The National Security Agency built a "Google-like" search engine to give domestic and international government agencies access to details of billions of calls, texts and instant messages sent by millions of people, according to The Intercept.
The search engine, called ICReach, had behind it roughly 850 billion pieces of metadata in 2007 on calls made largely but not exclusively by foreign nationals, the report said.
We already knew that the dragnet style of data collection employed by the NSA resulted in a huge level of collateral damage. As revealed by whistle-blower Edward Snowden the agency had been intercepting huge amounts of web traffic -- often with the assistance of web firms -- on an almost unbelievable scale.
The National Security Agency has the capability to record "100 percent" of the telephone calls placed in a foreign country and play them back up to a month later, according to a report Tuesday by The Washington Post.
The pressure on the US government to reform the NSA’s surveillance programs is growing. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all called for change last month alongside a petition from international authors calling for an end to mass surveillance. President Obama announced big changes to government surveillance programs, but most of them centered around the NSA's bulk collection of Americans' phone records, not its spying on internet communications. In an open letter published on Friday, more than 50 cryptography experts are asking the US government to make more changes to protect privacy.
Barack Obama has announced reforms to somewhat limit and examine US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, in order to win back trust following spying revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Obama said in a speech today that he will issue presidential directives promising a number of key changes to how US intelligence agencies collect and examine data.
The US government, through its National Security Agency, keeps records of every single phone call made by every single phone in the country – and probably almost anything that travels over the internet. The oft-repeated rationale is that this kind of bulk data collection has the power to prevent terrorist attacks and keep the US safe.
There has been a lot of news lately about nefarious-sounding backdoors being inserted into cryptographic standards and toolkits. One algorithm, a pseudo-random bit generator, Dual_EC_DRBG, was ratified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007 and is attracting a lot of attention for having a potential backdoor. This is the algorithm that the NSA reportedly paid RSA $10 million in exchange for making it the default way for its BSAFE crypto toolkit to generated random numbers.
In a letter to Joseph Tucci, and Art Coviello, F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen says he is canceling his talk at the 2014 RSA Conference, due to the company's deal with the NSA.
Mikko Hypponen, a widely known security expert and speaker, has given many presentations at the RSA Conference over the years. However, his talk scheduled for the 2014 RSA Conference in February, "Governments as Malware Authors" isn't going to happen.
This weekend, the US government filed documents in two long-running cases (both in California's Northern District) related to NSA surveillance.
A federal judge in Washington ruled on Monday that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution, in the most significant legal setback for the agency since the publication of the first surveillance disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
