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One Small Step For NSA Reform, One Giant Leap for Congress

One Small Step For NSA Reform, One Giant Leap for Congress Exactly two years after journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras traveled to Hong Kong to meet an NSA whistleblower named Edward Snowden, Congress has finally brought itself to reform one surveillance program out of the multitude he revealed — a program so blatantly out of line […]

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Crazyland

Crazyland A long time ago—almost a quarter of a century—I worked in a research lab, designing measurement and data acquisition electronics for high energy physics experiments. In the interest of providing motivation for what follows, I will say a few words about the job. It was interesting work, and it gave me a chance to […]

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Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability

Eyes on the Spies: Canadians Deserve Accountability Yet while surveillance budgets balloon, watchdogs starve. Last in a series. For anyone involved in the privacy debate, it’s been a busy couple of years. Barely a week goes by without new revelations about the activities of the Canadian spy agency known as Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and […]

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Senior NATO Official Claims We’ll Be At War By Summer

Senior NATO Official Claims We’ll Be At War By Summer Last week, former NSA intelligence analyst John Schindler posted a rather disturbing tweet. With a statement that one could only assume to be a reference towards Russia, Schindler wrote “Said a senior NATO (non-US) GOFO to me today: “We’ll probably be at war this summer. If […]

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How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance

How Canada Can End Mass Surveillance Third chapter in OpenMedia’s crowd-sourced privacy plan. Just two short years ago, if you asked strangers on the street about mass surveillance, you’d likely encounter many blank stares. Some may remember East Germany’s Stasi spy agency, or reference China’s extensive Internet censorship. But few would express fear that western democratic governments […]

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The NSA’s Technotyranny: One Nation Under Surveillance

The NSA’s Technotyranny: One Nation Under Surveillance “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”—William Binney, NSA whistleblower We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, […]

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From the Very Creation of the Internet, U.S. Spy Agencies Fought to Block Encryption

From the Very Creation of the Internet, U.S. Spy Agencies Fought to Block Encryption American spy agencies have intentionally weakened digital security for many decades. This breaks the functionality of our computers and of the Internet. It reduces functionality and reduces security by – for example – creating backdoors that malicious hackers can get through. The spy agencies […]

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Researchers Predicted In 1971 that Debit Cards Would Become the Ultimate Spy Tool

Researchers Predicted In 1971 that Debit Cards Would Become the Ultimate Spy Tool We noted in 2013: The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA spies on Americans’ credit card transactions. Senators Wyden and Udall – both on the Senate Intelligence Committee, with access to all of the top-secret information about the government’s spying programs – write: Section 215 […]

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FBI Confirms No Major Terrorism Cases Cracked via Unconstitutional Patriot Act Phone Spying

FBI Confirms No Major Terrorism Cases Cracked via Unconstitutional Patriot Act Phone Spying FBI agents can’t point to any major terrorism cases they’ve cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday that could complicate efforts to keep key parts of the law […]

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NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones

NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals. The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, […]

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USA Freedom Act Passes House, Codifying Bulk Collection For the First Time, Critics Say

USA Freedom Act Passes House, Codifying Bulk Collection For the First Time, Critics Say After only one hour of floor debate, and no allowed amendments, the House of Representatives today passed legislation that seeks to address the NSA’s controversial surveillance of American communications. However, opponents believe it may give brand new authorization to the U.S. government to conduct domestic dragnets. The […]

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NSA Spying Ruled Illegal, But Will Congress Save the Program Anyway?

NSA Spying Ruled Illegal, But Will Congress Save the Program Anyway? This week the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s metadata collection program was not authorized in US law. The PATRIOT Act, under which the program began, was too vague, the court found. But the truth is the Act was intended to […]

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The Computers Are Listening: Speech Recognition Is the NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret

The Computers Are Listening: Speech Recognition Is the NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret Second in a series. Part 1 here. Siri can understand what you say. Google can take dictation. Even your newsmart TV is taking verbal orders. So is there any doubt the National Security Agency has the ability to translate spoken words into text? But precisely when the […]

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Will Appeals Court Ruling Really Stop NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection?

Will Appeals Court Ruling Really Stop NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection? Don’t Crack Open the Champagne Bottle Just Yet While congress ponders the merits of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, a bill which revises the business records provisions of the Patriot Act, a panel of judges in a federal appeals court has just thrown a clump of sand […]

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The Computers Are Listening: How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text

THE COMPUTERS ARE LISTENING: HOW THE NSA CONVERTS SPOKEN WORDS INTO SEARCHABLE TEXT Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record. But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are […]

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