More UK Wiretaps and Voicemail Hacks

UK - Nick Brown, the former chief whip and key political ally of former prime minister Gordon Brown, became the latest public figure yesterday to say that he believes his private calls and messages were eavesdropped.

The Newcastle MP revealed that he believes his landline was the subject of an "amateurish" bugging operation around the time his homosexuality was made public in 1998.

Five years later, he was also approached by police investigating voicemail hacking claims and warned that his mobile phone may have been illegally accessed. The former Cabinet minister is the latest senior Labour figure to come forward with claims that his phone calls and messages were hacked. Tessa Jowell, the former culture secretary, revealed that her phone may have been accessed as recently as this week and she has hired lawyers to discover who hacked into her messages on 29 separate occasions in 2006. (more)

The Don of Wiretaps... Mr. Austin "I had the powers."

Barbados - The man who knows more about police and other wiretapping of phones, emails and text messages at Cable & Wireless Caribbean has been gently sacked with a large severance and a “consulting” contract designed to keep him loyal and silent.

Donald Austin, Executive Vice President for Legal and Regulatory Matters, and a C&W employee for over two decades, probably knows more about the interception of private communications in Barbados than any other person.

Barbados Police can legally wiretap without a court order or supervision.

Barbados has no laws governing wiretapping by the police. Our Barbados police can legally wiretap your phone or look at your email and internet data for just about any reason they choose – without a warrant, without any judicial oversight and without ever informing you that they have listened to or read everything.

When our police needed technical assistance from Cable & Wireless / LIME, Mr. Austin was the go-to-guy with the authority to dedicate C&W resources to the police. (more)

Toy Fair Spy Ware

via pocket-lint.com...

With a new age group demographic comes the opportunity to “gadget up” and with that Playmobil has launched a wireless digital video camera and remote control car to appeal to the masses keen on their tech.

The idea is that using the camera to give you a point of view from within the car, with the signal from the video automatically relayed back to a display you’ve bolted on to the remote control and Pocket-lint were at the Toy Fair to have a go. (more)

via toyxplosion.com...

 Here’s a fun, new and exciting toy to tell you about from Playmobil. It’s the Playmobil Spying Camera Set. According to the PlaymobilUSA website, the camera will be launched in the US in August. Or, you can pay a heftier amount to purchase it now on Amazon.

The Spy Camera Set includes a camera with USB port and a color monitor. The images shot from the camera are displayed on the monitor via wireless transmission.

News of The World Phone Hacking Case Re-Opened

UK - Scotland Yard said Wednesday it has reopened its investigation into illegal phone-hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s News of The World.

The Metropolitan Police said it had received “significant new information” from executives on the paper relating to events going back more than five years. The news comes as News International said it had fired the newspaper’s assistant news editor Ian Edmondson, after spending days trawling through his notebooks and emails in an attempt to establish the extent of phone hacking on the paper. (more)

PA - The former Pennsylvania state constable awaiting trial for allegedly threatening the lives of two law enforcement officers is now facing felony wiretapping and weapons charges.

An arrest warrant was issued Monday for William David Denny, 31, the elected Republican constable for Chester’s 11th Ward. Denny remains a constable, although he has not been working as such since criminal charges were lodged against him last year...

Denny went so far as to record himself filing the citizen’s complaint with the police chief’s office, investigators allege.

Denny secretly also recorded a May 28, 2008, meeting in Seaton’s district court office. The meeting between Seaton and Denny was allegedly videotaped with audio in violation of state law. In an interview with investigators, Seaton said he was unaware the recording was being made. He recalled the meeting as having been a “closed-door” meeting and gave no one permission for it to be recorded, the affidavit states. (more)

Why Corporate Counsel Should Lose Sleep Over the Federal Wiretap Act

The following is an excerpt from a long article which addresses several Federal Wiretap Act land mines in the corporate environment. 

One vulnerability, not fully explored, is the potential for employee lawsuits based on electronic eavesdropping (authorized or not) which the company failed to protect the employee against.

While not every employee can reasonably be expected to be a target of electronic surveillance, top executives and persons handling unusually valuable information could very well expect their employer to take reasonable security measures to protect them from being victimized.

