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Post by swamprat on Jul 17, 2013 12:16:52 GMT -6
Thanks to WingsofCrystal for finding this:License Plate Readers Track You for ProfitBy David Kravets 07.17.13 As license plate readers proliferate, law enforcement and private business are pooling surveillance data in light of conflicting guidelines on how long they may retain the data, which often is marketed for profit, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union. The report, “You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements,” (.pdf) paints, for the first time, a broad, Orwellian picture of an often overlooked and growing feature of the surveillance — one funded, in part, by $50 million in federal grants to local governments during the past five years. The autonomous readers — small cameras affixed to police vehicles, light poles, bridges, street signs, buildings, you name it — chronicle a vehicle’s whereabouts to the second. Only a fraction of photos provide an immediate “hit” matching the vehicle to a crime. At least one town, the affluent San Francisco suburb of Tiburon, has cameras operating on the only road leading into and out of town. Nationwide, the authorities and even private enterprise maintain a trove of locational data on citizens’ movements, according to the report. Data from these cameras, according to the report, “is being placed into databases, and is sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of motorists’ location information are being created. All too frequently, these data are retained permanently and shared widely with few or no restrictions on how they can be used.” The standards by which the authorities may access the data varies. In the Northern California town of Pittsburg, for example, local police may analyze the database for “any routine patrol operation or criminal investigation,” and “reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required,” according to the report. In Scarsdale, New York, the barrier for access “is only limited by the officer’s imagination.” The report also illuminates a network of private companies — many in the repossession business — that scan 50 million license plates a month in major metropolitan areas and sell the data to law enforcement agencies. “These huge databases of plate information are not subject to any data security or privacy regulations governing license plate reader data,” the report said. “These companies decide who can access license plate data and for what purposes.” According to the report, the vast collection of data yields little in the way of crime fighting, and authorities are collecting “vast quantities of data on innocent people.” Law enforcement agencies throughout Maryland, for example, collected more than 85 million license plate records last year alone and pooled them in a single database — a practice used by other agencies nationwide. “Maryland’s system of license plate readers had over 29 million reads. Only 0.2 percent of those license plates, or about 1 in 500, were hits. That is, only 0.2 percent of reads were associated with any crime, wrongdoing, minor registration problem, or even suspicion of a problem,” the report said. “Of the 0.2 percent that were hits, 97 percent were for a suspended or revoked registration or a violation of Maryland’s Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program.” To be sure, many agencies promptly delete so-called “non-hit” data — photos of license plates that did not produce an immediate match. The Ohio State Highway Patrol deletes data immediately, whereas the Minnesota State Patrol keeps the info for 48 hours, while police in Brookline, Massachusetts keep the data for two weeks. On the other hand, Jersey City in New Jersey retains the data for five years, while authorities in Grapevine, Texas, have no data retention policy, according to the ACLU report. www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/license-plate-readers/
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Post by skywalker on Jul 17, 2013 12:48:21 GMT -6
Good thing the Feds don't know what kind of car I really drive. They probably think I'm driving the one that has my name on the registration. Ha! Those fools.
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Post by Deleted on Jul 18, 2013 11:31:01 GMT -6
Good thing the Feds don't know what kind of car I really drive. They probably think I'm driving the one that has my name on the registration. Ha! Those fools. This could be bad. Someone else driving your car, not stolen, but the police pull that person over anyway for suspicion. Will they need to carry a signed permission slip that they can drive your car? I think I've already stated that my sis got a speeding ticket in Denver (going to the airport) and she was never pulled over. Hmmmmmm. Now that I think about it, she may have been in a rental car also. We know that a snapshot was taken of her license plate (whatever car she was driving) and they had the date and time, and mailed her the ticket. Those cameras are more than you think. Our ford got a ticket running a red light. My mom tried to say I was driving it at the time. Nope. The picture was clear enough to show WHO the driver was.
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Post by swamprat on Aug 26, 2013 19:28:35 GMT -6
NETWORKWORLD
Report: NSA broke into UN video teleconferencing system
The agency reportedly cracked the system's encryption to snoop on internal UN communications
By Lucian Constantin, IDG News Service August 26, 2013 IDG News Service - The U.S. National Security Agency reportedly cracked the encryption used by the video teleconferencing system at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. In June 2012 the NSA department responsible for collecting intelligence about the U.N. gained "new access to internal United Nations communication," German magazine Der Spiegel reported Monday based on information from secret NSA documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA technicians were able to crack the encryption used by the U.N.'s internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system allowing VTC traffic to be decrypted. "This traffic is getting us internal UN VTCs (yay!)," one of the internal NSA documents said, according to Der Spiegel. In less than three weeks, the number of U.N. communications that the NSA managed to intercept and decrypt rose from 12 to over 450. According to another NSA internal report from 2011, the agency caught the Chinese spying on the U.N. and managed to tap into their signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection to gain insight into high interest and high profile events at the time. Media reports in June based on documents leaked by Snowden claimed that the European Union mission to the U.N. in New York and its delegation in Washington, D.C. have also been bugged by the NSA, prompting E.U. officials to demand answers from the U.S. government. The NSA was able to maintain persistent access to computer networks at E.U. delegations in New York and Washington by taking advantage of the Virtual Private Network (VPN) linking them, Der Spiegel also reported Monday. "If we lose access to one site, we can immediately regain it by riding the VPN to the other side and punching a whole [sic] out," an internal NSA presentation said, according to the German magazine. "We have done this several times when we got locked out of Magothy." "Magothy" is the internal code name used by the NSA for the E.U. delegation in Washington, D.C. The code name used for the E.U. mission in New York is "Apalachee." New security systems were installed to protect the restricted area hosting the server room at the offices of the E.U. delegation to the U.N. in New York a few weeks ago, following the June reports about the NSA targeting the E.U.'s diplomatic missions in the U.S., Der Spiegel said. An investigation was launched and technicians have searched for bugs and checked the computer network. The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.www.networkworld.com/news/2013/082613-report-nsa-broke-into-un-273179.html?hpg1=bn
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Post by skywalker on Aug 26, 2013 20:53:24 GMT -6
They are demanding answers from the US government? Ha! That's a laugh. I can just imagine what answers they will get...
