Privacy

New revelations about US spying continue to be released "in dribs and drabs," as President Obama recently complained.

Today's information comes courtesy of Der Spiegel, the Germany weekly magazine. While political discussion in the US has focused on the National Security Agency's deviations from its promise to not gather data on Americans, the international press continues to highlight examples of NSA spying that are perfectly legal, but may well stoke public outrage in other nations.

When someone dines with Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, I'd like to know who pays the tab.

In a contributing article in Forbes, Stanford Center for Internet and Society Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick talks about what it was like to meet the man in charge of the villainized security agency. Over dinner they discussed the NSA's surveillance tactics, document declassifying, and more.

 A German government infosec agency has warned that using Windows 8 in conjunction with the Trusted Computing security platform could lead to loss of control over IT solutions for users.

The advice comes from the federal Bundesamt for Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik IT security agency, which issued a German-language document stating that new Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips built into computers working in conjunction Windows 8 put the devices under Microsoft's control, with users having no control over what can and cannot be installed on them.

New spy laws legalising domestic communications interception were narrowly passed in New Zealand yesterday by a vote of 61 to 59 in Parliament.

The Government argued the laws are necessary to clarify the powers of the Government Communications Services Bureau (GCSB), New Zealand's cyber security agency, when it is asked to assist law enforcement agencies such as Police and the Security Intelligence Service.

The National Security Agency may have unintentionally collected as many as 56,000 emails of Americans per year between 2008 and 2011, in a program that a secret US court said may have violated US law and the Constitution.

The once-classified documents were released by US intelligence agencies as part of an unprecedented White House effort to smooth the uproar following revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of secret government surveillance programs.

North American players of the “League of Legends” video game may have had their personal information accessed, the company behind the popular online game has warned.

Riot Games has warned players that account information including usernames and email addresses were accessed by hackers, alongside salted password hashes.   

Two "security experts" from the British intelligence agency GCHQ have overseen the destruction of hard drives owned by The Guardian, the newspaper that has published leaked NSA documents describing the work of US and UK intelligence agencies.

The revelations are in a column published Monday afternoon by the newspaper's editor, Alan Rusbridger. In it, he describes the escalating concerns of the British government about the leaks given to The Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, the US has been trying to patch up its relationship with its long running ally Germany.

The German government said it was furious when it discovered US spooks were spying on its government.

Now it seems that the US has verbally committed to enter into a no-spying agreement with Germany. But this will just block government and industrial espionage, so presumably citizens are fair game. According to IT World, the verbal commitment was given in talks with the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND).

A report published Thursday evening in The Washington Post highlights top-secret documents that show the National Security Agency (NSA) collects unauthorized surveillance on Americans thousands of times per year.

 The secure voice and communication service, headed by PGP founder Phil Zimmermann, announced in a blog post that it was not able to offer the same security for email as it was for phone, video and text services, and has decided to shut down Silent Mail.

Jon Callas, Silent Circle co-founder and CTO of said that the voice communications were designed to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your data to be nil. “The reasons are obvious — the less of your information we have, the better it is for you and for us,” he said.