Gen. Keith Alexander and the National Security Agency continue to struggle to win back the public and political support they’ve lost while keeping their tenuous grasp on the collection tools they’ve been employing for more than a decade.
NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander faced questions about whether the spy agency collects cell location data on Americans yesterday during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
WASHINGTON–Faced with trying to accomplish its mission in an environment that suddenly has become quite hostile and inquisitive about its methods, the National Security Agency is becoming more and more public about the challenges that lie ahead and how the agency plans to address them. One of the key parts of this is a public […]
While Congress and the technology community are still debating and discussing the intelligence gathering capabilities of NSA revealed in recent months, the agency’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, is not just defending the use of these existing tools, but is pitching the idea of sharing some of the vast amounts of threat and vulnerability data the NSA and other agencies possess with organizations in the private sector.
It’s no fun being a cynic, thinking that everything is bad and getting worse. It’s easy–especially in the security community–but it’s not fun. But, in light of the latest in the interminable string of revelations about the NSA’s efforts to eat away at the foundation of the security industry, the only alternative available is the equivalent of believing in unicorn-riding leprechauns.
With all of the disturbing revelations that have come to light in the last few weeks regarding the NSA’s collection methods and its efforts to weaken cryptographic protocols and security products, experts say that perhaps the most worrisome result of all of this is that no one knows who or what they can trust anymore.
A newly declassified opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from this summer shows the court’s interpretation of the controversial Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act that’s used to justify the National Security Agency’s bulk telephone metadata collections, and reveals that none of the companies that have been served with such orders has ever challenged one.
The decision by the Ninth Circuit Court last week to allow the class-action suit against Google over its collection of WiFi data to continue was welcomed as good news by privacy advocates, but it may have considerable consequences for security researchers who collect such data during legitimate research projects.
A newly public contract shows that the NSA last year bought a subscription to the zero-day service sold by French security firm VUPEN.
A Belgian telecom company that handles some of the undersea cables that carry international voice traffic said Monday that its internal network had been compromised sometime in the last few months and malware had planted on some of its systems. Belgacom said the attack only affected its own systems, and not those of customers, and said it has filed a complaint with the Belgian federal authorities about the incident.
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