Gag Order Eased on NSA surveillance Transparency Reporting

A gag order has been eased that prevented technology and telecommunications companies from reporting requests for customer data made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA. The move comes on the heels of announced surveillance reforms by President Obama on Jan. 17. Obama, during an...

Crypto Pioneers Write Letter on NSA Surveillance to Obama

Perhaps the biggest condemnation of President Obama’s address last Friday announcing reforms to the NSA’s surveillance programs was his failure to mention any of the agency’s alleged involvement in subverting cryptography standards and the impact that has had on the trustworthiness of products...

Verizon Releases First Transparency Report, Says Government Requests INcreasing

After months of public calls from privacy advocates and security experts, Verizon on Wednesday released its first transparency report, revealing that it received more than 164,000 subpoenas and between 1,000 and 2,000 National Security Letters in 2013. The report, which covers Verizon’s landline,...

CREDO Mobile Publishes Industry's First Transparency Report

Credo Mobile, the small San Francisco mobile provider that is reportedly the unnamed plaintiff in a suit that challenged the legality of national security letters, yesterday published its first transparency report, the first such report published by a mobile provider. Credo, which has raised tens...

Academics Call for End to Mass Surveillance

A group of hundreds of academics from countries around the world have started a petition that demands Western governments, such as those in the United States and UK, stop the mass surveillance programs they have in place and “effectively protect everyone’s fundamental rights and freedoms”. The...

AT&T, Verizon Announce Transparency Reports in 2014

One by one, the telecommunications giants at the heart of the NSA surveillance scandal are relenting to shareholder pressure and public demands for them to publish reports on government requests for user data. On Friday Verizon and AT&T announced their intent to begin producing transparency repor...

NSA Must Reform Practices, Organization

A presidentially appointed, five member panel issued a more than 300-page report yesterday calling for nearly 50 recommendations for changes in the way that the National Security Agency conducts its increasingly public and controversial sweeping surveillance programs. The entire report hinges on...

AT&T Refuses to Issue Transparency Report, Cites Privacy

Telecommunications giant AT&T has come under fire from privacy advocates after it acknowledged that it will not publicly disclose any of its dealings with the National Security Agency. The company claimed that protecting customer privacy is at the crux of its decision not to share government...

[Orchid] Tor Client for Java

Orchid is a Tor client implementation and library written in pure Java. It was written from the Tor specification documents, which are available here. Orchid runs on Java 5+ and the Android devices. How can Orchid be used? In a basic use case, running Orchid will open a SOCKS5 listener which can ...

Tech Companies Join Reform Government Surveillance Alliance

Eight massive technology companies including Facebook, Apple and Google make up a new coalition calling for a reform of surveillance practices, which the companies say are undermining trust in not only their respective services, but of the Internet as a medium for communication and commerce. The...

French Government Impersonates Google Digital Certificate

Google last week revoked digital certificates for some of its domains that had been fraudulently signed by an intermediate certificate authority with links to France’s cyber-defense agency. The Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information ANSSI claims that the spoofed Google...

Privacy, Human Rights Groups Form New Anti-Surveillance Coalition

A large group of privacy and digital rights organizations has put together a new effort to urge politicians to curtail the mass surveillance operations that have been exposed in the last few months. The new coalition has developed a set of 13 principles for governments to follow in their...

Passive Security Community Turned Activist

Security people like to call themselves a community, but until June some might say its greatest community achievement is turning Twitter into its own private and contentious echo chamber. But since the Snowden leaks, there’s been a palpable change and a marked swell in stand-taking. Tweeters have...

Surveillance Transparency Act Would Limit NSA Spying

There have been countless hearings in both the House and Senate since the Snowden leaks began in June, and there seems to be no end in sight. The latest committee to get in on the action was the Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, which held a...

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso Discuss Bug Bounties, Bitcoin and the Apple Report

Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso talk about the major stories from the last couple of weeks, including the changes to the Microsoft bug bounty program, the new Internet bug bounty, the Apple transparency report and a new paper on a weakness in Bitcoin. Download: digitalunderground133.mp3...

Apple Says It Has 'Never Received an Order Under Section 215'

In a new report detailing the number and kind of requests for user information it’s gotten from various governments, Apple said it has never received a request for information under Section 215 of the USA PATROT Act and would likely fight one if it ever came. The company also disclosed that it ha...

Tech Giants Plead for U.S. Surveillance Reforms

Giant technology companies have been vocal about the need for more transparency with regard to the national security requests for user data they receive. But until now, they’ve stayed out of the political fight to address government surveillance, in particular by the National Security Agency...

NSA Director Alexander Denies Spying on Europeans

Intelligence officials appearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday denied collecting the phone records of citizens in France, Spain and Italy, as recently reported by media outlets in those countries. “The assertions made by Le Monde of France, El Mundo of Spa...

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...

EFF: Congress Has Opportunity to Stop Mass Surveillance

Since the leaks of NSA surveillance methods began in June, there has been a flurry of activity in Congress, with members scurrying to line up on either side of the issue, either defending the agency’s methods or condemning them. That mad scramble also has included the introduction of a number of...