PRISM

Why You Should Think Twice Before Using Facebook’s Messenger App

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“Messenger appears to have more spyware type code in it than I’ve seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance.”

– Jonathan Zdziarski, expert in iOS related digital forensics and security

Anyone who reads Liberty Blitzkrieg consistently will be aware of my disdain for the company Facebook. There are many reasons for my negative sentiments, but at its core is the company’s complete disrespect toward its own users.

Facebook made major headlines earlier this summer when it was caught in a massive controversy over its decision to intentionally manipulate its users’ feeds in order to affect their emotional state, something I covered in the article: Was the Department of Defense Behind Facebook’s Controversial Manipulation Study? 

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Is the U.S. Government Trying to Stop Glenn Greenwald from Publishing His “Biggest Story?”

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Screen Shot 2014-07-01 at 12.19.04 PMIn May, I highlighted an excellent interview of Glenn Greenwald by GQ Magazine in the piece: Glenn Greenwald on the 2016 Elections – “They’ll Probably Have a Gay Person After Hillary.” There’s so much good stuff in that piece, I strongly suggest you go back and read it if you haven’t, but the relevant part to today’s post is the following exchange:

GQ: How much more is there to release—and what burden do you feel to get it out there?

Greenwald: We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

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The Obama Administration is Trying to Cover up the VA Scandal by Issuing Subpoenas to Whistle-Blower Sites

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Screen Shot 2014-06-11 at 11.55.02 AMOne of the most significant realizations to emerge since the Edward Snowden revelations, is the understanding that we need more secure tools for would be whistle-blowers to more easily provide sensitive information in a secure and anonymous manner. As such, we have seen the deployment of encrypted drop boxes by several media outlets. I highlighted one of these a little over a year ago called Strongbox, which was a project announced by the New Yorker and was what Aaron Swartz was working on just before his death.

Recently, the Washington Post and the Guardian have released something similar called SecureDrop. The Washington Post described it as such:

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BUSTED – U.S. Tech Giants Knew of NSA Spying Says Agency’s Senior Lawyer

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This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.

The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.

I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.

So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I‘m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.

– Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in a post last week

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by posting about how he called President Barack Obama to express outrage and shock about the government’s spying activities. Of course, anyone familiar with Facebook and what is going on generally between private tech behemoths and U.S. intelligence agencies knew right away that his statement was one gigantic heap of stinking bullshit. Well now we have the proof.

Earlier today, the senior lawyer for the NSA made it completely clear that U.S. tech companies were fully aware of all the spying going on, including the PRISM program (on that note read my recent post: The Most Evil and Disturbing NSA Spy Practices To-Date Have Just Been Revealed).

So stop the acting all of you Silicon Valley CEOs. We know you are fully on board with extraordinary violations of your fellow citizens’ civil liberties. We know full well that you have been too cowardly to stand up for the values this country was founded on. We know you and your companies are compromised. Stop pretending, stop bullshitting. You’ve done enough harm.

From The Guardian:

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting month of angry denials from the firms.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

Asked during at a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”

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Apple’s Massive Security Flaw: NSA Exploit or an Honest Mistake?

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If you use Apple products you need to be aware of a very serious bug affecting the operating systems running on their devices. I was first made aware of this on Friday when John Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted the following:

Since I was away for the weekend, I wasn’t able to do any research into this until today. Fortunately, I came across an excellent article from Gizmodo. In a nutshell, it appears that Apple has released fixes for mobile devices (iPhones and iPads), but you need to go ahead and perform a software update to iOS 7.0.6. Unfortunately, there is no fix yet for Macs. This means if you are operating a Mac computer and using public wifi you should not use Safari as your browser. It is suggested you use Firefox or Chrome.

Even more terrifying is that although this flaw only became widely known about in the past several days, it has been there since September 2012. This has resulted in some claims of conspiracy. As Gigazom notes:

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India Moves to Ban Gmail

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The fallout from the Snowden revelations continue. While India has already been attempting to fight economic reality with import duties on gold in an desperate move to reduce buying, they are now also trying to take further control of their technology infrastructure. Although this may appear to be a good thing on the surface, perhaps it is merely a move to further consolidate their own domestic snooping powers, which we already know they are trying to do.

In the latest news, it is being reported that the government will soon ask its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail due to the presence of the company’s servers within the U.S. More from The Times of India:

BANGALORE/NEW DELHI: The government will soon ask all its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail for official communication, a move intended to increase security ofconfidential government information after revelations of widespread cyberspying by the US. 

