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Author Topic: they know what you are doing  (Read 273758 times)

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #465 on: January 22, 2014, 08:52:35 am »

hi bts.. yeah we hafta do the best we can as we read this.. and wonder what is actual and what is bs...the time it takes to shift thur it all  is a good enough reason why most just don't bother
sigh




Quote
It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.”


this may be true ..but the big problem is getting anyone to really care...

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #466 on: January 22, 2014, 07:49:24 pm »




http://news.msn.com/science-technology/russia-hacked-hundreds-of-firms-globally-report-says

Russia hacked hundreds of firms globally, report says

The allegations made by CrowdStrike are the first linking the Russian government to cyber intrusions on companies.

WASHINGTON — A U.S. cybersecurity firm says it has gathered evidence that the Russian government spied on hundreds of American, European and Asian companies, the first time Moscow has been linked to cyber attacks for alleged economic - rather than political - gains.

According to the firm, CrowdStrike, the victims of the previously unreported cyber espionage campaign include energy and technology firms, some of which have lost valuable intellectual property.

CrowdStrike declined to go into detail about those losses or to name any victims, citing confidentiality agreements related to its investigation.



Related: Snowden denies he worked as a spy for Russia

http://news.msn.com/world/snowden-denies-suggestions-he-worked-as-spy-for-russia?ocid=msnnws


Snowden denies suggestions he worked as spy for Russia
In an interview the magazine said was conducted by encrypted means from Moscow, Snowden was quoted as saying, "This 'Russian spy' push is absurd."





Officials with the Russian Interior Ministry could not be reached for comment early on Wednesday in Moscow.

"These attacks appear to have been motivated by the Russian government's interest in helping its industry maintain competitiveness in key areas of national importance," Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, told Reuters on Tuesday evening.

Cybersecurity researchers have in the past said that China's government was behind cyber espionage campaigns against various corporations dating back as far as 2005, but China has vehemently denied those allegations. Alperovitch said this is the first time the Russian government has been linked to cyber intrusions on companies.




Governments have been using computer networks to spy on each other for more than 30 years in the type of surveillance programs conducted by virtually every nation, according to CrowdStrike. It is only in the past decade that some nations have started using cyber espionage as a platform for gaining data to help promote their national economic interests, according to Alperovitch.

CrowdStrike has been following the activities of the Russian group of hackers, which it dubbed "Energetic Bear," for two years. The firm believes the Russian government is behind the campaign because of technical indicators, as well as analysis of the targets chosen and the data stolen, according to Alperovitch.

"We are very confident about this," he said. Victims include European energy companies, defense contractors, technology companies and government agencies, according to the CrowdStrike report.

Manufacturing and construction firms in the United States, Europe and Middle East as well as U.S. healthcare providers were also cited as targets in the report that was posted on the web early on Wednesday morning, http://www.crowdstrike.com/global-threat/.

CrowdStrike described the activities of the Energetic Bear hackers in its annual cyber threat report, released on Wednesday. It also documented attacks by hacking groups in China and Iran and described the activities of the activist Syrian Electronic Army.

Alperovitch, who is of Russian ethnic origin and now lives in the Washington, D.C., area, is an expert on cyber espionage who rose to prominence while working for McAfee Inc. While there he managed a team of researchers who produced a landmark January 2010 report that described how Chinese hackers had launched an unprecedented series of attacks known as "Operation Aurora" on Google Inc and dozens of other companies.

In 2012, he co-founded CrowdStrike, which collects intelligence about the activities of hacking groups around the world and sells software to thwart such attacks.

He told Reuters that the data his firm has obtained about Energetic Bear suggests that authorities in Moscow have decided to start using cyber espionage to promote Russia's national economic interests.

"They are copying the Chinese play book," he said. "Cyber espionage is very lucrative for economic benefit to a nation."

Additional reporting by Megan Davies in Moscow






Related: US security firm alleges massive Chinese hacking

http://news.msn.com/world/us-security-firm-alleges-massive-chinese-hacking?ocid=msnnws



Mandiant Corp. has produced a report claiming that the Chinese military has been cyberspying on U.S. and foreign companies and government agencies, a claim the Chinese deny.

BEIJING — Cyberattacks that stole information from 141 targets in the U.S. and other countries have been traced to a Chinese military unit in a drab office building in the outskirts of Shanghai, a U.S. security firm alleged Tuesday. China dismissed the report as "groundless."

The report by the Virginia-based Mandiant Corp.  https://www.mandiant.com/   is the most explicit suggestion yet by a Western security company that China's military might be directly linked to a wave of cyberspying against U.S. and other foreign companies and government agencies.

Mandiant said it has traced the massive amount of hacking back to a 12-story office building run by "Unit 61398" of the People's Liberation Army, and that the attacks targeted key industries including military contractors and companies that control energy grids.

The unit "has systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations," Mandiant wrote.

"From our observations, it is one of the most prolific cyberespionage groups in terms of the sheer quantity of information stolen," the company said, adding that the unit has been in operation since at least 2006.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei did not directly address the claims, but when questioned on the report Tuesday, he said he doubted the evidence would withstand scrutiny.

"To make groundless accusations based on some rough material is neither responsible nor professional," Hong told reporters at a regularly scheduled news conference.

In a reiteration of China's standard response to such accusations, Hong said China strictly outlaws hacking and said the country itself was a major victim of such crimes, including attacks originating in the United States.



"As of now, the cyberattacks and cybercrimes China has suffered are rising rapidly every year," Hong said.

China has frequently been accused of hacking, but the Mandiant report contains some of the most extensive and detailed accusations made public so far. The group said its findings led it to alter the conclusion of its earlier 2010 report on Chinese hacking, in which it said it was not possible to determine the extent of government knowledge of such activities.

"The details we have analyzed during hundreds of investigations convince us that the groups conducting these activities are based primarily in China and that the Chinese government is aware of them," the company said in a summary of its latest report.

It said the hacking was traced to the 2nd Bureau of the People's Liberation Army General Staff's 3rd Department, most commonly known as unit 61398, in the Shanghai suburbs.

China's Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to faxed questions about the report, although it has in the past labeled such allegations as groundless and irresponsible, and has demanded that evidence be presented.

News of the report spread Tuesday on the Chinese Internet, with many commentators calling it an excuse for the U.S. to impose greater restrictions to contain China's growing technological prowess.



you guys need to check out these two companies.. might be work there for some ;)

http://www.crowdstrike.com

https://www.mandiant.com/


the world has changed already..sigh
« Last Edit: January 22, 2014, 08:09:02 pm by sky otter »

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #467 on: January 25, 2014, 08:10:44 am »


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/edward-snowden-tech-industry_n_4596162.html?utm_hp_ref=world&utm_hp_ref=world


'Snowden Effect' Threatens U.S. Tech Industry's Global Ambitions

Gerry Smith
Posted: 01/24/2014 5:01 pm EST  |  Updated: 01/24/2014 5:59 pm EST


Election officials in India canceled a deal with Google to improve voter registration. In China, sales of Cisco routers dropped 10 percent in a recent quarter. European regulators threatened to block AT&T's purchase of the wireless provider Vodafone.