"Uhh...yes, we were spying on you and you can't do anything about it so shut up. Besides...it was Bush's fault. And not only that...it's not really spying because it was really just a weather balloon."
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Post by swamprat on Sept 7, 2013 8:53:55 GMT -6
LiveScience
Why the Latest NSA Leak Is the Scariest of AllPaul Wagenseil, TechNewsDaily Senior Editor September 06, 2013 The National Security Agency programs revealed yesterday (Sept. 5) in three media reports were perhaps the most important revelations yet this summer, and have profound implications for everyone who uses the Internet. The reports make clear that the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been methodically undermining the vast encryption-based "web of trust" that makes possible secure online financial transactions, communications and other sensitive transmissions. The spy agencies' activities have gone on for more than a decade. Like a silent but pervasive cancer, they have penetrated and weakened every corner of the Internet. "Not only does the worst possible hypothetical ... appear to be true," wrote Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green on his blog last night, "but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine." "The companies that build and manage our Internet infrastructure, the companies that create and sell us our hardware and software, or the companies that host our data: We can no longer trust them," wrote American encryption expert Bruce Schneier on the website of the British newspaper The Guardian. Subterfuge by any means necessaryThe surveillance programs, named "Manassas," "Bullrun" and "Edgehill" after battles in the American and English civil wars, not only built powerful computers to crack encryption protocols. They also coerced technology companies into handing over encryption keys, infiltrated NSA and GCHQ personnel onto corporate staffs, broke into the computer servers of uncooperative companies to steal information and ensured that some companies built "backdoors" into their technology so that the spy agencies would always have access. Perhaps most egregiously of all, the NSA and GCHQ deliberately poisoned publicly distributed encryption standards, used by hundreds of millions of people across the world every day, so that the standards would be secretly — but fatally — flawed. "The (actually substantial) goodwill that NSA built up in the public crypto community over the last two decades was wiped out today," tweeted University of Pennsylvania cryptography expert Matt Blaze. The implications are that, if they wanted to, the spy agencies could access nearly every Internet-based purchase, money transfer, email, Internet phone call, instant message or file transfer made by anyone, anywhere. Read more: www.livescience.com/39477-most-important-nsa-leak.html
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Post by skywalker on Sept 7, 2013 19:55:37 GMT -6
It's what we suspected they were doing all along. Now just wait until they start using all of that info to intimidate and control people...if they already haven't.
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Post by swamprat on Sept 8, 2013 9:16:44 GMT -6
WIRED
The Secret War
INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS, FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.By James Bamford Inside Fort Meade, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles. Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras. To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh. This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army. Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past eight years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.” In its tightly controlled public relations, the NSA has focused attention on the threat of cyberattack against the US—the vulnerability of critical infrastructure like power plants and water systems, the susceptibility of the military’s command and control structure, the dependence of the economy on the Internet’s smooth functioning. Defense against these threats was the paramount mission trumpeted by NSA brass at congressional hearings and hashed over at security conferences. But there is a flip side to this equation that is rarely mentioned: The military has for years been developing offensive capabilities, giving it the power not just to defend the US but to assail its foes. Using so-called cyber-kinetic attacks, Alexander and his forces now have the capability to physically destroy an adversary’s equipment and infrastructure, and potentially even to kill. Alexander—who declined to be interviewed for this article—has concluded that such cyberweapons are as crucial to 21st-century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th. And he and his cyberwarriors have already launched their first attack. The cyberweapon that came to be known as Stuxnet was created and built by the NSA in partnership with the CIA and Israeli intelligence in the mid-2000s. The first known piece of malware designed to destroy physical equipment, Stuxnet was aimed at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. By surreptitiously taking control of an industrial control link known as a Scada (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, the sophisticated worm was able to damage about a thousand centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material. The success of this sabotage came to light only in June 2010, when the malware spread to outside computers. It was spotted by independent security researchers, who identified telltale signs that the worm was the work of thousands of hours of professional development. Despite headlines around the globe, officials in Washington have never openly acknowledged that the US was behind the attack. It wasn’t until 2012 that anonymous sources within the Obama administration took credit for it in interviews with The New York Times. But Stuxnet is only the beginning. Alexander’s agency has recruited thousands of computer experts, hackers, and engineering PhDs to expand US offensive capabilities in the digital realm. The Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for “cyberspace operations,” even as the budget of the CIA and other intelligence agencies could fall by $4.4 billion. It is pouring millions into cyberdefense contractors. And more attacks may be planned. Read more; much more: www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/all/
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Post by Deleted on Sept 13, 2013 20:46:46 GMT -6
" Dubbed Bonesaw, the map displays the geolocation and digital address of basically every device connected to the Internet around the world, providing what’s called network situational awareness. "
from the article.
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This article is worth taking the time to read.
It explains why we should be worried.
Keep in mind that a cyberworm was used to destroy a nuclear facility in Iran. Another type of military attack would have cost way too many lives, and had been considered also.
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Post by swamprat on Dec 23, 2013 12:15:38 GMT -6
Today's "Non-Sequitur" by Wylie:
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