NSA

Yahoo is expanding its efforts to protect its users’ online activities from prying eyes by encrypting all the communications and other information flowing into the Internet company’s data centres around the world.

The commitment announced Monday by Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer follows a recent Washington Post report that the National Security Agency has been hacking into the communications lines of the data centres run by Yahoo and Google Inc. to intercept information about what people do and say online.

To say that there are a lot of people who are angry with the National Security Agency (NSA) right now would be an understatement. But the things that are getting the most political attention right now—such as the invasion of the privacy of American citizens and spying on the leaders of American allies—are just a fraction of the problem, according to cryptographer and Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society Fellow Bruce Schneier.

According to the Washington Post, the US National Security Agency has had the ability to track mobile phones even when they are switched off. It's not new news, with the Post's article published July 22 and its source, troops from the NSA's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), stating they've been able to do this since 2004. The problem is, almost a decade later, no one knows how it was done.

A U.S. email provider can promise its users all the security and privacy it wants; it still has to do whatever it takes to give the government access.

That’s the gist of the Justice Department’s 60-page appellate brief in the Lavabit surveillance case, filed today in the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia.

A new analysis of the Snowden papers by German magazine Der Spiegel shows GCHQ–the English counterpart to the US’s NSA–served false copies of LinkedIn and Slashdot pages to install malware on a few target individuals’ computers. This latest revelation is not a mass spying program, but a server-heavy, speed-dependent initiative to spy on key individuals deemed to be assets by the GCHQ. Targets included employees of GRX providers Comfon, Mach (now owned by Syniverse), and nine members of OPEC, the global oil cartel.

A unique effort to crowdsource a security audit of the popular TrueCrypt open source encryption software appears to be going viral three weeks after it was launched by two U.S. based researchers in response to concerns that the National Security Agency may have tampered with it.

The intiative has so far garnered more than $57,000 in donations and bitcoins and attracted over 1,000 volunteers from 30 countries, including a techncial advisory group comprised of some of the world's best regarded cryptographers.

Google has started to encrypt its traffic between its data centers, effectively halting the broad surveillance of its inner workings by the joint National Security Agency-GCHQ program known as MUSCULAR. The move turns off a giant source of information to the two agencies, which at one point accounted for nearly a third of the NSA's daily data intake for its primary intelligence analysis database—at least for now.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who created the world wide web, has called for a "full and frank public debate" over internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, warning that the system of checks and balances to oversee the agencies has failed.

As the inventor of the global system of inter-connectivity known as the web, with its now ubiquitous www and http, Berners-Lee is uniquely qualified to comment on the internet spying revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A coalition of defense lawyers, privacy advocates, and journalists has sued the Dutch government over its collaboration and exchange of data with the U.S. National Security Agency and other foreign intelligence services.

The coalition is seeking a court order to stop Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD from using data received from foreign agencies like the NSA that was not obtained in accordance with European and Dutch law. It also wants the government to inform Dutch citizens whose data was obtained in this manner.

Yahoo and Facebook have done it, and now it's Apple's turn to reveal the data requests it gets from the world's governments.

In the latest report released by the Cupertino company, it revealed that in the period between January 1, 2013 and June 30, 2013, law enforcement agencies in the US have made 1,000 to 2,000 account requests that affect 2,000 to 3,000 specific accounts. Of that number, 0 to 1,000 accounts were disclosed, though Apple claims it objected to that same number of requests.