One wiretap, undiscovered for just a day, could bring a judgment of $10,000.00, not to mention damages and attorneys' fees.

There are many other financial reasons quarterly Eavesdropping Detection Audits (TSCM) make good sense. The Federal Wiretap Act is just one of the reasons people don't think about very often.

via Philip Gordon, Corporate Counsel,

Once seen only in the shadows of the war against organized crime, the Federal Wiretap Act should now be moving steadily and rapidly toward the top of the corporate compliance checklist. Robust civil remedies, recent court decisions and technological developments have transformed the act's risk profile from a nonevent to a statute worthy of significant attention.

Although principally a criminal statute, the Federal Wiretap Act is unique among privacy laws in that it provides for substantial monetary damages without proof of actual harm.

Under the act, an aggrieved party can recover a minimum award of $10,000 or $100 per day of violation — whichever is greater, or, actual damages, plus punitive damages, attorneys' fees and costs. Comparing recent class action litigation involving security breaches with potential class actions involving the Federal Wiretap Act demonstrates the significantly pro-plaintiff aspect of this remedial scheme.

To date, the vast majority of security breach class actions have been dismissed, or resolved in the defendant's favor on summary judgment, because the plaintiff failed to plead or prove that the security breach at issue proximately caused any cognizable damage to class members.

By contrast, under the Federal Wiretap Act, proof that the violation proximately caused cognizable harm is unnecessary, and each individual plaintiff can recover a minimum of $10,000 even in the absence of actual damages. (more)

Philip L. Gordon is a shareholder in Littler Mendelson's Denver office, where he is the Chair of Littler's Privacy and Data Protection Practice Group.

Channel 5 Reports on New Phone Spyware

AL - This software has definitely spurred some debate between parents and their children. Parents love to know they can keep track of their son or daughter. Most teenagers are not too excited about it.

"It gives you as a parent the ability to protect your child, to walk beside them," explained Chase Chandler, the creator of this program. "Not that you're trying to maliciously spy in on your kids, because none of us as parents want to do that."

The program is called Big Daddy Spy, and it was released just a little over a month ago. Creator Chase Chandler admitted it was basically wiretapping, because it allows parents to "tap" into their children's phones without their knowledge. (more) 


No mention of the debate between spouses and other jealous consenting adults.

FX's hilarious animated spy satire, "Archer," is consistently wrong on multiple levels, which accounts for much of the reason it's consistently hilarious.

Equally important, though, "Archer" doesn't regard racist, sexist, ageist and just plain impolite jokes as an end in themselves.

The tasteless humor instead just flows naturally from the dysfunctional bunch of neurotics and misfits who populate the erratic spy agency ISIS.

Amid a blizzard of appalling dialogue, the viewer becomes genuinely interested in many of the characters. That's not to be confused with liking them, but even though they look and speak like toons, they come across as rather human. Except they're funnier than most humans, because they take full advantage of the fact that toons can say things humans cannot. (more)

Security Director Alert - Yet Another Printer Security Issue

Add one more device to the list of things you need to protect from hackers: The humble printer.

In two separate presentations scheduled for the Shmoocon hacking conference in Washington, D.C., next week, researchers will show how hackers can use printers to compromise a company's computer network. One presentation will reveal how poorly secured printers can even be grouped together to act as online storage for cybercriminals. (more)

Poltergeist Man Eavesdropping Case Slated for Trial

MI - A jury could decide the fate of a 36-year-old Midland parolee charged with hiding an eavesdropping device in his neighbor’s bedroom.

The word poltergeist actually means noisy ghost.

Paul A. Rivard faces is scheduled to go to trial Monday, March 14, in Circuit Judge Michael J. Beale’s courtroom. Rivard is charged with second-degree home invasion, larceny in a building, eavesdropping and aggravated stalking.

Investigators allege Rivard broke into his neighbor’s home several times between August and November, once hiding a baby monitor under a dresser, Bay City Times records show. Authorities also claim Rivard burned and buried clothing belonging to the neighbors, broke furniture and rearranged items inside the house, according to reports. (more)

In what country can you get a 15-year prison sentence for recording your public conversation with a law enforcement officer?

