Spy News Bites

We're not the only ones...

Russia - President Vladimir Putin has defended the right by Russian special services to wiretap... “If this [wiretapping] is made within the framework of the law, by which the special services’ rules of conduct are guided, this is normal." (more)

Canada has also been electronically eavesdropping on Canadians and others, scouring global telephone records and Internet data for patterns of suspicious activity, a newspaper said Monday. (more)

Panama - A TV journalist and cameraman were detained by police while working on a story... about alleged government wiretaps. (more)

Former Bulgarian interior minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov was indicted Wednesday in connection with a scandal over the irregular wiretapping of top politicians and businessmen, sources said. (more)

Not to be left out...

DC - The IRS... is ordering surveillance equipment that includes hidden cameras in coffee trays, plants and clock radios. The IRS wants to secure the surveillance equipment quickly – it posted a solicitation on June 6 and is looking to close the deal by Monday, June 10. (more)

PA - The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would... add audio surveillance to security cameras already mounted in school buses. (more)

Taiwan - Taiwan's top intelligence body is seeking a change to the law to expand its power to conduct wiretapping in anti-espionage operations. (more) (copycats)

Nigeria - The Bayelsa (state) Government awarded a contract valued at N3.6 billion for electronic surveillance in the state... to the Chinese Firm, Wali... The governor appealed to residents of the state to cooperate with the contractors... (more)

Unintended Consequences...

NSA leaks will... significantly increase the level of state-sponsored economic espionage directed against American companies. (more)

Sales of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 have skyrocketed following revelations about secret US spying on internet data. (more)

'I listened to Marilyn die': Private eye who bugged Monroe's house reveals details...

Files shedding new light on Marilyn Monroe's last night alive and her relationships with President John F Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby have emerged 51 years after her death.

Documents belonging to the late Fred Otash, one of Hollywood's most notorious private detectives, were uncovered by his daughter Colleen after being found in a suburban storage unit.

...in his notes, Otash claimed: 'I listened to Marilyn Monroe die.'

He recorded that on August 5 1962, she had a violent argument with the Kennedys and that she felt that she had been 'passed around like a piece of meat'.

The notes read: 'She was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down.'

'She's in the bedroom and Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.'

Otash only found out she had died later on.

A red filing cabinet that contained Otash's most sensitive material was removed from his apartment by his lawyer after he collapsed from an apparent heart attack. Its contents were never seen again. (more)

Cool but Off-Topic - Beer Bottle Record

19th Century technology meets 21st Century music over a bottle of beer in the latest extension to the Beck’s Record Label project. 

This time, the art label has evolved, and been replaced by the grooves of Auckland band Ghost Wave. Their new single was inscribed into the surface of a Beck’s beer bottle which could then be played on a specially-built device based on Thomas Edison’s original phonograph. 

Making the world’s first playable beer bottle was a formidable technical challenge. (more with video)

Top 10 iPhone Passwords

Time to change your password.

1. “1234”
2. “0000”
3. “2580”
4. “1111”
5. “5555”
6. “5683”
7. “0852”
8. “2222”
9. “1212”
10. “1998”
(more)

Oh, Number 6, it spells LOVE.

New "Surveillance-Industrial State" Book Coming

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and investigative journalist is working on a book about the "surveillance-industrial state" that emerged after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Penguin Press announced Thursday that it had acquired a book by Barton Gellman, a contributing editor at large for Time magazine and a Washington Post reporter. The book, currently untitled, does not have a release date. (more)

Barton also has a great blog... CounterSpy

Cloak of Invisibility Emerges from the Labs

To make a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak requires the use of materials that have what's known as a negative refractive index over all optical wavelengths, from red to violet. 

You don't see yourself.

However, the artificially-structured optical materials from which cloaks are made thus far have been restricted to a very narrow range of optical wavelengths, limiting their ability to cloak over a range of colors. 

That obstacle to progress looks to be at an end, as a group of optical engineers at Stanford has succeeded in designing a broadband metamaterial that exhibits a negative refractive index over nearly the entire rainbow...

The broad bandwidth of the new Stanford metamaterial suggests that this new class of materials will one day allow the fabrication of invisibility cloaks that are truly invisible, at least to the human eye. Beyond this, the extraordinary freedom to control light with metamaterials is likely to lead to hordes of applications never previously imagined. (more) (original paper) (lab-shirt) (How to hide a bug from an IR viewer.)

Imagine the impact on eavesdropping and spying.

Spybusters Tip #631 - Top Four Anti-Surveillance Apps

...as reported by Violet Blue for Zero Day.
Text Secure (play.google.com)
TextSecure encrypts your text messages over the air and on your phone. It's almost identical to the normal text messaging application, and is just as easy to use.

Red Phone (play.google.com)
RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in.

Onion Browser (Apple iTunes)
Onion Browser is a minimal web browser that encrypts and tunnels web traffic through the Tor onion router network and provides other tools to help browse the internet while maintaining privacy. 

Orbot (play.google.com)
Orbot is a "proxy app that empowers other apps to use the internet more securely. It uses Tor to encrypt Internet traffic and hide it by basically bouncing through a series of computers around the world; it is the official version of the Tor onion routing service for Android. (more)

Thoughts on a PRISM Term

by James B. Rule, a sociologist and a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

"THE revelation that the federal government has been secretly gathering records on the phone calls and online activities of millions of Americans and foreigners seems not to have alarmed most Americans... We privacy watchers and civil libertarians think this complacent response misses a deeply worrying political shift of vast consequence...

