NSA Has Full "Back Door" Access To iPhone, BlackBerry And Android Smartphones
Now my phone is a matter of US national security?
Ridiculous
Judge Rules NSA's "Indiscriminate & Arbitrary" Invasion Of Privacy Likely Unconstitut
A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency program which collects information on nearly all telephone calls made to, from or within the United States is likely to be unconstitutional. As Politico reports, Judge Richard Leon blasted, "I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying it and analyzing it without judicial approval." This is the first significant legal setback for the NSA’s surveillance program since Edward Snowden exposed it.
Via Politico,
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon found that the program appears to run afoul of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. He also said the Justice Department had failed to demonstrate that collecting the so-called metadata had helped to head off terrorist attacks....
“Plaintiffs have a very significant expectation of privacy in an aggregated collection of their telephone metadata covering the last five years, and the NSA’s Bulk Telephony Metadata Program significantly intrudes on that expectation,” wrote Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. “I have significant doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”
...
Leon’s ruling is the first significant legal setback for the NSA’s surveillance program since it was disclosed in June in news stories based on leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The metadata program has been approved repeatedly by numerous judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and at least one judge sitting in a criminal case.
Saab wins Brazil jet deal after NSA spying sours Boeing bid
Brazil awarded a $4.5 billion contract to Saab AB on Wednesday to replace its aging fleet of fighter jets, a surprise coup for the Swedish company after news of U.S. spying on Brazilians helped derail Boeing's chances for the deal.
The contract, negotiated over the course of three presidencies, will supply Brazil's air force with 36 new Gripen NG fighters by 2020. Aside from the cost of the jets themselves, the agreement is expected to generate billions of additional dollars in future supply and service contracts.
Saab did not immediately comment on the purchase. In addition to Chicago-based Boeing Co, France's Dassault Aviation SA was a contender for the contract.
The timing of the announcement, after more than a decade of off-and-on negotiations, appeared to catch the companies involved by surprise. Even Juniti Saito, Brazil's top air force commander, said on Wednesday that he only heard of the decision a day earlier in a meeting with President Dilma Rousseff.
Brazilian officials said the deal, one of the most coveted emerging-market defense contracts, went to Saab because it provided the most affordable option for the new jets, as well as the best conditions for technology transfer to local partners.
The choice, Defense Minister Celso Amorim said, "took into account performance, the effective transfer of technology and costs - not just of acquisition but of maintenance."
Until earlier this year, Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet had been considered the front runner. But revelations of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency in Brazil, including personal communication by Rousseff, led Brazil to believe it could not trust a U.S. company.
"The NSA problem ruined it for the Americans," a Brazilian government source said on condition of anonymity.
A U.S. source close to the negotiations said that whatever intelligence the spying had delivered for the American government was unlikely to outweigh the commercial cost of the revelations.
Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer
As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.
Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.
Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.
The earlier disclosures of RSA's entanglement with the NSA already had shocked some in the close-knit world of computer security experts. The company had a long history of championing privacy and security, and it played a leading role in blocking a 1990s effort by the NSA to require a special chip to enable spying on a wide range of computer and communications products.
RSA, now a subsidiary of computer storage giant EMC Corp, urged customers to stop using the NSA formula after the Snowden disclosures revealed its weakness.
RSA and EMC declined to answer questions for this story, but RSA said in a statement: "RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products. Decisions about the features and functionality of RSA products are our own."
Edward Snowden's Alternative Christmas Message To The World
Edward Snowden's Christmas message, conveyed to the world courtesy of the UK's Channel 4, from his Russian exile is simple: "end mass surveillance." Alas, in a world in which social media exhibitionism is the norm, is his message increasingly falling on deaf ears? After all, there is a Duck Dynasty scandal, or a Justin Bieber retirement at any given moment, both of which are far more important than the loss of all personal privacy and the supreme reign of Big Brother.
NSA spying on Europe-Asia undersea telecom cables
he US National Security Agency has collected sensitive data on key telecommunications cables between Europe, north Africa and Asia, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday citing classified documents.
Spiegel quoted NSA papers dating from February and labelled "top secret" and "not for foreigners" describing the agency's success in spying on the so-called Sea-Me-We 4 undersea cable system.
The massive bundle of fibre optic cables originates near the southern French city of Marseille and links Europe with north Africa and the Gulf states, continuing through Pakistan and India to Malaysia and Thailand.
"Among the companies that hold ownership stakes in it are France Telecom, now known as Orange and still partly government-owned, and Telecom Italia Sparkle," Spiegel said.
It said NSA specialists had hacked an internal website belonging to the operator consortium to mine documents about technical infrastructure including circuit mapping and network management information.
"More operations are planned in the future to collect more information about this and other cable systems," Spiegel quoted the NSA documents as saying.
