photos, music targeted in mass anti-terror surveillance
Canada’s electronic spy agency sifts through millions of videos and documents downloaded online every day by people around the world, as part of a sweeping bid to find extremist plots and suspects, CBC News has learned.
Details of the Communications Security Establishment project dubbed “Levitation” are revealed in a document obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently released to CBC News.
Under Levitation, analysts with the electronic eavesdropping service can access information on about 10 to 15 million uploads and downloads of files from free websites each day, the document says.
“Every single thing that you do — in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites — that act is being archived, collected and analyzed,” says Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto-based internet security think-tank Citizen Lab, who reviewed the document.
In the document, a PowerPoint presentation written in 2012, the CSE analyst who wrote it jokes about being overloaded with innocuous files such as episodes of the musical TV series Glee in their hunt for terrorists.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle
The Digital Arms Race: NSA Preps America for Future Battle
Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, “looking for interns who want to break things.”
Politerain is not a project associated with a conventional company. It is run by a US government intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA). More precisely, it’s operated by the NSA’s digital snipers with Tailored Access Operations (TAO), the department responsible for breaking into computers.
Potential interns are also told that research into third party computers might include plans to “remotely degrade or destroy opponent computers, routers, servers and network enabled devices by attacking the hardware.” Using a program called Passionatepolka, for example, they may be asked to “remotely brick network cards.” With programs like Berserkr they would implant “persistent backdoors” and “parasitic drivers”. Using another piece of software called Barnfire, they would “erase the BIOS on a brand of servers that act as a backbone to many rival governments.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Anti Terror Laws Coming After Attack On Charlie Hebdo
New Anti Terror Laws Coming After Attack On Charlie Hebdo
Stephen Harper announced that an “international Jihadist Movement Has Declared War On The World”, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in France. He also stated that new anti terrorism legislation would be introduced shortly after the House of Commons winter break.
The Canadian government responded to the fall attacks in Ottawa and Quebec, in the same fashion. Intoducing Bill C-44. You can read the full version of Bill C-44 HERE.
Critics of Bill C-44 cite concerns such as:
“Our government is already in the midst of giving spies more power through the passage of Bill C-13 (better known as the Cyberbullying Bill), which makes it easier for law enforcement agencies to surveil Canadians and allows Internet Service Providers to voluntarily turn your information over to the government without consequence, and without notifying you. The bill is so broad that even Carol Todd – mother of Amanda Todd, whose heartbreaking death helped inspire C-13 – has spoken out against its surveillance provisions.
And now, following last week’s attacks, the government wants to expand its spying powers even further through C-44. The bill has a lot of problems, but I want to concentrate on just one. C-44 would cut judicial oversight out of the admission of information from confidential informants at trial, automatically preserving the anonymity of those informants. In other words, Canadians would lose the right to confront their accusers in court; in essence, it’s the loss of our right to due process.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Can Iceland become the ‘Switzerland of data’? – Features – Al Jazeera English
Can Iceland become the ‘Switzerland of data’? – Features – Al Jazeera English.
