Privacy

It's been long time since we reported news updates on hacking attacks done by Syrian Electronic Army.  Just now, Syrian Electronic Army has posted a tweet saying they have hacked into TrueCaller website(www.truecaller.com)

"Sorry @Truecaller, we needed your database, thank you for it :) http://truecaller.com  #SEA #SyrianElectronicArmy" One of the Tweet reads. In another tweet, the group has provided the database host address,database name,  username, and password in plain-text.

US drivers are being tracked to an unprecedented extent thanks to a system fattened by federal grant money and spurred by the rush to market private automobile data, according to a report by the ACLU.

After analyzing 26,000 pages of documents from police departments spread across the USA, along with information about private companies, the American Civil Liberties Union has produced a report highlighting the large amounts of data public and private companies are storing on drivers, and the poor retention policies that go along with it.

As stories based on Edward Snowden’s trove of leaked National Security Agency (NSA) documents continue to trickle out, most reporters have focused on what they can tell us about the spy agency’s current or recent surveillance activities. Yet one of the most interesting documents from Snowden’s cache, published in full by The Guardian back in June, sheds new light on the granddaddy of them all: President Bush’s original warrantless wiretap program.

Recent revelations about US government snooping may have made privacy-conscious companies think again about whether they can trust American cloud companies such as Amazon, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft. This could provide an opportunity for companies outside the US to provide havens for sensitive commercial data. So, why not Switzerland?

How safe is your online social network? Not very, as it turns out. Your friends may not even be human, but rather bots siphoning off your data and influencing your decisions with convincing yet programmed points of view.

A team of computer researchers at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia has found that hordes of social bots could not only spell disaster for large online destinations like Facebook and Twitter but also threaten the very fabric of the Web and even have implications for our broader economy and society.

A federal judge today rejected the assertion from President Barack Obama’s administration that the state secrets defense barred a lawsuit alleging the government is illegally siphoning Americans’ communications to the National Security Agency.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco, however, did not give the Electronic Frontier Foundation the green light to sue the government in a long-running case that dates to 2008, with trips to the appellate courts in between.

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

Crowds across the U.S. gathered Thursday to protest the federal government’s surveillance of the American public – recently highlighted by leaker Edward Snowden – as part of pro-Forth Amendment rallies, chanting “NSA go away!”

More than 400 people gathered in New York and Washington D.C., while around 300 people were estimated to be in San Francisco.

Edward Snowden's revelations about American communications snoopery have inspired newspapers around the world to investigate domestic spying, the latest of which is Le Monde in France.

The newspaper's exposé (French language) finds that French citizens' communications are just as thoroughly trawled as those in America.

L33tdawg: Kind of easier said than done ...

The fallout from the recent revelations that the United States conducts large scale electronic surveillance continues, with German federal minister of the interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, saying people who fear being spied upon should not use US websites such as Google and Facebook.

Speaking to the Die Welt, Friedrich said: "If you worry about your communications being intercepted in any way, don't use services that go through American servers."