In Illinois, recording a conversation is a Class 1 felony unless all parties consent; just below the prison time you'd spend for murder

via Jason Mick - Daily Tech

 "We've often written on the disconnect between current laws and the reality of the digital age. When a person gets charged over a million dollars for pirating and sharing a few songs, and a robber stealing a dozen CDs might have to a pay a few hundred in fines, the system can seem incredibly flawed at times.

Another example of this disconnect that has recently been brought into sharp focus include laws that police are using to try to prosecute those that digitally record their actions. We already covered how police in some areas can arrest you, if you videotape or photograph them in a public or private setting. Well, in some areas they can arrest you for even recording an audio conversation.

Illinois is one of the states with the toughest laws against audiotaping a conversation between you and another party without their knowledge. The law [text] states that you can face up to 15 years in prison for committing the offense."  (more) 

Two real life examples... (more) (more)

"Bug-in-a-Book" project at the Spy Museum - January 30th

David Simpson says...
We all love spy gear, from the wacky Maxwell Smart rotary-dial shoephone to the grab bag of goodies Bond always so nonchalantly snares from Q. Thank you, MAKE, for Volume 16, the "Spy Tech" issue, which featured Mad Magazine's iconic Spy vs. Spy on the cover. In that issue, you can find my wireless "Bug-in-a-Book" project. The guts come from readily available Radio Shack components (a mini FM transmitter for listening to your iPod through the car stereo and a grandpa-tech amplified listener). 

Fast forward: I'll be leading that workshop at the Spy Museum January 30th.

The session will open with an "NCIS-like" briefing, laying out an impeding threat and mission, but I can't divulge the full details here. Let's just say that this whole thing was triggered by an encrypted message intercepted by an allied listening post off the coast of Algeria on one of the long wave frequencies known to be used by a US-based black market arms dealer and certain intermediaries representing a radical militant religious group targeting pro-western nations. Maybe by now it's becoming clearer; the well-being of the free world lies in the hands of the young makers that attend this workshop and the intelligence they're able to gather during surveillance using their field-made Bug-in-a-Book. (more)

Cell Phone Bugging Hack

Black Hat, Washington, DC - A European researcher today showed how bugs he has discovered in the baseband chipset firmware of iPhone and Android smartphones could be exploited to ultimately take control of these devices.

Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, a researcher at the University of Luxembourg, was poised here to demonstrate an exploit he created that turns on the auto-answer feature on the affected smartphones and then uses them as remote listening devices. But he was unable to get his demo to run live successfully, in part due to poor cellular reception in the hotel where the conference was held.

Despite the demo glitch, security experts say the research marks a new generation of smartphone hacking. (more)

SpyCam Story #598 - The Tax Man Attacks

FL - On January 13, 2011, a jury awarded damages of $476,200.00 against Kenneth Wayne Ryals, a landlord who had serially spied on his young female tenants by means of a micro video camera hidden in a DVD player he provided with the rental. 

Mr. Ryals, who is an Internal Revenue Service agent, had confessed to the Davie Police Department that he had watched Plaintiff for his viewing pleasure... 

Further, despite the pendency of the lawsuit, Mr. Ryals willfully destroyed all the physical evidence in the case, eleven pieces of electronic equipment, including the spy cam that he had hidden in the plaintiffs bedroom...

The plaintiff filed the suit in hopes that her suit would appeal to Mr. Ryals conscience and encourage him to stop preying on young women like herself. Mr. Ryals, however, has never shown any remorse for his conduct. Within a week of his arrest by the Davie Police for video voyeurism on September 14, 2007, he was soliciting new female renters through the website Roommates.com. (more)

SpyCam Story #597 - Heart Doc Attack

NY - A doctor who hid a video camera in the bathroom of his Manhasset medical office has been sentenced to 45 days in jail.

Prosecutors say 56-year-old cardiologist Vincent Pacienza, of North Hills, installed the camera in an air purifier so he could spy on unsuspecting women. They say he watched the camera's video feed on a monitor hidden beneath his desk.

The camera was discovered after an employee saw an invoice from a surveillance equipment company and became suspicious. (more)

He probably bought it already assembled.