Sprint fed customer GPS data to cops over 8 million times: ars technica

“A blogger has released audio of Sprint's Electronic Surveillance Manager describing the carrier's cooperation with law enforcement. Among the revelations are that Sprint has so far filled over 8 million requests from LEOs for customer GPS data.

“By Jon Stokes | Last updated December 1, 2009 5:38 PM

“Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student at Indiana University's School of Informatics and Computing, has made public an audio recording of Sprint/Nextel's Electronic Surveillance Manager describing how his company has provided GPS location data about its wireless customers to law enforcement over 8 million times.

“Through a mix of documents unearthed by Freedom of Information Act requests and the aforementioned recording, Soghoian describes how ‘the government routinely obtains customer records from ISPs detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.’”

Sprint: 50 million customers, 8 million law enforcement GPS requests in 1 year from Christopher Soghoian on Vimeo.

Why Privacy Concerns are Ruining Facebook

PC World seems troubled by Facebook's elimination of regional networks:

"Facebook was built as a...social connector, allowing users to befriend others with similar interests, locations, schools, and more. But as privacy concerns mount…Facebook is eliminating regional networks -- or groupings of people based on where they live…

"Regional networks granted access to wider swaths of potential friends, but therein was the concern: how much is too much? Do we really want the entire city of Boston looking at last year's Halloween pictures? Is making friends with these strangers something I want to do?

"Facebook has had more than its share of privacy problems. There's the Beacon fiasco; the lawsuits; the federal complaints; international investigations; and schemes galore. There are also...methods to protect your privacy both on Facebook and online in general.

"Brennon Slattery

"Dec 2, 2009 9:29 am"

Lawsuit Demands Answers About Social-Networking Surveillance

Government Agencies Withholding Information on Data-Gathering from Facebook, Twitter, and Other Online Communities

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) …filed suit today against a half-dozen government agencies for refusing to disclose their policies for using social networking sites for investigations, data-collection, and surveillance.

Recent news reports have publicized the government's use of social networking data as evidence in various investigations, and Congress is currently considering several pieces of legislation that may increase protections for consumers…

"Millions of people use social networking sites like Facebook every day, disclosing lots of information about their private lives," said James Tucker, a student working with EFF…"As Congress debates new privacy laws covering sites like Facebook, lawmakers and voters alike need to know how the government is already using this data and what is at stake."

Kennedy assassination linked to UFOs and CIA

On November 12, 1963, President John Kennedy issued two Presidential memoranda instructing NASA and the CIA to begin cooperating with the USSR on joint space missions including a lunar landing. On the same day, a conversation occurred between Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on the importance of sharing information concerning UFOs as they moved forward with joint space missions. Leaked documents concerning the alleged conversation and the role of the CIA in controlling UFO information directly implicate the CIA in Kennedy’s assassination ten days later.

Abu Ghraib abuse photos 'show rape' - Telegraph

By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent and Paul Cruickshank
Last Updated: 8:21AM BST 28 May 2009

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

The graphic nature of some of the images may explain the US President’s attempts to block the release of an estimated 2,000 photographs from prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan despite an earlier promise to allow them to be published.

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

Terrorist Watchlist Has More Than One Million Names

By William Fisher

Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.

The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.

The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”

The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.

OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.

Torture: It Was Never Just “Sleep Deprivation”

What this L.A. Times story demonstrates is the proclivity of the CIA and other government torturing agencies to twist the meaning of words, and stuff into the nomenclature of one "technique" or procedures a veritable cornucopia of different torture methods. In this "enhanced interrogation" version of sleep deprivation, forced sleep deficit was...

read more | digg story

US declares public health emergency for swine flu

The precautionary step doesn't signal a greater threat to Americans. But it allows the federal and state governments easier access to flu tests and medications.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napilotano says roughly 12 million doses of the drug Tamiflu are being released from a federal stockpile so that states can get it if needed.

Napilotano said at a White House news conference Sunday that the emergency declaration is standard operating procedure — one was recently declare for the inauguration and for flooding.

The World Health Organization advised all countries to be on the lookout for "unusual" outbreaks of flu, after an emergency meeting Saturday as the seriousness of the outbreak became clear.

By Sunday, 81 deaths in Mexico had been deemed "likely linked" to swine flu. Viral testing has confirmed 20 cases, said Dr. Jose A. Cordova Villalobos, Mexico's health secretary.

read more | digg story

US ramps up cybersecurity focus

The White House should take direct control of US cybersecurity, the woman tipped to be President Obama's net security Czar has said.

Melissa Hathaway told a conference in San Francisco that the net had not been built with safety in mind.

read more | digg story


Researchers recently concluded the average number of unique new infected sites grew from 100,000-200,000 a day to 200,000-300,000 a day and this trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. In addition, the world recently witnessed the third cyber attack against a country (Kyrgyzstan).

PIN Crackers Nab Holy Grail of Bank Card Security

Hackers have crossed into new frontiers by devising sophisticated ways to steal large amounts of personal identification numbers, or PINs, protecting credit and debit cards, says an investigator. The attacks involve both unencrypted PINs and encrypted PINs that attackers have found a way to crack,...

read more | digg story

Rogue Wireless Gets Sneakier

Many companies conduct regular “war-walking” scans to detect rogue access points (ie. using Kismet or Netstumbler), or invest in commercial Wireless Intrusion Detection Systems (WIDS). However, there are sneaky ways to bypass traditional war-walking and WIDS systems.

read more | digg story

Largest Nuclear Plant in the U.S. Sealed Off After Discovery of Bomb

By David Schwartz PHOENIX (Reuters) - The Palo Verde nuclear power plant, the largest in the United States, was sealed off on Friday after security guards found a pipe bomb in a worker's pickup truck as he tried to enter the facility, officials said. The engineer had access to sensitive areas of the plant and was detained Friday by the sheriff's office and his apartment was searched. The result of the search was not yet known.

read more | digg story

6 Involved in Nuke Mistake Dead in Accidents

six people connected to last week's nuke mistake have died in accidents

read more | digg story

Big Brother is watching us all

Silence equals consent.

read more | digg story

Security expert used Tor to collect government e-mail passwords

A security expert who exposed the passwords and login information for a number of embassies and foreign government organizations revealed today that the information was acquired by operating a Tor node.Last month, Swedish security specialist Dan Egerstad exposed the passwords and login information for 100 e-mail accounts on embassy and government servers. In a blog entry today, Egerstad disclosed his methodology. He collected the information by running a specialized packet sniffer on five Tor exit nodes operated by his organization, Deranged Security. Tor is an onion routing service that facilitates anonymous Internet communication. Originally developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory and currently funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tor is designed to protect users from traffic analysis and other kinds of network surveillance. It works by relaying connections through a series of distributed network servers. When a Tor user visits a web site, the IP address detected and logged by that site will be the IP address of one of the Tor nodes rather than the actual user. This makes it possible for users to obscure their identity under certain circumstances.

read more | digg story