NSA

Pakistan’s Upper House this week began debating a new bill seeking to establish a National Cyber Security Council, an agency the nation feels is needed in the wake of Edward Snowden's myriad revelations about NSA surveillance.

The Cyber Security Council Bill 2014 was presented by Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed on Monday with the aim of creating a body to draft policy, guidelines and strategy on cyber security issues according to international best practices, in line with Pakistan Today.

The National Security Agency denied that it previously knew of the Heartbleed bug, calling reports that it or any part of the U.S. government were aware before April “wrong.”

Bloomberg reported earlier Friday that the NSA knew of the bug in the widely used encryption tool called OpenSSL for at least two years and exploited it to gather intelligence. Security researchers have called Heartbleed one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history. Later in the day, the NSA released a statement saying the agency wasn’t aware of Heartbleed until it was made public.

In December 2013, RSA was accused – based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden – of entering into a secret $10 million agreement with the NSA to use a flawed encryption formula in its products, but a backdoor may not be all that was snuck in, according to researchers from various universities.

“Evidence of an implementation of a non-standard TLS extension called “Extended Random” was discovered in the RSA BSAFE products,” according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, University of Wisconsin, Eindhoven University of Technology, and University of California, San Diego.

The Obama Administration has secured a 90-day extension of the National Security Agency's (NSA's) controversial authority to collect phone metadata records on U.S. customers under Section 215 of the U.S.A Patriot Act.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which oversees the data collection program, granted a reauthorization request filed by the U.S. Justice Department last week.

President Barack Obama's plan to stop the National Security Agency's bulk collection and storage of telephone records is a good first step that needs to go much further to protect Americans' privacy rights, advocates say.

Obama unveiled his plans Thursday, saying in a statement, "I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk."

When Edward Snowden ripped open the curtain and began revealing details of the NSA's data vacuuming, IT analysts warned that an unintended consequence of the program was a huge blow to the credibility of U.S. cloud providers. After all, they asked, why would anyone who cares about the security of their data put it someplace where government snoops could access it?

The top lawyer for the National Security Agency and others from the Obama administration made it clear to the US government's independent oversight board that tech titans knew about government surveillance while it was going on.

Google has started encrypting its search data to protect users from surveillance by state intelligence outfits like the US National Security Agency (NSA) as well as hackers.

Google said that the PRISM revelations last year prompted it to rethink its privacy methods, so it has started encrypting search data using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol.

 An article that accused the National Security Agency of impersonating Facebook to spy on U.S. citizens has triggered a denial from the NSA and a reprimand for the U.S. president from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The article, which also said the NSA plans to infect millions of PCs with malware, appeared on the website First Look and was co-written by Glenn Greenwald, who shot to prominence last year for a series of articles in the Guardian about classified NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden.