Can the NSA and CIA use your phone to track your location? July 26, 2011, 12:43 PM — There's no need to panic, or start shopping for aluminum-foil headwear, but the super-secret National Security Agency has apparently been thinking frequently enough about whether the NSA is allowed to intercept location data from cell phones to track U.S. citizens that the agency's chief lawyer was able to speak intelligently about it off the cuff while interviewing for a different job. "There are certain circumstances where that authority may exist," even if the NSA has no warrant to investigate a the person whose privacy it is invading or global permission to eavesdrop on everyone, according to Matthew Olsen, the NSA's general counsel. He didn't come to talk about that particularly; he said it yesterday in response to a question from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was considering whether he'd be a good choice to run the National Counterterrorism Center. So far, though, no law.
Microsoft Online Surveillance Guide - Cryptome Leak Cryptome, a whistleblower site that regularly leaks sensitive documents from governments and corporations, is in hot water again: this time, for publishing Microsoft’s “Global Criminal Compliance Handbook,” a comprehensive, 22-page guide running down the surveillance services Microsoft will perform for law enforcement agencies on its various online platforms, which includes detailed instructions for IP address extraction. You can find the guide here (warning: PDF). not anymore. Microsoft has demanded that Cryptome take down the guide — on the grounds that it constitutes a “copyrighted [work] published by Microsoft.” Yesterday, at 5pm, Cryptome editor John Young received a notice from his site’s host, Network Solutions, bearing a stiff ultimatum: citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), Network Solutions told him that unless he takes the “copyrighted material” down, they will “disable [his] website” on Thursday, February 25, 2010. So far, Young refuses to budge. So, briefly: 1.
How To Permanently Delete Your Account on Popular Websites - Smashing Magazine Advertisement We all have an increasing number of sites and online services we’re members of, and sometimes it all gets a little overwhelming. At times, we just need to delete our memberships to some sites, either in an effort to simplify our lives or just because we’ve grown tired of a particular site or service. What we often don’t realize when signing up for all these accounts, though, is how difficult it can be to permanently delete our accounts when we’ve had enough. Some require complicated, multi-step processes that can stretch over the course of days (or weeks). Others take less time, but still require multiple steps by the user. Below we’ll take a look at the account deletion processes of popular websites and services, and how easy or difficult they make it. Facebook Difficulty (on a scale of 1-5, 5 being hardest): 5 Deleting a Facebook account is a bit more complicated than many other services. Then you can use the form found here to request deletion. Twitter Difficulty: 2 MySpace
‘MegaSearch’ Aims to Index Fraud Site Wares A new service aims to be the Google search of underground Web sites, connecting buyers to a vast sea of shops that offer an array of dodgy goods and services, from stolen credit card numbers to identity information and anonymity tools. MegaSearch results for BIN #423953 A glut of data breaches and stolen card numbers has spawned dozens of stores that sell the information. The trouble is that each shop requires users to create accounts and sign in before they can search for cards. Enter MegaSearch.cc, which lets potential buyers discover which fraud shops hold the cards they’re looking for without having to first create accounts at each store. This free search engine aggregates data about compromised payment cards, and points searchers to various fraud shops selling them. According to its creator, the search engine does not store the compromised card numbers or any information about the card holders. I first read about this offering in a blog post by RSA Fraud Action Research Labs.
untitled Operator Operator YAPO is a new incarnation of an award-winning portable Opera package. You can run Operator on any computer you want (company, library, your friend's computer) and without administration privileges as long as it's a Windows PC. Plus, unless you choose otherwise, no data will be stored at the host computer. Changes in the current release This initial release includes Opera 10.52. Subscribe to updates via the Operator RSS feed. Download Operator YAPO 1.0 Operator weights 10 MB and is Windows only. Please do not link directly to the files. Troubleshooting and bugs If you seek support or want to report a bug, please use the Troubleshooting forum. Looking for the old OperaTor? Here is an archive page.
Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex Citation: Pasley BN, David SV, Mesgarani N, Flinker A, Shamma SA, Crone NE, et al. (2012) Reconstructing Speech from Human Auditory Cortex. PLoS Biol 10(1): e1001251. Academic Editor: Robert Zatorre, McGill University, Canada Received: June 24, 2011; Accepted: December 13, 2011; Published: January 31, 2012 Copyright: © 2012 Pasley et al. Funding: This research was supported by NS21135 (RTK), PO4813 (RTK), NS40596 (NEC), and K99NS065120 (EFC). Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Abbreviations: A1, primary auditory cortex; STG, superior temporal gyrus; STRF, spectro-temporal receptive field Results Words and sentences from different English speakers were presented aurally to 15 patients undergoing neurosurgical procedures for epilepsy or brain tumor. Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5.
Self-guided bullet could hit laser-marked targets from a mile away A group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have built a prototype of a small-caliber bullet capable of steering itself towards a laser-marked target located approximately 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) away. The dart-like design has passed the initial testing stage, which included computer simulations as well as field-testing prototypes built from commercially available parts. The four-inch (10 cm) long projectile is to be used with smoothbore arms, meaning ones with non-rifled barrels. Rifling involves cutting helical grooves in the barrel to give the bullet a spin that, thanks to the gyroscopic effect, improves its aerodynamic stability and accuracy. In a self-guided projectile, however, such spinning movement would prevent the bullet from reliably turning towards the target when in flight. For this reason, the group of researchers lead by Red Jones and Brian Kast decided to use a dart-like design that includes tiny fins to allow the projectile to fly straight, without a spin.
Charges Against the N.S.A.’s Thomas Drake On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.”
Christopher Soghoian Shopping Centre Tracking System Faces Civil Rights Campaigners’ Wrath Civil rights campaigners have spoken out against a technology used by several shopping centres in the UK to track consumers using their mobile signals. The shopping centres claim that the technology helps them provide better services to consumers and retailers without compromising privacy. The system, called the Footpath, allows them to know how are people spending time in a shopping centre, which spots they visit the most and even the route they take while walking around in a shopping centre. Footpath has been developed by Hampshire based Path Intelligence. According to The Guardian, several consumer and civil rights groups, including Big Brother Watch, have claimed that consumers must be given a choice on whether they want their movement tracked or not. The fact that the technology keeps the consumers' anonymous has been appreciated but several organisations claim that is wrong to assume that shopping centres have a right to track the movement of the consumers.
Supreme Court Rules In GPS Tracking Device Case Washington DC police thought they had a good idea when they attached a global-positioning-system (GPS) device on the car of a suspected drug dealer in order to more effectively tail him and find his "safe house" stash. The police did, in fact, nail DC nightclub owner Antoine Jones. But the Supreme Court this week sided with the Appeals court that over-turned Jones's conviction on the grounds that police need to first obtain a search warrant before attaching such a device. The decision by the high court was unanimous, a relative rarity for this court that is usually politically divided. View Gallery: GPS Tracking Devices Judge Samuel Alito addressed the cell-phone issue in his opinion asserting that the most basic cellphone can be located by coordinating signals received by different towers. The decision should also open new questions about whether police can tap into GPS systems installed on cars, such as General Motors' OnStar system.