The technology industry is being roiled by the so-called Snowden Effect, as disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of American spying worldwide prompt companies to avoid doing business with U.S. firms. The recent setbacks for Google, Cisco and AT&T overseas have been attributed, in part, to the international outcry over the companies' role in the NSA scandal.

Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, said criticism over Silicon Valley's involvement in the government surveillance program was initially limited to European politicians "taking advantage of this moment to beat up on the U.S."

"But the reports from the industry are showing that it is more than that," he added. "This is more than just a flash in the pan. This is really starting to hurt."

The impact of the Snowden leaks could threaten the future architecture of the modern Internet. In recent years, computing power has shifted from individual PCs to the so-called cloud -- massive servers that allow people to access their files from anywhere.

The Snowden revelations undermined trust in U.S.-based cloud services by revealing how some of the largest American tech companies using cloud computing -- including Google and Yahoo -- had their data accessed by the NSA. About 10 percent of non-U.S. companies have canceled contracts with American cloud providers since the NSA spying program was disclosed, according to a survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, an industry group.

U.S. cloud providers could lose as much as $35 billion over the next three years as fears over U.S. government surveillance prompt foreign customers to transfer their data to cloud companies in other countries, according to a study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C.

"If European cloud customers cannot trust the United States government, then maybe they won't trust U.S. cloud providers either," Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for digital affairs, said last summer after the NSA revelations were made public. "If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for American companies. If I were an American cloud provider, I would be quite frustrated with my government right now."

European officials and companies have been especially troubled by the Snowden leaks because European privacy laws are more stringent than those in the United States.

After documents from Snowden revealed that the NSA had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone calls, she said Europeans should promote domestic Internet companies over American ones in order to avoid U.S. surveillance. German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich has suggested that people who are worried about government spying should stop using Google and Facebook altogether.

"Whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don't go through American servers," Friedrich said after Snowden leaked the NSA documents.

Chris Lamoureux, the executive vice president of the company Veriday, told The WorldPost that some of his customers have requested that the company avoid storing their information in U.S.-based data centers, hoping to make it more difficult for the NSA to gain access.

"They've said, 'We don't want you to put our data in the U.S. because we're worried about what we're seeing and hearing over there right now,'" said Lamoureux, whose Ottawa-based company develops web applications for banks, governments and retailers.

Some argue that President Barack Obama has added to the tech industry's troubles abroad by emphasizing how the NSA surveillance program focused on people outside the United States, where most of Silicon Valley's customers are located.

"Those customers, as well as foreign regulatory agencies like those in the European Union, were being led to believe that using US-based services meant giving their data directly to the NSA," journalist Steven Levy wrote in a recent article in Wired magazine.

Hoping to reassure overseas customers, major tech companies (including AOL, which owns The Huffington Post Media Group) have asked the Obama administration for permission to be more open about how they responded to past requests for data from the U.S. government. They argue the government snooped on their networks without their knowledge. Recent reports based on documents provided by Snowden revealed that the NSA spied on Google and Yahoo customers, unbeknownst to the companies, by secretly tapping cables that connect data centers around the world.

"The impression is that the tech industry is in league with the U.S. government," Cate said. "But the industry would like to give the impression that they're victims of the U.S. government, too."

On Wednesday, Microsoft said it would offer customers who are wary about NSA surveillance the ability to store their data outside the United States.

Meanwhile, some foreign tech companies are trying to capitalize on the distrust between U.S. tech firms and their customers around the world. Swisscom, a cloud provider in Switzerland, is developing a service that would attract customers looking to store data under the country's strict privacy laws and away "from the prying eyes of foreign intelligence services," Reuters reported.

Germany's three largest email providers have also created a new service, called "Email Made in Germany," designed to thwart the NSA by encrypting messages through servers located within the country, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But Cate said that any businesses that try to avoid surveillance by boycotting U.S. tech companies are not really protecting their data from the NSA. After all, intelligence agencies in France and Spain also spied on their own citizens, and passed on that information to the NSA, according to documents from Snowden.

"It doesn't make a difference what you do with your data -- the NSA is going break into it," Cate said. "But that doesn't mean U.S. industry isn't going to get hurt along the way."




tons of embedded links thur the article..at the source

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/24/edward-snowden-tech-industry_n_4596162.html?utm_hp_ref=world&utm_hp_ref=world


sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #468 on: January 26, 2014, 07:48:06 am »



http://rt.com/news/snowden-nsa-industrial-interview-208/

NSA is after industrial spying – Snowden to German TV

Published time: January 26, 2014 09:44
Edited time: January 26, 2014 13:23

The NSA agency is not preoccupied solely with national security, but also spies on foreign industrial entities in US business interests, former American intelligence contractor, Edward Snowden, has revealed in an interview to German TV.

Edward Snowden chose the German ARD broadcaster to make his first TV interview ever since he became a whistleblower. The interview was made in strict secrecy in an unspecified location in Russia, where Snowden is currently living under temporary asylum.

“There is no question that the US is engaged in economic spying,” said Snowden, from a teaser aired late on Saturday.
If an industrial giant like Siemens has something that the NSA believes “would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they'll take it,” the whistleblower said, giving an example.

Edward Snowden disavowed participation in any future publications of the documents he withdrew from the NSA databanks, saying in the same interview that he no longer possesses any NSA data. The information has been distributed among a number of trustworthy journalists, who are going to decide for themselves what to make public and in what sequence.

The full 30-minute version will be aired at 11pm local time (22:00 UTC) on Sunday right after prime-time talk show, ‘Günther Jauch’.

The former NSA contractor’s revelations about US global spying activities, including snooping on its closest allies, put transatlantic ties “to the test,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel last November and demanded that Washington give Germany clarity over the future of the NSA in the country.

Snowden’s revelation hit Berlin particularly hard because Germany is a non-Anglophone country, and therefore is not a member of the ‘Five eyes’ intelligence alliance that incorporates NSA-equivalent agencies in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Deutsche Welle points out. While members of the ‘Five eyes’ were exchanging intelligence on a regular basis, Berlin had to consider itself satisfied with less data, while both Washington and London, for example, were blatantly listening to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone right in the middle of Germany’s capital.

The Germans - according to polls – have lost confidence in the US as a trustworthy partner, and the majority of them consider NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a hero.

In order to mend fences, US President Barack Obama made a rare appearance on German TV. On January 18 President Obama told the ZDF TV channel that “As long as I'm president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany will not have to worry about this.”

