NSA

Gen. Alexander will not be fair game for fed-spotting contest

The hacker community is the ultimate moral gray.  While many hackers engage in malicious activities on a daily basis, and routinely violate U.S. local, state, and federal laws, they also have been vital over the last two decades in protecting consumers.  In the 1990s corporations recklessly stored data using poor practices which threatened to allow personal financial information to fall into the hands of truly malicious individuals. 

The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won’t tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency as part of its sweeping new counterterrorism powers. The reason: it would violate your privacy to say so. 

While 2011 could be considered the “year of the hacker,” government efforts prevented cyberattacks from having any major effect on Defense Department systems, Gen. Keith Alexander, head of U.S. Cyber Command, told a House subcommittee on Tuesday.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center originally filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the NSA which was denied and is today having it's appeal heard. The center is trying to obtain information about a deal the NSA cut with Google following an attack on Gmail by Chinese hackers in 2010. 

In its Freedom of Information Act request, the information center is requesting:

The National Security Agency director and other intelligence officials have been making the case within the Obama administration that the NSA should play a bigger role in protecting computer networks in the U.S., according to current and former U.S. officials.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has released SE Android, a security-enhanced version of Android, which provides and enforces stricter access-control policies than those found in the popular mobile operating system by default.

SE Android is based on NSA's previous research into mandatory access controls (MACs) that gave birth to the Security-Enhanced Linux project back in 2000. SE Linux is a collection of Linux kernel security modules and other tools that provide a flexible mechanism for restricting what resources users or applications can access.