Der Spiegel has over the last several months reported on mass NSA spying on targets in the United States and abroad using documents provided by fugitive intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
A White House-picked panel this month recommended curbing the secretive powers of the NSA, warning that its spying sweeps in the "war on terror" had gone too far.
US President Barack Obama plans to address the report in January.
How The NSA Hacks Your iPhone (Presenting DROPOUT JEEP)
Following up on the latest stunning revelations released yesterday by German Spiegel which exposed the spy agency's 50 page catalog of "backdoor penetration techniques", today during a speech given by Jacob Applebaum (@ioerror) at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress, a new bombshell emerged: specifically the complete and detailed description of how the NSA bugs, remotely, your iPhone. The way the NSA accomplishes this is using software known as Dropout Jeep, which it describes as follows: "DROPOUT JEEP is a software implant for the Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGINT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection.All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted."
The flowchart of how the NSA makes your iPhone its iPhone is presented below:
- NSA ROC operator
- Load specified module
- Send data request
- iPhone accepts request
- Retrieves required SIGINT data
- Encrypt and send exfil data
- Rinse repeat
And visually:
It is useless
Whatever we do they are going to spy on us (under the banner of freedom). Soon they are going to take our DNA and than use it when some big shot needs "organ donation". We are but a fools
Apple Denies Ever Working With The NSA
Yesterday, we broke the storythat during the 30th Chaos Communication Congress, it was revealed that according to the NSA (the slide in question) virtually every Apple product can be "backdoored", and that the presenter of the discovery Jacob Applebaum openly asked Apple if it was just its "shitty software" that provided the NSA with this privacy invading loophole, or if it was Apple secretly working in collaboration with the NSA that permitted this betrayal of the iconic company's customers.
Moments ago the WSJ reported that according to Apple, it was just the "shitty software", as the company denied ever working with the NSA.
Somehow we doubt this will be the end of this particular story, especially since this is an implicit admission that Apple does, indeed, have "backdoors" in its products. Whether invited or not...
Senator Bernie Sanders Asks NSA If It Spies On Congress
The real life magic-mushroom, banana dictatorship envisioned by George Orwell just went full retard.
From VT Senator Bernie Sanders:
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today asked the National Security Agency director whether the agency has monitored the phone calls, emails and Internet traffic of members of Congress and other elected officials.“Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” Sanders asked in a letter to Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director. “Spying” would include gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business?”
Sanders said he was “deeply concerned” by revelations that American intelligence agencies harvested records of phone calls, emails and web activity by millions of innocent Americans without any reason to even suspect involvement in illegal activities. He also cited reports that the United States eavesdropped on the leaders of Germany, Mexico, Brazil and other allies.
Sanders emphasized that the United States “must be vigilant and aggressive in protecting the American people from the very real danger of terrorist attacks,” but he cited U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s recent ruling that indiscriminate dragnets by the NSA were probably unconstitutional and “almost Orwellian.”
Sanders has introduced legislation to put strict limits on sweeping powers used by the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation to secretly track telephone calls by millions of innocent Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.
The measure would put limits on records that may be searched. Authorities would be required to establish a reasonable suspicion, based on specific information, in order to secure court approval to monitor business records related to a specific terrorism suspect. Sanders’ bill also would put an end to open-ended court orders that have resulted in wholesale data mining by the NSA and FBI. Instead, the government would be required to provide reasonable suspicion to justify searches for each record or document that it wants to examine.
Uhm... yes?
Is the NSA Spying on Congress? - Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
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Two months ago, when we reported that the NSA has successfully inserted illegal access protocols into the Android OS, thus granting it back door access into nearly three quarters of all cell phones, the news was met with skepticism and resistance: how could an open-sourced architecture be so frail and open to penetration was the most common complaint. We wonder if today's news, broken by Germany's Spiegel, according to which the NSA can spy not only on Android smartphones but tap user data on all iPhone and BlackBerry devices "including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been", will be met with the same skepticism or if the realization that every form of privacy is now gone, has finally dawned on the population. Spiegel reports, citing"internal NSA documents that the NSA has the capability of tapping user data from the iPhone, devices using Android as well as BlackBerry, a system previously believed to be highly secure. The documents also indicate that the NSA has set up specific working groups to deal with each operating system, with the goal of gaining secret access to the data held on the phones." While at this point it should come as no surprise that the NSA pervasively spies on Americans without a warrant or clearance, and has access to every device permitting electronic communication, the bigger question is: if everything is being spied on, what is left? Is carrierpigeons.com about to IPO?
Of course not, it just allowed the NSA to program one. And while the biggest scandal of the Obama administration continues to get ever bigger, and makes Nixon look like an amateur, what is the response? Why a media that aside for a few outlets remains mute... and diversion from the administration of course, in the form of war and hundreds of thousands about to die just to keep the president in his seat.
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