Yet Germany remains skeptical about US promises of discontinuing spying on foreign leaders, and is in the vanguard of a number of European countries aiming to change data privacy rules in the EU.

Former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, remains in Russia, where his temporary political asylum status could be extended every year. He has no plans for returning to the US where he would face trial for alleged treason.

“Returning to the US, I think, is the best resolution for the government, the public, and myself, but it’s unfortunately not possible in the face of current whistleblower protection laws, which through a failure in law did not cover national security contractors like myself,” said Snowden during his public Q&A session last Thursday.




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http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/german-tv-snowden-nsa-spies-industry-21971023



German TV: Snowden Says NSA Also Spies on Industry


BERLIN January 26, 2014 (AP)
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden claims in a new interview that the U.S. agency is involved in industrial espionage.

German public television broadcaster ARD released a written statement before an interview airing Sunday night in which it quotes Snowden as saying that if German engineering company Siemens had information that would benefit the United States — but had nothing to do with national security needs — the National Security Agency would still use it.

ARD did not give any further context and it was not clear what exactly Snowden accused the NSA of doing with such information.

Snowden faces felony charges in the U.S. after revealing the NSA's mass surveillance program. He has temporary asylum in Russia.




.......................................



http://www.dw.de/snowden-nsa-economic-espionage-claim-broadcast-as-teaser-to-first-tv-interview/a-17387469

video at this link



NSA Scandal

Snowden NSA economic espionage claim broadcast as teaser to first TV interview


German public broadcaster ARD will air a half-hour interview with NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden on Sunday. The first snippet, aired late Saturday, accuses the NSA of conducting industrial espionage.

The first extract of Edward Snowden's first television interview since laying a string of NSA practices bare last summer were broadcast on ARD on Saturday night, ahead of Sunday's full-length interview conducted by ARD's regional NDR partner.

"I don't want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but what I will say is there is no question that the US is engaged in economic spying," Snowden told veteran NDR journalist Hubert Seipel. "If there is information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they'll take it."

Snowden said that he no longer possessed the NSA data he has helped make public in recent months, saying he had entrusted the material to selected journalists. He also told the public broadcaster that he was no longer playing any part in decisions on what information should be published.

The 30-year-old former intelligence contractor, currently in Russia after being granted temporary asylum, spoke in secret with Seipel in Moscow earlier this week. His first televised interview since turning whistleblower will be broadcast in full at 11 p.m. local time (2200 UTC) on Sunday, with extracts serving as the focal point of discussion in the popular, prime-time panel-based talk show "Günther Jauch" before that.

A tough audience

Germany has been among the more vocal international critics of NSA practices, not least since reports in October that Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone was among the prominent numbers to be tapped. As a non-Anglophone country, Germany is not part of the "five eyes" intelligence alliance incorporating NSA-equivalent agencies in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Allegations of economic espionage had already surfaced in the German press as part of the Snowden-related scandal, including reports of a special listening posts for this purpose at the US and British embassies in Berlin.

US President Barack Obama issued a lengthy address on NSA reforms earlier in January, pledging that the US would cease phone monitoring of their allies' political leaders. He later made a rare appearance on German television, telling public broadcaster ZDF: "As long as I'm president of the United States, the chancellor of Germany will not have to worry about this." Obama will leave office in 2016.

Snowden also went public in an Internet question-and-answer session on the "Free Snowden" website on Thursday, when he said he currently had no intention of returning to the US, saying he doubted his chances of a fair trial. Several reports, most recently in the Washington Post, have said that an amnesty deal was conceivable for the fugitive whistleblower, a claim that US Attorney General Eric Holder refuted on Friday.

msh/jm (AFP, dpa)

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #469 on: January 27, 2014, 03:38:59 pm »

and today's bunch of stuff..
i think i will finish out the month and stop adding  articles..
just tired of the continuing story...





http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25911727

27 January 2014 Last updated at 09:08 ET

FBI arrests five over 'hackers for hire' websites

The FBI has arrested five people in connection with what it says are several hacking-for-hire websites.

Two men have been charged with running and three others with being customers of websites that allegedly offered to obtain access to email accounts.

The swoop against the sites was co-ordinated with police forces in Romania, India and China.

Six other alleged administrators of such sites were arrested as part of the overseas element of the operation.

Mark Anthony Townsend and Joshua Alan Tabor, both of Arkansas, have been charged with operating the needapassword.com website that, according the FBI, charged people to find passwords for about 6,000 email accounts.

If the two are found guilty they face up to five years in jail for computer fraud offences.

The other three people have been charged with paying, between them, more than $23,000 (£14,000) to similar hacker-for-hire websites outside the US to find passwords for a wide variety of email accounts.

Paying a hacker to act on your behalf is a "misdemeanour offense" and if found guilty each defendant could go to a federal jail for 12 months.

In a statement, the FBI said it expected all five defendants to plead guilty.

Four people in Romania, one person in India and one in China were also arrested in connection with websites that allegedly offered to obtain a password for any email account for between $100 (£60) and $500 (£300).

More on This Story
Related StoriesFBI warns shops on checkout thefts 24 JANUARY 2014, TECHNOLOGY
JP Morgan in cyber hack warning 05 DECEMBER 2013, BUSINESS
Days of the 'bank job' are numbered 27 DECEMBER 2013, TECHNOLOGY
The gentle art of cracking passwords 01 DECEMBER 2013, TECHNOLOGY



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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/27/nsa-angry-birds_n_4675310.html



NSA Using Angry Birds, Other Smartphone Apps To Collect Personal Data: Report


AP  |  Posted: 01/27/2014 2:10 pm EST  |  Updated: 01/27/2014 2:59 pm EST

BY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON (AP) — Documents leaked by former NSA contactor Edward Snowden suggest that spy agencies have a powerful ally in the apps installed on smartphones across the globe.

The documents, published by The New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica, suggest that the mapping, gaming, and social networking apps available on smartphones can feed America's National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ spy agency with huge amounts of personal data.

Little is known about the scope and scale of the program, but all three publications outlined how data could be harvested from apps such as the Angry Birds game franchise or Google's popular mapping service.

The NSA said Monday it focused on "valid foreign intelligence targets." GCHQ did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
.


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http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/27/politics/surveillance-tech-companies/index.html?hpt=hp_t2



U.S. to let tech companies release more surveillance data

By Evan Perez, CNN Justice Reporter
updated 5:05 PM EST, Mon January 27, 2014

CNN) -- The Obama administration will allow technology companies to release more information about the number of government surveillance requests for their customer data, according to an agreement announced Monday.

Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Linked-In sued the government last summer in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court seeking to disclose the data as a way to show customers how many snooping requests they receive and are required by court order to comply with. Apple has also made legal filings in support of the companies' lawsuit.

Under the agreement, companies will be allowed to publish broad categories of data on government requests for customer information made via national security letters, and orders made by surveillance court, both for general customer data and for content of customer communications.

