Following the lead of Google, Twitter and other major Internet companies, Yahoo has issued its first transparency report, revealing that it received more than 12,000 requests for user data from the U.S. government in the first half of 2013. The company disclosed user content in nearly a third of those requests. The data released by […]
In the wake of the revelations surrounding the NSA’s domestic surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations, security experts said there would likely be a natural uptick in the usage of privacy focused tools such as Tor, PGP and other encryption services. In the case of Tor, there has been more than a slight increase–the number of Tor […]
In response to a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Department of Justice is preparing to release a trove of documents related to the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.
Facebook complied with 79 percent of the government requests for user data it received, according to its first transparency report.
Newly declassified documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the EFF show that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2011 declared that the National Security Agency’s techniques for collecting upstream Internet communications was unconstitutional and illegal.
It has been a rough few months for the National Security Agency, and specifically for its director, Gen. Keith Alexander. Now, there’s a petition, on the White House’s own Web site, to have Alexander removed from his position.
A member of Facebook’s security team acknowledged over the weekend that the group could’ve taken further steps to verify a vulnerability initially brought to their attention by an independent security researcher last week but that the company largely adhered to its bug disclosure policy.
Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso discuss the news from Black Hat and DEF CON, particularly the fact that the Web seems to be broken and that a lot of the attacks revealed in Las Vegas don’t have easy solutions.
When Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency and chief of U.S. Cyber Command, agreed to deliver the opening keynote at Black Hat USA 2013, he had no idea that by the time he took the stage many of the NSA’s most secret information-collection programs would be public knowledge, thanks to Edward Snowden.
The pervasive bulk surveillance performed by the NSA and other government agencies that’s been revealed in recent weeks relies on court orders, as do other kinds of legal access operations, such as wiretapping or lawful intercepts. Those orders are shrouded in secrecy and the organizations that receive them often comply immediately without asking any questions, a response that can sometimes be a mistake.
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