Obama Administration to Review NSA Capabilities

President Barack Obama has initiated a review of the procedures and methods that the NSA uses to collect intelligence at home and overseas to ensure that the agency isn’t overstepping its bounds in phone and Internet data collection. The review comes at a time when Congress is set to consider...

New Bill Would End Mass Surveillance

UPDATE: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner R-Wisc. is introducing a bill that would counteract many of the elements of the U.S. PATRIOT Act that enables the mass collection of data belonging to U.S. citizens. Sensenbrenner’s bill is called the USA FREEDOM Act, a quasi-acronym for Uniting and Strengthening...

Crypto Party, Anti-Surveillance Rally in DC

WASHINGTON — Saturday marked the 12-year anniversary of the initial signing of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, the anti-terrorism bill signed into law shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, sections of which have allegedly given federal law enforcement the authority to...

Snapchat Complies with Govt., Sends Images to Law Enforcement

Snapchat cleared up any doubts users may have had about the privacy surrounding images sent back and forth on its photo messaging service when the company confirmed this week that it has shared some images with law enforcement. Snapchat, started in 2011, has gained popularity over the last year –...

NSA Director Alexander Asked About Cell Location Collection

Did we hear the next shoe to drop in the NSA surveillance saga? Yesterday before a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, asked some pointed questions of NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander regarding whether the agency collects cell tower location data in addition t...

FISC: No Phone Company Ever Challenged Metadata Collection Orders

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 ...

Decision in Street View WiFi Case Could Hinder Some Security Research

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...

Insufficient Authorization vulnerability in Act

Hello 3APA3A! This is Insufficient Authorization vulnerability in Act. It is conference software on Perl. Besides Insufficient Authorization, there are a lot of other vulnerabilities in Act. ------------------------- Affected products: ------------------------- Vulnerable are all versions of Act...

Department of Transport UK - SQL Injection Vulnerability

Document Title: =============== Department of Transport UK - SQL Injection Vulnerability References Source: ==================== http://www.vulnerability-lab.com/getcontent.php?id=732 Release Date: ============= 2013-08-28 Vulnerability Laboratory ID VL-ID: ==================================== 73...

NSA Director Alexander Defends Surveillance at Black Hat

LAS VEGAS –NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander’s keynote today at Black Hat USA 2013 was a tense confessional, an hour-long emotional and sometimes angry ride that shed some new insight into the spy agency’s two notorious data collection programs, inspired moments of loud applause in support of the...

House Rejects Amendment to Sever NSA Data Collection Funding

By a narrow dozen votes, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday failed to pass an amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act of 2014 that would have severed funding for the NSA’s phone record surveillance program turned out by Edward Snowden. The amendment, put forth by Rep...

EFF: Forced Decryption Violates Fifth Amendment

If the government would like to force Jeffrey Feldman to decrypt the contents of the hard-drives and Dell computer found in his apartment, then they must offer him immunity and cannot use any of the information found on the devices as part of their case against him. That is what the Electronic...

Weaknesses in CFAA language exposed at Black Hat

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act CFAA can be unsettling even to the most stalwart security researcher. The law, enacted in 1986 and revisited several times since, is still littered with loopholes and nuances that can be leveraged by a prosecutor in a criminal case, or turned against a white hat i...

Appropriations Amendment Threatens to Cut Funding for NSA Collection Program

A small group of Congressmen is trying to cut off the funding for the NSA’s widespread collection of phone and Internet records under the “business records” collection provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The provision in FISA that enables law enforcement agencies to get access...

Congress Warns Section 215 May Not Be Renewed

Incensed at the way that the Department of Justice and the intelligence community have used the controversial section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday angrily questioned Justice and NSA officials about their surveillance of U.S. citizens and said that...

EFF, Eclectic Group of Organizations Sue NSA Over Data Collection

If politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes, wholesale government surveillance takes that to an entirely new level. The clearest evidence yet of the broad and diverse set of groups opposed to the NSA’s domestic spying programs came Tuesday when the EFF said that is representing a...

FAA Civil Aviation Registry Vulnerable to Data Breach

The Federal Aviation Administration’s FAA Civil Aviation Registry lacks proper security controls to prevent unauthorized access to its systems, according to a report based on a recent audit undertaken by the Office of the Inspector General OIG for the United States Department of Transportation Do...

DNI Clapper Says Statement to Congress About NSA Data Collection Was 'Erroneous'

In a highly unusual move, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Tuesday that he misspoke when he told a Congressional committee in March that the National Security Agency does not assemble dossiers on Americans. Clapper said at the time that the agency does not do so...

FAQ: The NSA Metadata and PRISM Programs

The details of extensive government surveillance of U.S. citizens through collection of cell phone metadata, and email and Internet activities through the PRISM program has raised a lot of questions and caused quite a bit of confusion about what’s actually happening. To help users sort through th...

California issued cease and desist order against Bitcoin Foundation

The Bitcoin Foundation has received a cease-and-desist letter from the California Department of Financial Institutions, which oversees banks, credit unions, and other financial organizations operating in the state. Jon Matonis, who is a board member at the Foundation, revealed the letter on Forbe...