The companies will also be allowed to say how many customer accounts are affected. The detail companies can provide will be limited to groups of a thousand, or 250, depending on which option companies choose to use.

The court complaints have been dismissed, a spokeswoman for the companies said in a statement.

"We filed our lawsuits because we believe that the public has a right to know about the volume and types of national security requests we receive," the statement said. "We're pleased the Department of Justice has agreed that we and other providers can disclose this information. While this is a very positive step, we'll continue to encourage Congress to take additional steps to address all of the reforms we believe are needed."

The lawsuit by the companies followed leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that made public the existence of certain NSA surveillance programs.

The government has fought the corporate request, saying even broad numbers would hurt national security. The companies have argued they should be allowed to publish aggregate data, in part to reassure customers.

The companies contend their businesses are hurt by any perception they are arms of vast government surveillance.

Currently, they can release information on general law-enforcement requests with no specifics.

In a January 17 speech at the Justice Department, President Barack Obama signaled his administration was willing to allow the companies to make data public.

The night before the speech, tech company lawyers met at the White House with lawyers from the Justice Department and intelligence agencies, according to a government official familiar with the meeting.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole, and his chief of staff, David O'Neil, proposed a compromise that prompted the White House to include the issue in the President's speech.

Last Thursday and Friday, the company lawyers and Justice Department officials completed terms of their agreement, the official said.

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #470 on: January 29, 2014, 08:02:49 am »


lol.. perfect way for me to end this very very long thread..
with an up-yours to the nsa...

not that the peace prize really means anything.. o got one and all he's done is send soldiers

this world is running the wrong way for me going back to the cave and raise lettuce....sigh





http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/29/snowden-nobel-prize-nomination-norway-politicans_n_4686575.html


Snowden Nominated For Nobel Prize By Norwegian Politicians

01/29/14 06:34 AM ET EST 

STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — Two Norwegian lawmakers say they have jointly nominated former NSA contractor Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.

Socialist lawmakers Baard Vegard Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen said Wednesday the public debate and policy changes "in the wake of Snowden's whistleblowing has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order."

Being nominated just means Snowden will be one of scores of names that the Nobel committee will consider for the prestigious award.

The five-member panel won't confirm who's been nominated but those who submit nominations sometimes make them public.

Nominators, including members of national parliaments and governments, university professors and previous laureates, must enter their submissions by Feb. 1.

The prize committee members can add their own candidates at their first meeting after that deadline.

Offline Sinny

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #471 on: January 31, 2014, 04:32:28 am »
Ironic that he's up for the 'nobel peace prize'.. He hasn't caused any 'peace' lmafo.
"The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society"- JFK

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #472 on: February 18, 2014, 03:18:06 pm »


yeah, i know, i said i quit collecting these articles but this is a funny one
and a good trick getting these groups on the same side





http://www.timesheraldonline.com/news/ci_25168088/nsa-brings-liberals-tea-party-group-together

NSA brings liberals, Tea Party group together

By Connie Cass/Associated Press/
Posted:   02/18/2014 12:54:00 AM PST


WASHINGTON -- Hoyt Sparks says he has no use for liberal Democrats and their "socialistic, Marxist, communist" ways.

Toni Lewis suspects tea party Republicans are "a bunch of people who probably need some mental health treatment."

Politically speaking, the tea-party supporter in rural North Carolina and the Massachusetts liberal live a world apart.

Who or what could get them thinking the same?

Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency.
By exposing the NSA's vast surveillance web, Snowden created a link between tea partyers and liberals -- two tribes camped on opposite sides of the nation's political chasm.

These people to the right and left of mainstream America sound a lot alike now.

Sparks, a federal retiree in the Blue Ridge mountain town of Sparta and a political independent, condemns the NSA programs as "a breach of privacy which violates the Constitution."
Lifetime Democrat Lewis, a social worker in the city of Brockton, near Boston, says, "When we're violating the rights of U.S. citizens, I think that's a dangerous line to be walking."

Whether they are Republicans, Democrats or independents, almost half of Americans say they support the tea party movement or call themselves liberal.

Compared with their more moderate Republican or Democratic peers, tea partyers and liberals are significantly more likely to oppose the collection of millions of ordinary citizens' telephone and Internet data, an Associated Press-GfK poll shows.
By a 2-to-1 margin, these two groups say the government should put protecting citizens' rights and freedoms ahead of protecting them from terrorists.

Nearly 6 in 10 Republicans support the tea party movement. Nearly 4 in 10 Democrats call themselves liberals. Combined, they are buoying a coalition of conservative and liberal lawmakers pushing to rein in the NSA, while party leaders balk at anything that might weaken the agency's ability to foil terrorists.

Why does the NSA unite the right and left ends of the political spectrum?
"More extreme political views lead to more distrust of government," said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, who's studied the tea party's focus on the Constitution. People at the far ends of the political spectrum are less likely than middle-of-the-road voters to feel government is responsive to them.

On the flip side, Somin said, moderates generally don't follow politics as closely as people at the extremes, so they may be less aware of the scope of the NSA's activities.

"The whole thing is wrong," says Virginia Greenfield, a tea-party supporter in Cortland, N.Y. But, she says, "most people don't want to believe that the government would do what it's doing."

Liberals, who tend to trust government to handle many matters, also tend to be suspicious of intrusions into privacy or civil liberties. That aligns them on some issues with libertarians, the champions of individual rights who make up a substantial portion of the tea party movement.

Another segment of the tea party -- social conservatives -- deeply mistrusts President Barack Obama and his administration, an attitude likely to extend to the NSA while he's in charge.

Obama is a point of contention in the anti-surveillance coalition. Eight in 10 tea partyers dislike the way he's handled the issue; only about half of liberals disapprove. Still, the NSA brings liberals closer to the tea-party way of thinking than usual: On other big issues, liberals' approval for Obama generally hovers around 70 percent.

When it comes to Snowden, tea-party supporters and liberals are back in step -- about half of each group says the former NSA contractor did the right thing. Among non-tea party Republicans and nonliberal Democrats, a strong majority thinks he was wrong to reveal classified programs.

Christina Ott, who works on her family's farm near Woodbury, Tenn., found Snowden's action inspiring.

"I thought it was somebody taking a moral stand and a big risk," said Ott, a liberal Democrat.

She isn't surprised to find herself siding with the tea party for once. Regardless of their political views, Ott said, the people who worry about mass surveillance are the ones "who are paying close attention and believe it is possible for things to go badly wrong."

But Lewis, an Obama fan, is shocked to agree with tea partyers about anything.
"I can't explain it. It's kind of scary," she said, joking: "Now I might have to rethink my position."


The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Jan. 17-21 using KnowledgePanel, GfK's probability-based online panel. It involved online interviews with 1,060 adults. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points for all respondents. Those respondents who did not have Internet access before joining the panel were provided it for free.


