Tech Companies, Privacy Advocates Call for NSA Reform

A group of technology companies, non-profits and privacy and human rights organizations have sent a letter to President Barack Obama, the director of national intelligence and a wide range of Congressional leaders, calling for an end to the bulk collection of phone metadata under Section 215 of t...

Facebook Transparency Report: Government Requests Down

Facebook today reported a slight drop in government requests for user data, bucking a trend that peaked during the first half of 2014 with the highest numbers the company had seen. Its latest transparency report covers the second half of last year, and shows slight dips in requests for user data,...

Cheezburgers, Warrant Canaries and Cat Memes

Surveillance, privacy and security are serious subjects. So too, for some people, are cat memes and GIFs of screaming goats. And Cheezburger Inc., the premier purveyor of said memes and GIFs, wants its users to know that the company is standing up for their rights. The folks at Cheezburger have...

Canary Watch Site Launches to Track Warrant Canaries

In the years since Edward Snowden began putting much of the NSA‘s business in the street, including its reliance on the secret FISA court and National security Letters, warrant canaries have emerged as a key method for ISPs, telecoms and other technology providers to let the public know whether...

Reddit Publishes its First Transparency Report

Reddit on Thursday published its first transparency report, joining the litany of technology and online service providers who have already shed light on their privacy practices, and the extent to which governments makes requests for user information. Reddit thrives on user-submitted content...

Venafi to Launch Certificate Transparency Log

Three weeks after the first non-Google public log for Certificate Transparency was launched by DigiCert, officials at Venafi said that the company plans to debut its own public CT log. On Jan. 1 Google approved the use of DigiCert’s log, the first CT log that is independent and not operated by...

Government Demands for Verizon Customer Data Drop

The number of subpoenas, total orders and warrants that the United States government delivered to Verizon all dropped in the second half of 2014, according to the company’s latest transparency report. The giant telecom provider released data on Thursday that showed a decrease in subpoenas of abou...

NSA Official: Support for Compromised Dual EC Algorithm Was 'Regrettable'

In a new article in an academic math journal, the NSA’s former director of research says that the agency’s decision not to withdraw its support of the Dual ECDRBG random number generator after security researchers found weaknesses in it and questioned its provenance was a “regrettable” choice...

Certificate Transparency Moves Forward With First Independent Log

The Certificate Transparency scheme proposed by Google engineers has taken a couple of significant steps forward recently, with the approval of the first independent certificate log and the passing of a deadline for all extended validation certificates to be CT-compliant or lose the green indicat...

Google Releases End-To-End Chrome Extension to Open Source

Google yesterday announced that it has released the source code for its End-to-End extension for Chrome to open source via GitHub. End-to-End enables Gmail users to encrypt, sign and verify email messages within the Chrome browser, using OpenPGP. “We’ve always believed strongly that End-To-End mu...

Mozilla to Support Certificate Transparency in Firefox

Mozilla is planning to add support for Certificate Transparency checks in Firefox in the near future, but the company says that the feature won’t be turned on by default at first. Certificate Transparency is a proposal from engineers at Google that would help resolve some of the issues with...

EFF, Privacy Groups Say NIST Crypto Standards Must be Free From Backdoors

The EFF and a long list of civil and privacy groups have sent a letter to NIST, emphasizing the need for the agency to create “a process for establishing secure and resilient encryption standards, free from back doors or other known vulnerabilities.” The letter comes at a time when the agency is ...

Lame Duck Senate to Vote on NSA Reforming USA FREEDOM Act

The United States Senate will move to vote on the USA FREEDOM Act before the current congressional session closes at the end of the year, a move that pleases digital rights groups. In its current form, the bill would ban the bulk collection of Americans’ private records while granting the...

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...

Twitter Files Suit Over Government Restrictions on National Security Letter Data

Twitter has filed a lawsuit in federal court asking that the United States Department of Justice’s prohibitions on publishing the number and kind of government requests for data the company receives be declared unconstitutional. The suit claims that the rules infringe on Twitter’s right to free...

September 2014 Yahoo Transparency Report

There was less clamor from governments and law enforcement around the world for data collected and stored by Yahoo, but nonetheless, the technology giant still fielded more than 18,000 data requests over the first six months of the year. Yahoo yesterday released its third Transparency Report, and...

New Initiative Simply Secure Aims to Make Security Tools Easier to Use

The dramatic revelations of large-scale government surveillance and deep penetration of the Internet by intelligence services and other adversaries have increased the interest of the general public in tools such as encryption software, anonymity services and others that previously were mainly of...

Apple CEO Tim Cook Says Company Dedicated to Protecting Users' Privacy

While much of the tech community is still swooning over the iPhone 6, Apple Pay and Apple Watch, the company’s top executive is spending a lot of time and energy trying to reassure customers that Apple is doing everything it can to protect their privacy and the security of their data. Apple CEO T...

2014 Google Transparency Report Requests for Data Up Again

Against a backdrop of new surveillance programs being uncovered in New Zealand and allegations of the NSA and GCHQ’s penetration of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, Google yesterday published its biannual Transparency Report for the first half of 2014. Google’s numbers reflect not only a continually...