A senior official in the ministry of communications and information technology said the government plans to send a formal notification to nearly 5 lakh employees barring them from email service providers such as Gmail that have their servers in the US, and instead asking them to stick to the official email service provided by India’s National Informatics Centre. 

“Gmail data of Indian users resides in other countries as the servers are located outside. Currently, we are looking to address this in the government domain, where there are large amounts of critical data,” said J Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology. 

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Meet Xmission: The ISP Focused on Privacy

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Earlier this week, I highlighted alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, which focuses on privacy and claims that: “if the NSA demanded data there would be none to hand over.” Today’s article focuses on a little known internet service provider (ISP) called Xmission, which is based in Utah and has 30,000 subscribers. Ironically, it is situated close to the NSA’s new multi-billion dollar spy center and it has received rave reviews from the always excellent Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF). It’s founder, Pete Ashdown is a brave man who, unlike his larger tech peers, has consistently stood up to the government and intelligence services to protect his customers’ Constitutional rights. From The Guardian:

Silicon Valley’s role in US government surveillance has triggered public anxiety about the internet, but it turns out there is at least one tech company you can trust with your data. The only problem: it’s a relative minnow in the field, operating from offices in Utah.

Xmission, Utah’s first independent and oldest internet service provider, has spent the past 15 years resolutely shielding customers’ privacy from government snoops in a way that larger rivals appear to have not.

The company, a comparative midget with just 30,000 subscribers, cited the Fourth Amendment in rebuffing warrantless requests from local, state and federal authorities, showing it was possible to resist official pressure.

“I would tell them I didn’t need to respond if they didn’t have a warrant, that (to do so) wouldn’t be constitutional,” the founder and chief executive, Pete Ashdown, said in an interview at his Salt Lake City headquarters.

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How Much is Your Private Data Worth?

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Interesting article from the Star Tribune that shines a small degree of light on the fees telecommunication companies and others charge the U.S. government for your personal data.  Interestingly, while AT&T charges a $325 million activation fee per wiretap and $10 a day for maintenance, “Facebook doesn’t charge the government for access.”  That’s mighty generous of you Mr. Zuckerberg.

Also of interest, is the revelation that AT&T devotes roughly 100 employees to review each request and hand over data, while Verizon has a team of 70 employees that work around the clock on spying.  More below:

In the era of intense government surveillance and secret court orders, a murky multimillion-dollar market has emerged. Paid for by U.S. tax dollars, but with little public scrutiny, surveillance fees charged in secret by technology and phone companies can vary wildly.

AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 “activation fee” for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

Meanwhile, email records like those amassed by the National Security Agency through a program revealed by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden probably were collected for free or very cheaply. Facebook says it doesn’t charge the government for access.  And while Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won’t say how much they charge, the American Civil Liberties Union found that email records can be turned over for as little as $25. 

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How Edward Snowden Helped Kill CISPA (for now)

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If you forgot about CISPA, it’s the latest version of the internet spying bill that Congress has been trying to pass for years. So not only did Edward Snowden alert the American public and the world of the extraordinarily unconstitutional and immoral activities of the NSA and U.S. government, his information also stopped CISPA dead … Read more

German Backlash to NSA Spying Begins: “National Security is at Stake”

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You’d think that in a country in which a great deal of the population is young enough to remember the East German secret police colloquially known as the Stasi, there would be considerable backlash to the Anglo-American global spy grid. Well it appears that there is.  I want to highlight a scathing critique published a couple of days ago in Der Spiegel, one of the most popular weekly magazines in Europe, with a circulation of more than one million.  In it, Jakob Augstein wrote an article titled: Anglo-Saxon Spies: German National Security Is at Stake.  Here are my favorite excerpts:

American and British intelligence agencies are monitoring all communication data. And what does our chancellor do? She says: “The Internet is uncharted territory for us all.”

That’s not enough. In the coming weeks, the German government needs to show that it is bound to its citizens and not to an intelligence-industrial complex that abuses our entire lives as some kind of data mine. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger hit the right note when she said she was shocked by this “Hollywood-style nightmare.”

It may be up to the Americans and the British to decide how they handle questions of freedom and the protection of their citizens from government intrusion. But they have no right to subject the citizens of other countries to their control. The shoulder-shrugging explanation by Washington and London that they have operated within the law is absurd. They are not our laws. We didn’t make them. We shouldn’t be subject to them.

The totalitarianism of the security mindset protects itself with a sentence: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But firstly, that contains a presumption: We have not asked the NSA and GCHQ to “protect” us. And secondly, the sentence is a stupid one: Because we all have something to hide, whether it pertains to our private lives or to our business secrets.

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