------


AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.


------


Follow Connie Cass on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ConnieCass

sky otter

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #473 on: February 23, 2014, 01:53:22 pm »






http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence
 

Google Will Soon Know You Better Than Your Spouse Does, Top Exec Says

Posted: 02/23/2014 1:12 pm EST Updated: 02/23/2014 1:59 pm EST

 

Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, believes that the tech behemoth will soon know you even better than your spouse does.

Kurzweil, who Bill Gates has reportedly called "the best person [he knows] at predicting the future of artificial intelligence," told the Observer in a recent interview that he is working with Google to create a computer system that will be able to intimately understand human beings.

(Read Kurzweil's full interview with the Observer here.)

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kurzweil-terminator-singularity-artificial-intelligence

"I have a one-sentence spec which is to help bring natural language understanding to Google," the 66-year-old tech whiz told the news outlet of his job. "My project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means."

"When you write an article, you're not creating an interesting collection of words," he continued. "You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organizing and processing the world's information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage in intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions."

In short, the Observer writes, Kurzweil believes that Google will soon "know the answer to your question before you have asked it. It will have read every email you've ever written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself."

As creepy as this may sound to some, Kurzweil -- who has long contended that computers will outsmart us by 2029 -- believes that the improvement of artificial intelligence is merely the next step in our evolution.

"[Artificial intelligence] is not an intelligent invasion from Mars," he told the Montecito Journal in 2012, per a post on his website. "These are brain extenders that we have created to expand our own mental reach. They are part of our civilization. They are part of who we are. So over the next few decades our human-machine civilization will become increasingly dominated by its non-biological component."

Offline Flux

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #474 on: February 23, 2014, 04:15:52 pm »
But we keep on whipping SkyNets butt in the movies?
Bugger!

sky otter

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #475 on: February 28, 2014, 08:21:02 am »

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo


Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ•
 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone


Spencer Ackerman and James Ball
The Guardian, Thursday 27 February 2014



Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.



Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.

The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.

One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."

The agency did make efforts to limit analysts' ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.

However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they were allowed to display "webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target".

Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.

Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".



Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorisations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.

There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations – Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

GCHQ insists all of its activities are necessary, proportionate, and in accordance with UK law.

The documents also show that GCHQ trialled automatic searches based on facial recognition technology, for people resembling existing GCHQ targets: "f you search for similar IDs to your target, you will be able to request automatic comparison of the face in the similar IDs to those in your target's ID".

The undated document, from GCHQ's internal wiki information site, noted this capability was "now closed … but shortly to return!"

The privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: "One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as pornography, commercials, movie clips and family home movies."

Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography



GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest, but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.

The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective Optic Nerve users that "there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them".

It further notes that "under GCHQ's offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offence".




Once collected, the metadata associated with the videos can be as valuable to the intelligence agencies as the images themselves.

It is not fully clear from the documents how much access the NSA has to the Yahoo webcam trove itself, though all of the policy documents were available to NSA analysts through their routine information-sharing. A previously revealed NSA metadata repository, codenamed Marina, has what the documents describe as a protocol class for webcam information.

In its statement to the Guardian, Yahoo strongly condemned the Optic Nerve program, and said it had no awareness of or involvement with the GCHQ collection.

"We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity," said a spokeswoman. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December.

"We are committed to preserving our users' trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services."

Yahoo has been one of the most outspoken technology companies objecting to the NSA's bulk surveillance. It filed a transparency lawsuit with the secret US surveillance court to disclose a 2007 case in which it was compelled to provide customer data to the surveillance agency, and it railed against the NSA's reported interception of information in transit between its data centers.

The documents do not refer to any specific court orders permitting collection of Yahoo's webcam imagery, but GCHQ mass collection is governed by the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and requires certification by the foreign secretary, currently William Hague.

The Optic Nerve documentation shows legalities were being considered as new capabilities were being developed. Discussing adding automated facial matching, for example, analysts agreed to test a system before firming up its legal status for everyday use.

"It was agreed that the legalities of such a capability would be considered once it had been developed, but that the general principle applied would be that if the accuracy of the algorithm was such that it was useful to the analyst (ie, the number of spurious results was low, then it was likely to be proportionate)," the 2008 document reads.

The document continues: "This is allowed for research purposes but at the point where the results are shown to analysts for operational use, the proportionality and legality questions must be more carefully considered."

Optic Nerve was just one of a series of GCHQ efforts at biometric detection, whether for target recognition or general security.

While the documents do not detail efforts as widescale as those against Yahoo users, one presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated "fairly normal webcam traffic" and was being evaluated as part of a wider program.

Documents previously revealed in the Guardian showed the NSA were exploring the video capabilities of game consoles for surveillance purposes.

Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, faced a privacy backlash last year when details emerged that the camera bundled with its new console, the Xbox One, would be always-on by default.

Beyond webcams and consoles, GCHQ and the NSA looked at building more detailed and accurate facial recognition tools, such as iris recognition cameras – "think Tom Cruise in Minority Report", one presentation noted.

The same presentation talks about the strange means the agencies used to try and test such systems, including whether they could be tricked. One way of testing this was to use contact lenses on detailed mannequins.

To this end, GCHQ has a dummy nicknamed "the Head", one document noted.

In a statement, a GCHQ spokesman said: "It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.

"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.

"All our operational processes rigorously support this position."

The NSA declined to respond to specific queries about its access to the Optic Nerve system, the presence of US citizens' data in such systems, or whether the NSA has similar bulk-collection programs.

However, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the agency did not ask foreign partners such as GCHQ to collect intelligence the agency could not legally collect itself.

"As we've said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself," she said.

"The NSA works with a number of partners in meeting its foreign intelligence mission goals, and those operations comply with US law and with the applicable laws under which those partners operate.

"A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons."





sky otter

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Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #476 on: March 07, 2014, 07:26:36 pm »


http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/07/us-russia-cyberespionage-insight-idUSBREA260YI20140307


Suspected Russian spyware Turla targets Europe, United States
By Peter Apps and Jim Finkle

LONDON/BOSTON Fri Mar 7, 2014 2:45pm EST


(Reuters) - A sophisticated piece of spyware has been quietly infecting hundreds of government computers across Europe and the United States in one of the most complex cyber espionage programs uncovered to date.

Several security researchers and Western intelligence officers say they believe the malware, widely known as Turla, is the work of the Russian government and linked to the same software used to launch a massive breach on the U.S. military uncovered in 2008.

It was also linked to a previously known, massive global cyber spying operation dubbed Red October targeting diplomatic, military and nuclear research networks.

Those assessments were based on analysis of tactics employed by hackers, along with technical indicators and the victims they targeted.