Institutions and techniques predictably outlive the intentions of their creators. J. Edgar Hoover went before Congress in 1931 to declare that “any employee engaged in wiretapping will be dismissed from the service of the bureau.” A few decades later, F.B.I. agents were in full pursuit of alleged Communist sympathizers, civil rights workers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — using wiretapping, break-ins and other shady tactics.

We must also ask how far we want government to see into our private lives, even in the prevention and punishment of genuine wrongdoing. The promise that one especially egregious sort of crime (terrorism) can be predicted and stopped can tempt us to apply these capabilities to more familiar sorts of troublesome behavior.

Imagine that analysis of telecommunications data reliably identified failure to report taxable income. Who could object to exploiting this unobtrusive investigative tool, if the payoff were a vast fiscal windfall and the elimination of tax evasion? Or suppose we find telecommunications patterns that indicate the likelihood of child abuse or neglect. What lawmaker could resist demands to “do everything possible” to act on such intelligence — either to apprehend the guilty or forestall the crime.

Using surveillance for predictive modeling to prevent all sorts of undesirable or illegal behavior is the logical next step. These possibilities are by no means a fantastical slippery slope — indeed, the idea of pre-empting criminals before they act was envisioned by Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report,” later a movie starring Tom Cruise." (more)

Business Espionage - FBI Stops "Millions" from Flying Out of the U.S.

NJ - FBI agents arrested an engineer on Wednesday as he was preparing to return to India with trade secrets he allegedly stole from Becton, Dickinson and Co., the Franklin Lakes-based global medical technology company, authorities said.

B-D Patent from the late 1990's

Ketankumar "Ketan" Maniar, 36, an Indian national who lived in Mahwah until last week, had amassed a veritable tool kit for the manufacture of a new pen-like device for injecting drugs that was being developed by Becton Dickinson, authorities said...
 The stolen information was valued in the millions of dollars and could be used by Maniar to set up a new business or sold to a competitor...

If convicted, Maniar could face up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. (more)

Quote of the Year - You Decide

Quote 1: "You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."

Quote 2: "You can't come up against the world's most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will." (more - with video interview) 

From an interview with Edward Snowden, self-confessed Intelligence Community whistle-blower, now on the run.

Dead man running?
Russia has offered to consider an asylum request from the US whistleblower Edward Snowden... (more) (sing-a-long)

Guess Who Else is Scared of PRISM

Business and the advertising industry!

via... AdAge
Privacy legislation has been brewing in congress for years now, but a combination of public apathy and strong industry opposition has kept it at bay. Could the Prism data surveillance scandal become the watershed moment that propels it forward?

It's too soon to tell how revelations that the U.S. government has been mining web communications and phone logs will impact public opinion, but none of what the government has been implicated in doing would be possible if corporations weren't mining and storing consumer data, often for advertising purposes...

Of course, many in the ad industry hope this government data-gate serves as a foil to commercial data practices, resulting in less focus on how marketers gather and use consumer information. (more)

"Whatever happened to OPSEC?"

Last week's news sparked much discussion about privacy. Here is one semi-sarcastic exchange between two well-respected, over-50 security professionals...
 

Q. "Whatever happened to OPSEC?"
 
A. "Indeed. Whatever happened to OPSEC?

I think you and I are seeing the "generation gap" from the other side, now. Yesterday, I was talking to a sixteen year-old about the past week's news (PRISM and the Supreme Court decision on DNA).
 
The attitude was, "So?"
 
Geeez, the under-30 crowd has no expectation of privacy. It is a foreign concept to them. They grew up going to school with cameras aimed at them all day, and Ra-parents checking their email, and cocooning them in play dates and bike helmets. Sprinkle with general self: indulgence, centered-ness, and entitlement, and this is what evolves—a new world where real privacy is a quaint concept.
 
Their new world is "look at me, look at me", tweet, tweet, tweet. The new privacy hinges on SnapChat zaps, and the ability to 'friend' and 'unfriend'.

The first Eloi of this new wave are starting to take their places in business and government. They are being egged on, and in turn enabling, a few dystopian power-elders. Together they constructed PRISM. The flip side of the coin, however, is that they don't get to do it in private.
 
So, to answer the question, OPSEC and Privacy have joined hands... and are skipping on their merry f-ing way to oblivion.

The PRISM of Surveillance - 2002-2013

The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA). 

Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. 

However, several IAO projects continued to be funded, and merely run under different names. (more) (60's update... "We all prism'ers chicky babe, we all locked in.")

Obama: 'Nobody Is Listening to Your Telephone Calls'

President Barack Obama on Friday defended his administration's vast collection of emails and telephone records, saying the programs help prevent terrorist attacks while imposing only "modest encroachments" on people's privacy...

"When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," the president said. 

 Mr. Obama made clear that his own views of such intelligence-gathering efforts have evolved since he was a candidate for the presidency in 2008. He suggested he is now more comfortable with the "trade-offs" involved in guarding against terrorism. (more)

FutureWatch: 24/7 Outdoor Surveillance from 17,000 Feet - Recorded & Searchable

A new camera developed by the Pentagon's research arm was highlighted in a recent special on PBS' "Nova" in an episode called "Rise of the Drones." It's a camera system so detailed it can discern specific movements and even what a subject is wearing.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS) has 1.8 billion pixels (1.8 gigapixels), making it the world' highest resolution camera. 



The sensors on the camera are so precise, PBS stated it is the equivalent to the capabilities of 100 Predator drones in a medium city.