Microsoft is Giving the FBI BitLocker Keys

Microsoft gives the FBI the ability to decrypt BitLocker in response to court orders: about twenty times per year. It's possible for users to store those keys on a device they own, but Microsoft also recommends BitLocker users store their keys on its servers for convenience. While that means...

Surveillance through Push Notifications

The Washington Post is reporting on the FBIs increasing use of push notification data--"push tokens"--to identify people. The police can request this data from companies like Apple and Google without a warrant. The investigative technique goes back years. Court orders that were issued in 2019 to...

Microsoft Takedown Domains Used in Cyberattack Against Ukraine

Microsoft seized seven domains it claims were part of ongoing cyberattacks by what it said are state-sponsored Russian advanced persistent threat actors that targeted Ukrainian-related digital assets. The company obtained court orders to take control of the domains it said were used by Strontium,...

VPNs and Trust

TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on. Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated i...

Microsoft Hijacks Necurs Botnet that Infected 9 Million PCs Worldwide

Microsoft today announced that it has successfully disrupted the botnet network of the Necurs malware, which has infected more than 9 million computers globally, and also hijacked the majority of its infrastructure. The latest botnet takedown was the result of a coordinated operation involving...

The Dangers of Secret Law

Last week, the Department of Justice released 18 new FISC opinions related to Section 702 as part of an EFF FOIA lawsuit. Of course, they don't mention EFF or the lawsuit. They make it sound as if it was their idea. There's probably a lot in these opinions. In one Kafkaesque ruling, a defendant w...

Signal is Most Secure Messenger, 'Useless Data' Obtained by FBI Proves It All

Do you trust your messaging app even though it uses end-to-end encryption? As I previously said end-to-end encryption doesn't mean that your messages are secure enough to hide your trace. It's because most of the messaging apps still record and store a lot of metadata on your calls and messages...

Apple Transparency Report Government Requests for Data

Apple’s latest transparency report published on Wednesday shows a big increase in the number of law enforcement and government requests for account and device data. Publication of the report comes on the heels of the latest chapter in the Apple-FBI tussle over encryption and privacy. Tuesday’s...

Microsoft Wins Widespread Support in Privacy Clash With Govt.

Microsoft’s lawsuit against the U.S. government for the right to tell its customers when a federal agency is looking at their emails is getting widespread support by privacy advocates. For many, Microsoft’s stance lends an important and powerful voice to ongoing efforts to reform the Electronic...

California Kills Phone Decryption Bill

Civil liberty groups and tech firms are celebrating the defeat of a controversial California bill that would have forced phone makers to decrypt their devices by court order. The proposed legislation, AB 1681, died when lawmakers refused to give the bill a vote. But opponents of the bill, who...

Anti-Encryption Bill Released, would Kill your Privacy and Security

The United States anti-encryption bill will kill your Privacy. In the wake of the Apple vs. FBI case, two leading Intelligence Committee Senators have introduced an anti-encryption bill that would effectively ban strong encryption. Senators Richard Burr R-NC and Dianne Feinstein D-CA released the...

Facebook's Vice President Arrested in Brazil for Refusing to Share WhatsApp Data

Apple is not the only technology giant battling against authorities over a court order; Facebook is also facing the same. Brazil’s federal police arrested Facebook Latin America Vice President for failing to comply with court orders to help investigators in a drug trafficking case that involves...

FBI Director Asks Tech Companies to At least Don't Offer End-to-End Encryption

FBI declared War against Encryption. Encryption is defeating government intelligence agencies to detect terrorist activities and after the recent ISIS-linked terror attacks in Paris and California, the issue has once again become a political target in Washington. ...and meanwhile, Kazakhstan plan...

CloudFlare Transparency Report Shows Spike in Court Orders

In its latest transparency report, CloudFlare says that the number of subpoenas it has received has remained steady since last year, but the volume of court orders has more than doubled since the second half of last year. While much of the data from CloudFlare’s report for the first half of 2015...

FBI Director to Silicon Valley: 'Try Harder' to Find 'Going Dark' Solution

The United States government has eased off off its demands for “exceptional access” to encrypted communication, and instead volleyed the problem back to technology companies and asked them to try harder to come up with a solution. The government’s concern is that recent enhancements to encryption...

Government Requests for Facebook User Data Increasing

Facebook’s latest transparency report shows that U.S law enforcement agencies issued a greater number of total requests for user data related to criminal investigations in the first six months of 2014 than they have over any previous such period. This report, per Justice Department reporting...

AOL Releases Transparency Report Lobbies for USA FREEDOM Act

Noting that Saturday was the 13th anniversary of the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Web giant AOL this week released its latest transparency report, detailing estimations of how many Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA orders and National Security Letters NSLs it’s received in the las...

Microsoft Exec Says Company Has Never Been Asked to Backdoor a Product

One of Microsoft’s top security executives said the company has never been asked by the United States government to build a backdoor into any of its products, and if the company was asked, it would fight the order in the courts. Since the Edward Snowden revelations began last summer, there have...

Comcast Transparency Report

Another day, another transparency report from a company trying to put some distance between itself and the United States’ broad surveillance apparatus. Today’s report comes from Comcast, the largest Internet service provider in the U.S., who “takes customer privacy very seriously, and holds it in...

CloudFlare Issues Transparency Report

CloudFlare claims government requests for user data are affecting fewer than .017 percent of their two million global customers The Web performance and security company yesterday issued the report in accordance with the Department of Justice’s new regulations for publishing information pertaining...