"It is sophisticated malware that's linked to other Russian exploits, uses encryption and targets western governments. It has Russian paw prints all over it," said Jim Lewis, a former U.S. foreign service officer, now senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

However, security experts caution that while the case for saying Turla looks Russian may be strong, it is impossible to confirm those suspicions unless Moscow claims responsibility. Developers often use techniques to cloud their identity.

The threat surfaced this week after a little known German anti-virus firm, G Data, published a report on the virus, which it called Uroburos, the name text in the code that may be a reference to the Greek symbol of a serpent eating its own tail.

Experts in state-sponsored cyber attacks say that Russian government-backed hackers are known for being highly disciplined, adept at hiding their tracks, extremely effective at maintaining control of infected networks and more selective in choosing targets than their Chinese counterparts.

"They know that most people don't have either the technical knowledge or the fortitude to win a battle with them. When they recognize that someone is onto them, they just go dormant," said one expert who helps victims of state-sponsored hacking.

A former Western intelligence official commented: "They can draw on some very high grade programmers and engineers, including the many who work for organized criminal groups, but also function as privateers."

Russia's Federal Security Bureau declined comment as did Pentagon and U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials.

On Friday, Britain's BAE Systems Applied Intelligence - the cyber arm of Britain's premier defense contractor - published its own research on the spyware, which it called "snake."

The sheer sophistication of the software, it said, went well beyond that previously encountered - although it did not attribute blame for the attack.

"The threat... really does raise the bar in terms of what potential targets, and the security community in general, have to do to keep ahead of cyber attacks," said Martin Sutherland, managing director of BAE Systems Applied Intelligence.

NATO NATIONS TARGETED

Security firms have been monitoring Turla for several years.

Symantec Corp estimates up to 1,000 networks have been infected by Turla and a related virus, Agent.BTZ. It named no victims, saying only that most were government computers.

BAE said it has collected over 100 unique samples of Turla since 2010, including 32 from Ukraine, 11 from Lithuania and 4 from Great Britain. It obtained smaller numbers from other countries.

Hackers use Turla to establish a hidden foothold in infected networks from which they can search other computers, store stolen information, then transmit data back to their servers.

"While it seems to be Russian, there is no way to know for sure," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with Helsinki-based F-Secure, which encountered Turla last year.

Security firms that are monitoring the threat have said the operation's sophistication suggests it was likely backed by a nation state and that technical indicators make them believe it is the work of Russian developers.

European governments have long welcomed U.S. help against Kremlin spying, but were infuriated last year to discover the scale of surveillance by America's National Security Agency that stretched also to their own territory.

AGENT.BTZ, RED OCTOBER

Security experts say stealthy Turla belongs to the same family as one of the most notorious pieces of spyware uncovered to date: Agent.BTZ. It was used in a massive cyber espionage operation on U.S. Central Command that surfaced in 2008 and is one of the most serious U.S. breaches to date. While Washington never formally attributed blame, several U.S. officials have told Reuters they believed it was the work of Russia.

Hypponen said Agent.BTZ was initially found in a military network of a European NATO state in 2008, but gave no details. F-Secure is credited with naming that piece of malware in 2008, though researchers believe it was created already in 2006.

Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner said he believes Turla and Agent.BTZ are related to Red October, which suddenly shut down after his firm reported on it in January 2013.

"Unusually unique artifacts link Red October, Agent.BTZ and Turla," he said, referring to strings of text contained in the code and functionality of the malware.

Eric Chien, technical director with Symantec Security Response, described Turla as "the evolution" of Agent.BTZ. "They are a very active development group," Chien said.

Finland said its Foreign Ministry computer systems had been penetrated by an attack last year but would not elaborate.

Sweden's National Defence Radio Establishment said cyber espionage was "more common than people think", adding that it had discovered multiple attacks against authorities, governments and universities, some only detected after several years.

Government sources in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland and Romania said Turla had not affected them directly. Other European governments contacted by Reuters declined comment.

CHASING TURLA

Although computer security researchers have been quietly studying Turla for more than two years, public discussions of the threat only began after G Data published its report.

G Data spokesman Eddy Willems declined to name any victims or identify the author of the report, saying the firm was concerned the group behind Turla might attempt to harm him.

Jaime Blasco, director of AlienVault Labs, said that Turla was more of a "framework" for espionage than simply malware.

The malware is a "root kit" that hides the presence of the spying operation and also creates a hidden, encrypted file system to store stolen data and tools used by the attackers, he said. Those tools include password stealers, tiny programs for gathering information about the system and document stealers.

The operators can download specialized tools onto an infected system, adding any functionality they want by including it in the encrypted file system, Blasco said.

They have used dozens of different "command and control" servers located in countries around the world to control infected systems, according to Symantec, whose researchers have helped identify and shut down some of those systems.

Researchers say Turla's code is regularly updated, including changes to avoid detection as anti-virus companies detect new strains. BAE said it had two samples created in January 2014.

Chien said that in some cases when a command and control server was taken offline, Turla's operators have quickly pushed out new versions of the malware that directed infected computers to new command and control servers.

"They have a super active development team," he said.

(Additional reporting by Jan Strouhal in Prague, Marcin Goeetig in Warsaw, Guy Faulconbridge in London, Zoran Radosavljevic in Zagreb, Gwladys Fouche in Oslo, Matthias Williams in Bucharest, Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow, Alexandra Hudson in Berlin, Johan Sennero in Stockholm, Phil Stewart in Washington; Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Ralph Boulton)


 

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #477 on: April 02, 2014, 08:36:15 pm »


do you think if they  pick on each other they will leave us little guys alone?..
..Nah probably not
sigh



http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/world/asia/nsa-breached-chinese-servers-seen-as-spy-peril.html?_r=0

N.S.A. Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat
By DAVID E. SANGER and NICOLE PERLROTHMARCH 22, 2014


WASHINGTON — American officials have long considered Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, a security threat, blocking it from business deals in the United States for fear that the company would create “back doors” in its equipment that could allow the Chinese military or Beijing-backed hackers to steal corporate and government secrets.

But even as the United States made a public case about the dangers of buying from Huawei, classified documents show that the National Security Agency was creating its own back doors — directly into Huawei’s networks.

The agency pried its way into the servers in Huawei’s sealed headquarters in Shenzhen, China’s industrial heart, according to N.S.A. documents provided by the former contractor Edward J. Snowden. It obtained information about the workings of the giant routers and complex digital switches that Huawei boasts connect a third of the world’s population, and monitored communications of the company’s top executives.

One of the goals of the operation, code-named “Shotgiant,” was to find any links between Huawei and the People’s Liberation Army, one 2010 document made clear. But the plans went further: to exploit Huawei’s technology so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A. could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive cyberoperations.

“Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products,” the N.S.A. document said. “We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products,” it added, to “gain access to networks of interest” around the world.

