Monthly Archives: January 2014

NSA Spying: Rand Paul Plans Obama Lawsuit

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A Republican Senator says he will take legal action against President Obama for "snooping on the American people," following revelations from Edward Snowden of unlawful spying by the NSA.

Rand Paul is urging anyone in the US with a mobile phone to join the group action which declares the government is not permitted to access the public's emails and phone records without a warrant.

Mr Paul said the purpose of the action is to "protect the Fourth Amendment," the part of the US Constitution which prevents unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The question here is whether or not, constitutionally, you can have a single warrant apply to millions of people," he told Fox News.

"So we thought, what better way to illustrate the point than having hundreds of thousands of Americans sign-up for a class-action suit."

Mr Paul's move comes as a secretive US intelligence court decided the NSA can continue to collect phone data from American citizens for at least another 90 days.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) renewed the NSA surveillance programme on Friday, despite a panel of advisors advising the President Obama that a warrant must be obtained for each search.

US government lawyers have also moved to block a surprise decision by a district judge that ruled the NSA phone records programme was unlawful.

Judge Richard Leon said the NSA's programme was "almost Orwellian," a reference to George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.

He added there was little evidence the operation had prevented terrorist attacks, a conclusion also reached by the advisory panel to President Obama.

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NSA Spying: Rand Paul Plans Obama Lawsuit

Businesses Deny Helping NSA Plant Bugs in Americans’ Gadgets

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NSA spying could wreak havoc on the national economy, cost the IT space $35-45 billion, creating a digital recession

The stuff of dystopian science fiction has become the reality that Americans are living in. Newly published documents reveal the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is engaging in behavior that many Constitutional experts condemn as criminal.

I. No One is Safe From Those Who Claim to Protect Our Safety

To the NSA every American is a potential criminal. So it uses techniques it borrowed from cybercriminals against every American.

Every American is a target. Your data is mined. It is "temporarily" stored for 15 years. If you type a suspicious query in search engines or social networks, the NSA's autonomous attack system, targets you for deep attacks. These deep attacks reportedly literally watch tens of thousands, if not millions of Americans via compromised webcams.

The NSA has admitted to violating the law "accidentally" thousands of times a year, but refuses to allow outside parties to inspect its behavior. It won't even given special Congressional committees the full story on its tactics. Agents have spied on former lovers. And documents show the last two Presidents have spied on political rivals (including Quakers and Occupy Wall Street activists).

But the NSA documents reveal in Germany this week show there's more.

II. Complicit or Victims? Either Way the Sabotage Threatens to Create an American IT Industry Recession

Jacob Appelbaum, a University of Washington (UW) security research remarked in a weekend keynote:

This part of a constant theme of sabotaging and undermining American companies and American ingenuity. As an American, while generally not a nationalist I find this disgusting, especially as someone that writes free software and would like my tax dollars spent on improving these things. And when they know about them I don't want them to keep it a secret because all of us are vulnerable. It's a really scary thing.

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Businesses Deny Helping NSA Plant Bugs in Americans' Gadgets

Australian Encryption | Text encryption software for the protection of your privacy – Video

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Australian Encryption | Text encryption software for the protection of your privacy
Introduction to a fun feature of Encrypt Advanced - text encryption software by Australian Encryption for the protection of your privacy. We show you how qui...

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Australian Encryption | Text encryption software for the protection of your privacy - Video

How Encryption Works – HowStuffWorks "Computer"

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When we use the Internet, we're not always just clicking around and passively taking in information, such as reading news articles or blog posts -- a great deal of our time online involves sending others our own information. Ordering something over the Internet, whether it's a book, a CD or anything else from an online vendor, or signing up for an online account, requires entering in a good deal of sensitive personal information. A typical transaction might include not only our names, e-mail addresses and physical address and phone number, but also passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs).

The incredible growth of the Internet has excited businesses and consumers alike with its promise of changing the way we live and work. It's extremely easy to buy and sell goods all over the world while sitting in front of a laptop. But security is a major concern on the Internet, especially when you're using it to send sensitive information between parties.

Let's face it, there's a whole lot of information that we don't want other people to see, such as:

Information security is provided on computers and over the Internet by a variety of methods. A simple but straightforward security method is to only keep sensitive information on removable storage media like portable flash memory drives or external hard drives. But the most popular forms of security all rely on encryption, the process of encoding information in such a way that only the person (or computer) with the key can decode it.

In this article, you will learn about encryption and authentication. You will also learn about public-key and symmetric-key systems, as well as hash algorithms.

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How Encryption Works - HowStuffWorks "Computer"