— House and Senate members have been meeting...

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
accessnow
House and Senate members have been meeting secretly to merge language in two complementary bills (including CISA) focusing on information sharing between companies and the government. Unfortunately, it’s looking like the final language of the bill will include the worst aspects of both versions, gutting even the minimal privacy protections the surveillance bill had to protect sensitive data from the NSA.
House and Senate Members Gut Cyber Bill’s Privacy Protections Behind Closed Doors
(via accessnow)
Source: Wired

More you might like

freepress.net

Cyber Bill Gives Companies Perfect Cover to Gut Your Privacy

Following several high-profile data breaches — such as those at Sony and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management — Congress is once again feeling the pressure to push “cybersecurity” legislation.
Free Press

The problem is, the bill they’re laser-focused on is misguided, wouldn’t protect us — and is a huge gift to companies wanting legal cover if and when they choose to violate Americans’ privacy rights.

In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 14–1 in favor of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (CISA). The bill, like its infamous predecessor CISPA, would allow companies to share vast amounts of users’ private and personally identifiable data with the government. That information would go straight to the Department of Homeland Security and then on to the NSA.

If CISA passes, companies would be permitted to monitor and then report to the government on vaguely defined “cyber-threat indicators” — a term so broad that it covers actual threats hackers pose to computer systems but also sweeps in information on crimes like carjacking and burglaries. Those are serious offenses to be sure, but they have nothing to do with cybersecurity.

While current law allows companies to monitor their own systems for cyber threats, CISA would take this to the next level. The bill would allow companies that hold huge swaths of our personal data — like health insurers and credit-card companies — to monitor and report online activity “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”

This means that CISA would undermine the strong protections embedded in laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 and the Privacy Act of 1964 — laws designed to keep the government from spying on our communications.

While posing a serious threat to our privacy online, CISA wouldn’t even guard well against cyber attacks. The bill offers a bad trade-off, to put it mildly.

cybersecurity Cyberspying cyber NSA spying NSA surveillance NSA CISA stop cisa online privacy technology Tech Policy
OPERATION: Fax Big BrotherCongress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In...

OPERATION: Fax Big Brother

Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they’ll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of “cybersecurity.” CISA won’t stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn’t understand modern technology. So this week we’re sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand.

Stop CISA. Send a fax now!

StopCISA FaxBigBrother CISA NSA spying Cyberspying spying online privacy privacy Big brother 1984 orwellian Government Surveillance government congress senate
accessnow
accessnow: “ Congress Slips CISA Into a Budget Bill That’s Sure to Pass: “ Privacy advocates were aghast in October when the Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 74 to 21, leaving intact portions of the law they say...
accessnow

Congress Slips CISA Into a Budget Bill That’s Sure to Pass:

Privacy advocates were aghast in October when the Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act by a vote of 74 to 21, leaving intact portions of the law they say make it more amenable to surveillance than actual security. Now, as CISA gets closer to the President’s desk, those privacy critics argue that Congress has quietly stripped out even more of its remaining privacy protections.

In a late-night session of Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced a new version of the “omnibus” bill, a massive piece of legislation that deals with much of the federal government’s funding. It now includes a version of CISA as well. Lumping CISA in with the omnibus bill further reduces any chance for debate over its surveillance-friendly provisions, or a White House veto. And the latest version actually chips away even further at the remaining personal information protections that privacy advocates had fought for in the version of the bill that passed the Senate.

“They took a bad bill, and they made it worse,” says Robyn Greene, policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute.

Source: Wired

NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure

1) Hide in the network. Implement hidden services. Use Tor to anonymize yourself. Yes, the NSA targets Tor users, but it’s work for them. The less obvious you are, the safer you are.

2) Encrypt your communications. Use TLS. Use IPsec. Again, while it’s true that the NSA targets encrypted connections – and it may have explicit exploits against these protocols – you’re much better protected than if you communicate in the clear.

3) Assume that while your computer can be compromised, it would take work and risk on the part of the NSA – so it probably isn’t. If you have something really important, use an air gap. Since I started working with the Snowden documents, I bought a new computer that has never been connected to the internet. If I want to transfer a file, I encrypt the file on the secure computer and walk it over to my internet computer, using a USB stick. To decrypt something, I reverse the process. This might not be bulletproof, but it’s pretty good.

4) Be suspicious of commercial encryption software, especially from large vendors. My guess is that most encryption products from large US companies have NSA-friendly back doors, and many foreign ones probably do as well. It’s prudent to assume that foreign products also have foreign-installed backdoors. Closed-source software is easier for the NSA to backdoor than open-source software. Systems relying on master secrets are vulnerable to the NSA, through either legal or more clandestine means.