The documents were disclosed by The New York Times and Der Spiegel, and are also part of a book by Der Spiegel, “The N.S.A. Complex.” The documents, as well as interviews with intelligence officials, offer new insights into the United States’ escalating digital cold war with Beijing. While President Obama and China’s president, Xi Jinping, have begun talks about limiting the cyber conflict, it appears to be intensifying.

The N.S.A., for example, is tracking more than 20 Chinese hacking groups — more than half of them Chinese Army and Navy units — as they break into the networks of the United States government, companies including Google, and drone and nuclear-weapon part makers, according to a half-dozen current and former American officials.

If anything, they said, the pace has increased since the revelation last year that some of the most aggressive Chinese hacking originated at a People’s Liberation Army facility, Unit 61398, in Shanghai.
The Obama administration distinguishes between the hacking and corporate theft that the Chinese conduct against American companies to buttress their own state-run businesses, and the intelligence operations that the United States conducts against Chinese and other targets.

American officials have repeatedly said that the N.S.A. breaks into foreign networks only for legitimate national security purposes.
A White House spokeswoman, Caitlin M. Hayden, said: “We do not give intelligence we collect to U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line. Many countries cannot say the same.”

But that does not mean the American government does not conduct its own form of corporate espionage with a different set of goals. Those concerning Huawei were described in the 2010 document.
 “If we can determine the company’s plans and intentions,” an analyst wrote, “we hope that this will lead us back to the plans and intentions of the PRC,” referring to the People’s Republic of China. The N.S.A. saw an additional opportunity: As Huawei invested in new technology and laid undersea cables to connect its $40 billion-a-year networking empire, the agency was interested in tunneling into key Chinese customers, including “high priority targets — Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kenya, Cuba.”

The documents offer no answer to a central question: Is Huawei an independent company, as its leaders contend, or a front for the People’s Liberation Army, as American officials suggest but have never publicly proved?

Two years after Shotgiant became a major program, the House Intelligence Committee delivered an unclassified report on Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE, that cited no evidence confirming the suspicions about Chinese government ties. Still, the October 2012 report concluded that the companies must be blocked from “acquisitions, takeover or mergers” in the United States, and “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence.”

Huawei, which has all but given up its hopes of entering the American market, complains that it is the victim of protectionism, swathed in trumped-up national security concerns. Company officials insist that it has no connection to the People’s Liberation Army.

William Plummer, a senior Huawei executive in the United States, said the company had no idea it was an N.S.A. target, adding that in his personal opinion, “The irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us.”
“If such espionage has been truly conducted,” Mr. Plummer added, “then it is known that the company is independent and has no unusual ties to any government, and that knowledge should be relayed publicly to put an end to an era of mis- and disinformation.”
Blocked at Every Turn

Washington’s concerns about Huawei date back nearly a decade, since the RAND Corporation, the research organization, evaluated the potential threat of China for the American military. RAND concluded that “private Chinese companies such as Huawei” were part of a new “digital triangle” of companies, institutes and government agencies that worked together secretly.

Huawei is a global giant: it manufactures equipment that makes up the backbone of the Internet, lays submarine cables from Asia to Africa and has become the world’s third largest smartphone maker after Samsung and Apple.

The man behind its strategy is Ren Zhengfei, the company’s elusive founder, who was a P.L.A. engineer in the 1970s. To the Chinese, he is something akin to Steve Jobs — an entrepreneur who started a digital empire with little more than $3,000 in the mid-1980s, and took on both state-owned companies and foreign competitors. But to American officials, he is a link to the People’s Liberation Army.

Acting to Block a Chinese Telecom Giant
 Over the past seven years, the United States government has taken steps to block the Chinese telecommunications and internet giant Huawei from gaining a foothold here, fearing that the company could act on behalf of the Chinese military to gain access to government and corporate secrets. The company was founded in 1987 and by the mid-90s had begun making inroads into the U.S. telecom equipment market.


 
U.S. RELATIONS WITH HUAWEI
2003–4
 Cisco sues Huawei for stealing source code; the suit is settled with neither side revealing terms.

 2005
The Air Force hires the RAND corporation to examine threats from Chinese networking firms; it concludes there is a “digital triangle” of Chinese military, state research groups, and companies like Huawei.

2007
The National Security Administration begins its “Shotgiant” effort to pierce Huawei’s networks and exploit its systems.

 
2008
The U.S. blocks Huawei from buying 3Com on national security grounds.

 
2010
The U.S. persuades Australia to kill a plan to let Huawei build a national broadband network
In an open letter to the U.S., Huawei denies that it is a front for the Chinese government, and invites investigation.

 
2012
 The House Intelligence Committee produces a long report urging the U.S. to “block acquisitions, takeovers or mergers” with Huawei, and to exclude its equipment from U.S. systems.

2013
The U.S. approves purchase of Sprint Nextel by Softbank Corporation, but under conditions that probably exclude Huawei equipment.

 
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., on a trip to Seoul, urges South Korea to kill a contract for Huawei to build an advanced telecom network for Seoul.


They have blocked his company at every turn: pressing Sprint to kill a $3 billion deal to buy Huawei’s fourth generation, or 4G, network technology; scuttling a planned purchase of 3Com for fear that Huawei would alter computer code sold to the United States military; and pushing allies, like Australia, to back off from major projects.

As long ago as 2007, the N.S.A. began a covert program against Huawei, the documents show. By 2010, the agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit — which breaks into hard-to-access networks — found a way into Huawei’s headquarters. The agency collected Mr. Ren’s communications, one document noted, though analysts feared they might be missing many of them.

N.S.A. analysts made clear that they were looking for more than just “signals intelligence” about the company and its connections to Chinese leaders; they wanted to learn how to pierce its systems so that when adversaries and allies bought Huawei equipment, the United States would be plugged into those networks. (The Times withheld technical details of the operation at the request of the Obama administration, which cited national security concerns.)

The N.S.A.’s operations against China do not stop at Huawei. Last year, the agency cracked two of China’s biggest cellphone networks, allowing it to track strategically important Chinese military units, according to an April 2013 document leaked by Mr. Snowden. Other major targets, the document said, are the locations where the Chinese leadership works. The country’s leaders, like everyone else, are constantly upgrading to better, faster Wi-Fi — and the N.S.A. is constantly finding new ways in.


Hack Attacks Accelerate
 Chinese state attacks have only accelerated in recent years, according to the current and former intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity about classified information.

A dozen P.L.A. military units — aside from Unit 61398 — do their hacking from eavesdropping posts around China, and though their targets were initially government agencies and foreign ministries around the world, they have since expanded into the private sector. For example, officials point to the First Bureau of the army’s Third Department, which the N.S.A. began tracking in 2004 after it hacked into the Pentagon’s networks. The unit’s targets have grown to include telecom and technology companies that specialize in networking and encryption equipment — including some Huawei competitors.

