NSA

CNN Claims “Americans Want Security Over Freedom”

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Wow, this is straight up insane propaganda at the highest level. He is not even trying to hide the message. CNN’s Jake Tapper just comes out and says it: I think the American people, honestly, want security over freedom. – Jake Tapper Compare that to let’s say, Benjamin Franklin: Any society that would give up a … Read more

The Definitive Chart on How to Identify a Terrorist

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A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled:  You Know You Are a Conspiracy Theorist If… It proved a useful description of the varied afflictions that might overcome your fellow man on the path toward becoming a sentient human being. These include critical thinking, the enjoyment of nature and the distrust of … Read more

Big Brother is Coming to Your Car

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This is a topic that has been on my radar screen for a while, but one that very few Americans seem to be paying attention to despite the egregious revelations concerning NSA spying that have emerged recently. I first flagged this issue in late 2012 in an article titled: Coming to Your Car: Mandatory Black Boxes That Record Everything.

The latest push for tracking devices in cars is being sold as necessary in order to raise funds to pay for the nation’s decayed highway infrastructure. For example:

 As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.

This is simply idiotic. There is already a tax per gallon on gasoline, so people are already being taxed based on how much they drive. Only a control-freak, moronic government bureaucrat would come to the conclusion that the solution to this problem is to install Orwellian tracking devices in people’s cars.

More from the LA Times:

WASHINGTON — As America’s road planners struggle to find the cash to mend a crumbling highway system, many are beginning to see a solution in a little black box that fits neatly by the dashboard of your car.

The devices, which track every mile a motorist drives and transmit that information to bureaucrats, are at the center of a controversial attempt in Washington and state planning offices to overhaul the outdated system for funding America’s major roads.

Are people really so dumb they will agree to this? Probably.

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Now MasterCard Wants Your Fingerprints…

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Earlier this week, USA Today reported that massive payment processor MasterCard had joined the FIDO alliance. FIDO is an acronym for Fast IDentity Online, and the group describes itself as: The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance is a 501(c)6 non-profit organization nominally formed in July 2012 to address the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices … Read more

Former DHS Chief Privacy Officer Was Regularly Called a “Terrorist” by the Intelligence Community

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So it appears one of the few decent people at the gestapo that is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was constantly berated and referred to as a “terrorist” for her attempts to defend the privacy of American citizens. So let me get this straight, the tea party are “terrorists,” privacy officers that look after … Read more

Bulgarian-German Novelist and Privacy Activist Denied Entry into the USA

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It just keeps getting creepier and creepier. So far, I can’t find many english language articles on this disturbing event, but The Guardian has posted some key information on their website. It informs us that: A Bulgarian-German novelist and privacy activist was on Monday refused entry to the US, writes the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent Philip Oltermann. … Read more

This is What Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Thinks About Your Privacy Rights…

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spoke yesterday at the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s (NVTC) Titans breakfast gathering in McLean, Virginia. He discussed the fact that prior to a Supreme Court decision in 1967, there were no constitutional prohibitions on wiretaps because conversations were not explicitly granted privacy protection under the Fourth Amendment. He goes on to imply that he thinks it was better before such privacy rights existed. According to the AP:

Scalia said that before the court’s 1967 opinion on wiretapping, the high court held the view that there were no constitutional prohibitions on wiretaps because conversations were not explicitly granted privacy protection under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against Americans against unreasonable search and seizure of “their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

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Censored in the USA: John Hopkins Cryptography Professor Told to Take Down Blog Post

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There’s nothing like waking up to the smell of censorship in the morning…and that’s exactly what happened to John Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green on September 9th. I’ve seen Matthew’s tweets come across my stream from time to time so I knew that he was highly regarded. ArsTechnica reports that: Matthew Green is a well-known cryptography professor, … Read more

War on Encryption: Highlighting Two Crucial Articles on the Latest NSA Revelations

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While most of the media, including the alternative media, has been focused primarily on our psychopathic leaders’ attempt to drag us into a Syrian civil war alongside al-Qaeda, some really crucial new information has been released about the NSA from the Snowden documents.

Specifically, we now know the lengths to which the NSA has fought to make encryption useless. Disturbingly, there was a debate about all of this in the 1990’s. Back then the NSA, with the help of the Clinton administration, attempted to install a backdoor into all encryption called a “Clipper Chip.” This was shot down, but the NSA went ahead and did it covertly anyway. This is the type of total unconstitutional slime we are dealing with.

The most absurd part of the recent revelations is the realization that the NSA isn’t actually cracking most of the encryption due to smarts or math, but rather by coercing major technology companies to allow them unfettered access. Part of this coercion unsurprisingly revolves around generous monetary payoffs to “grease the surveillance wheels” courtesy of a hefty Black Budget.

The first highlighted article is from yesterday’s New York Times. The information is so devastating to the already battered reputation of the criminal NSA that according to the paper:

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

Some key excepts below:

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of an American Civil War battle. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Think about the fact that they named these programs after Civil War battles. What does that tell us about how they view “the people” in relation to government?

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Meet the Black Budget: The NSA’s Surveillance Business Model

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A simply blockbuster new piece of information was just released tonight from the Washington Post, that reveals another gigantic piece of the puzzle, this time the financial one. While we already knew telecom companies were taking money for surveillance, the amounts seemed modest. That’s because that was only the part they revealed to the public. This newly released information shows a massive budget, hundreds of millions of dollars, which are being used to “grease the surveillance wheels.” The NSA seems to pay very well.

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise, atter all, Snowden wasn’t living in a teepee in the middle of Death Valley. No, he seemed to have a very comfortable life in Hawaii, and that’s how they get you. That’s why so few people talk. Who would want to shake the trees and bring down the system that is rewarding you so handsomely. Most people wouldn’t, and they don’t.

That’s precisely what makes Edward Snowden’s act so courageous. We only needed one. He knew that and realized that if not him, then who? Could he afford to wait around and assume someone else will do the job? He decided he couldn’t and for that we are forever indebted. Now from the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.

The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.

New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.

Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.

“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”

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