5) Try to use public-domain encryption that has to be compatible with other implementations. For example, it’s harder for the NSA to backdoor TLS than BitLocker, because any vendor’s TLS has to be compatible with every other vendor’s TLS, while BitLocker only has to be compatible with itself, giving the NSA a lot more freedom to make changes. And because BitLocker is proprietary, it’s far less likely those changes will be discovered. Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography. Prefer conventional discrete-log-based systems over elliptic-curve systems; the latter have constants that the NSA influences when they can.

Source: theguardian.com NSA tech cybersecurity internet surveillance metadata
aljazeeraamerica-blog
aljazeeraamerica: “ Exclusive: NSA pushed 9/11 as key ‘sound bite’ to justify surveillance “ The National Security Agency advised its officials to cite the 9/11 attacks as justification for its mass surveillance activities, according to a master list...
aljazeeraamerica

Exclusive: NSA pushed 9/11 as key ‘sound bite’ to justify surveillance

The National Security Agency advised its officials to cite the 9/11 attacks as justification for its mass surveillance activities, according to a master list of NSA talking points.

The document – obtained by Al Jazeera through a Freedom of Information Act request – containstalking points and suggested statements for NSA officials (PDF) responding to the fallout from media revelations that originated with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Invoking the events of 9/11 to justify the controversial NSA programs, which have caused major diplomatic fallout around the world, was the top item on the talking points agency officials were encouraged to use.

Read more

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty 

aljazeeraamerica-blog
aljazeeraamerica: “ NSA records all phone calls in an undisclosed target country “ The National Security Agency (NSA) has created a surveillance system that can record “100 percent” of a foreign country’s phone calls, allowing it to play back and...
aljazeeraamerica

NSA records all phone calls in an undisclosed target country

The National Security Agency (NSA) has created a surveillance system that can record “100 percent” of a foreign country’s phone calls, allowing it to play back and listen to the conversations up to a month later, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The newspaper cited unnamed sources with direct knowledge of the system as well as documents supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who since last year has leaked extensive data revealing sweeping American spying activities.

The voice interception program is known as MYSTIC and started in 2009, with its “retrospective retrieval” capability, called RETRO, reaching full strength in 2011 against the first target nation, the Post reported.

Continue reading

(Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

theverge
thisistheverge: “NSA used PRISM to collect more than 200 million internet communications a year as of 2011 According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was “acquiring”...
thisistheverge

NSA used PRISM to collect more than 200 million internet communications a year as of 2011

According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was “acquiring” more than 250 million “internet communications” each year under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the statute that allows the NSA to collect the content of internet communications. The order states that the “vast majority” of these communications were obtained from internet service providers under PRISM, and that only nine percent of of the total internet communications acquired by the NSA were part of it’s “upstream” collection practices, which pull data directly from telecommunications cables. 

Source: theverge.com
theatlantic
theatlantic: “ How Surveillance State-Insiders Try to Discredit NSA Critics “ Who has done more than anyone else to increase public understanding of what the National Security Agency does? A top-10 list would have to include James Bamford, its first...
theatlantic

How Surveillance State-Insiders Try to Discredit NSA Critics

Who has done more than anyone else to increase public understanding of what the National Security Agency does? A top-10 list would have to include James Bamford, its first and most prolific journalistic chronicler, and Glenn Greenwald, a primary recipient of classified documents leaked months ago by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Over the weekend, I engaged in a back-and-forth with a former NSA employee who harshly criticized both (and me, too) with words that illuminate how some insiders view the press and the national-security state.

His name is John R. Schindler. In his own words, he is a “professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he’s been since 2005, and where he teaches courses on security, strategy, intelligence, terrorism, and occasionally military history.” He previously spent “nearly a decade with the National Security Agency as an intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer,” and he is “a senior fellow of the International History Institute at Boston University and is chairman of the Partnership for Peace Consortium's Combating Terrorism Working Group, a unique body which brings together scholars and practitioners from more than two dozen countries across Eurasia to tackle problems of terrorism, extremism, and political violence.” In addition, hisbloghas some smart commentary on it.

He is certainly a surveillance-state expert. In comparison, I started writing regularly about surveillance in June when the Snowden story broke. If we’re going by the dictionary definition, Schindler is correct that I am a neophyte, “a person who is new to a subject, skill, or belief.” As Schindler and I interacted on Twitter, a predictable divide opened up between his followers, who are generally supportive of the surveillance state, and mine, who are more skeptical of it. Highlighting parts of our exchange* will permit me to better explain what it is that many of us “outsiders” find so frustrating about how “insiders” treat this subject.

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

Source: The Atlantic
See this in the app Show more
Top Photos