For some of its most audacious attacks, China relies on hackers at state-funded universities and privately owned Chinese technology companies, apparently as much for their skills as for the plausible deniability it offers the state if it gets caught. The N.S.A. is tracking more than half a dozen such groups suspected of operating at the behest of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, China’s civilian spy agency, the officials said.

Their targets, they noted, closely align with China’s stated economic and strategic directives. As China strove to develop drones and next-generation ballistic and submarine-launched missiles in recent years, the N.S.A. and its partners watched as one group of privately employed engineers based in Guangzhou in southern China pilfered the blueprints to missile, satellite, space, and nuclear propulsion technology from businesses in the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia and Africa.

And as China strove to make its own inroads on the web, officials said another group of private hackers infiltrated Google, Adobe and dozens of other global technology companies in 2010. Lately, the officials said, that group and its counterparts are also going after security firms, banks, chemical companies, automakers and even nongovernment organizations.

“China does more in terms of cyberespionage than all other countries put together,” said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“The question is no longer which industries China is hacking into,” he added. “It’s which industries they aren’t hacking into.”


Correction: March 26, 2014

An article on Sunday about the National Security Agency’s infiltration of the servers of a Chinese telecommunications company considered by the United States to be a security threat misspelled, in two instances, the name of the company. It is Huawei, not Huawai.

A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Penetrated Chinese Servers It Saw as Spy Risk.

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #478 on: April 13, 2014, 09:09:19 am »


Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say
By DAVID E. SANGERAPRIL 12, 2014

WASHINGTON — Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.

But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

The White House has never publicly detailed Mr. Obama’s decision, which he made in January as he began a three-month review of recommendations by a presidential advisory committee on what to do in response to recent disclosures about the National Security Agency.

But elements of the decision became evident on Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers.

Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the review of the recommendations was now complete, and it had resulted in a “reinvigorated” process to weigh the value of disclosure when a security flaw is discovered, against the value of keeping the discovery secret for later use by the intelligence community.

“This process is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities,” she said.
Until now, the White House has declined to say what action Mr. Obama had taken on this recommendation of the president’s advisory committee, whose report is better known for its determination that the government get out of the business of collecting bulk telephone data about the calls made by every American. Mr. Obama announced last month that he would end the bulk collection, and leave the data in the hands of telecommunications companies, with a procedure for the government to obtain it with court orders when needed.

But while the surveillance recommendations were noteworthy, inside the intelligence agencies other recommendations, concerning encryption and cyber operations, set off a roaring debate with echoes of the Cold War battles that dominated Washington a half-century ago.
One recommendation urged the N.S.A. to get out of the business of weakening commercial encryption systems or trying to build in “back doors” that would make it far easier for the agency to crack the communications of America’s adversaries. Tempting as it was to create easy ways to break codes — the reason the N.S.A. was established by Harry S. Truman 62 years ago — the committee concluded that the practice would undercut trust in American software and hardware products. In recent months, Silicon Valley companies have urged the United States to abandon such practices, while Germany and Brazil, among other nations, have said they were considering shunning American-made equipment and software. Their motives were hardly pure: Foreign companies see the N.S.A. disclosures as a way to bar American competitors.


Another recommendation urged the government to make only the most limited, temporary use of what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give an attacker access to a computer — and to any business, government agency or network connected to it. The flaws get their name from the fact that, when identified, the computer user has “zero days” to fix them before hackers can exploit the accidental vulnerability.

The N.S.A. made use of four “zero day” vulnerabilities in its attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites. That operation, code-named “Olympic Games,” managed to damage roughly 1,000 Iranian centrifuges, and by some accounts helped drive the country to the negotiating table.

Not surprisingly, officials at the N.S.A. and at its military partner, the United States Cyber Command, warned that giving up the capability to exploit undisclosed vulnerabilities would amount to “unilateral disarmament” — a phrase taken from the battles over whether and how far to cut America’s nuclear arsenal.

“We don’t eliminate nuclear weapons until the Russians do,” one senior intelligence official said recently. “You are not going to see the Chinese give up on ‘zero days’ just because we do.” Even a senior White House official who was sympathetic to broad reforms after the N.S.A. disclosures said last month, “I can’t imagine the president — any president — entirely giving up a technology that might enable him some day to take a covert action that could avoid a shooting war.”

At the center of that technology are the kinds of hidden gaps in the Internet — almost always created by mistake or oversight — that Heartbleed created. There is no evidence that the N.S.A. had any role in creating Heartbleed, or even that it made use of it. When the White House denied prior knowledge of Heartbleed on Friday afternoon, it appeared to be the first time that the N.S.A. had ever said whether a particular flaw in the Internet was — or was not — in the secret library it keeps at Fort Meade, Md., the headquarters of the agency and Cyber Command.

But documents released by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make it clear that two years before Heartbleed became known, the N.S.A. was looking at ways to accomplish exactly what the flaw did by accident. A program code-named Bullrun, apparently named for the site of two Civil War battles just outside Washington, was part of a decade-long effort to crack or circumvent encryption on the web. The documents do not make clear how well it succeeded, but it may well have been more effective than exploiting Heartbleed would be at enabling access to secret data.

The government has become one of the biggest developers and purchasers of information identifying “zero days,” officials acknowledge. Those flaws are big business — Microsoft pays up to $150,000 to those who find them and bring them to the company to fix — and other countries are gathering them so avidly that something of a modern-day arms race has broken out. Chief among the nations seeking them are China and Russia, though Iran and North Korea are in the market as well.

“Cyber as an offensive weapon will become bigger and bigger,” said Michael DeCesare, who runs the McAfee computer security operations of Intel Corporation. “I don’t think any amount of policy alone will stop them” from doing what they are doing, he said of the Russians, the Chinese and others. “That’s why effective command and control strategies are absolutely imperative on our side.”

The presidential advisory committee did not urge the N.S.A. to get out of the business entirely. But it said that the president should make sure the N.S.A. does not “engineer vulnerabilities” into commercial encryption systems. And it said that if the United States finds a “zero day,” it should patch it, not exploit it, with one exception: Senior officials could “briefly authorize using a zero day for high priority intelligence protection.”





A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2014, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/us/politics/obama-lets-nsa-exploit-some-internet-flaws-officials-say.html

sky otter

  • Guest
Re: they know what you are doing
« Reply #479 on: May 17, 2014, 07:43:18 am »

grabbing this  from mic's  post here


http://www.thelivingmoon.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=8f67a0e1115dfb861be4408d56688655;topic=6766.0#msg94781



forget the gov watching you.. they have farmed out  everything and these guys
are now in charge 
and sadly this post was over a year ago.. i would say e-mail the  youie to everyone ya know...
then head for your cave



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Abby Martin takes a look at the biggest company you've never heard of, SERCO.

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« Last Edit: May 17, 2014, 07:53:07 am by sky otter »

 


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