Bad news headlines for you netrooters including the one about U.S. appeals court kills net neutrality . But I don't know which is worse, that one, or
Here’s the horrifying new way the NSA spies on offline computersBy Zach Epstein on Jan 15, 2014 at 8:30 AM
Email @zacharye
Security
NSA Spying Offline Computers
Believe it or not, there are still new revelations to be had regarding the various ways America’s National Security Agency spies on its targets. Just days before President Obama is expected to reveal a number of significant changes to the spying programs employed by the NSA,a new report from The New York Times sheds light on a previously unknown NSA spying tactic that allows the agency to conduct surveillance on computers that aren’t even connected to the Internet.
“While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials,” The Times’ David Sanger and Thom Shanker wrote. “The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers. In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.”
But before you go tearing apart your computer, the article says its mostly used on Chinese military and besides, has not the President reassured us that NSA not spying on US hmmmmm ????
And really, what could possibly go wrong especially if it were to be NSA contractors doing it ?
Well, the Senate heard from the President's Panel this week, and the news was not good.
The Guardian
The members of president Barack Obama’s surveillance review panel on Tuesday rejected some of the central contentions offered by the National Security Agency for its bulk collection of phone records, including the program’s potential usefulness in preventing the 9/11 attacks.
Testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, members of the panel said that restricting the NSA is necessary in order to rebalance the competing values of liberty and security.
Richard Clarke, who was the White House's counter-terrorism czar on 9/11, echoed the 9/11 Commission in saying that the biggest obstacle to preventing the terrorist attack was not the NSA collecting an insufficient amount of data, but a failure to share information already collected.
“If the information that the federal agencies had at the time had been shared among the agencies, then one of them, the FBI, could have gone to the Fisa Court and could have in a very timely manner gotten a warrant to monitor” US-based al-Qaida conspirators, Clarke told the Senate judiciary committee.
Good News Headlines ?
Well at least there is some good news
in the tech headlines this morning:
New Twitter for paranoids uses Bitcoin and BitTorrent to hide from NSA
Phone companies may have to change the way they help the NSA spy on you
Yes We Can: Obama to announce major changes to NSA spy programs this week
NSA isn't content with current spying powers, wants quantum computer
NSA scandal has spawned an industry for spy-proof smartphones
Have great day, all !