China - Police have arrested a divorced man and his mistress for subjecting his ex-wife to months of illegal surveillance, intimidation and extortion to gain control of half of her company, local media reported Friday.
The suspects, surnamed Zhu and Liu, spent almost a year spying on their victim, surnamed Wei, by installing monitoring software on her computers and bugging her home, her car and her luggage in a plot to destroy her reputation, according to a report in the Xinmin Evening News. By the time they were caught, the pair had cost Wei's company more than 100 million yuan ($16.5 million) in lost business.
Police said more and more illegal surveillance cases have emerged as technology has advanced, according to the report. Last year, Shanghai police arrested about 190 suspects for the illegal trade or use of surveillance equipment, seizing 500 pieces of equipment and more than 100 million pieces of personal information. (more)
Maryland legislators will consider a package of laws to curb electronic surveillance by police, requiring a search warrant to use drones, email, cellphone towers or license plate readers to track people.
Measures sponsored by a bipartisan pair of senators come amid a national debate over government surveillance after revelations about the extent to which the National Security Agency collects information on U.S. citizens. (more)
Obama to unveil spying reforms on 17th January
White House spokesman Jay Carney said that Obama's remarks would show the "outcomes of the work that has been done on the review process."
The White House said on Thursday that the president was nearing the end of his soul searching about US spying reforms as he met lawmakers who oversee the intelligence community. (more)
FBI Director James Comey recently told reporters that the federal government's spying on American citizens via the National Security Agency is the "way the founders intended." (more)
CA - Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) and Sen. Joel Anderson (R-San Diego) introduced the Fourth Amendment Protection Act to prohibit any state support of the NSA. “State-funded public resources should not be going toward aiding the NSA or any other federal agency from indiscriminate spying on its own citizens and gathering electronic or metadata that violates the Fourth Amendment,” Lieu said in a press release. (more)
Private Eye Sky Spies
Click-bait, or cold reality? The headline for Robinson Meyer’s article in the Atlantic about three Silicon Valley start-ups and their plans to make money off satellite photography of the earth is “Silicon Valley’s New Spy Satellites.” Very soon, it’s likely that it will be substantially easier to buy recent, high-resolution imagery of the Earth’s surface... the message they send together is simple: We’re all spies now. (more)
What Will Anna Chapman Do Next? Former spy Anna Chapman,
who was sent back from the United States to Russia in a major spy swap
in 2010, is going to present her own clothing line at a fashion show in
the Turkish resort of Antalya. (more) (Anna's adventure timeline)
500 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent (more)
Boycott Of RSA Security Conference Builds In Wake Of NSA Spy Scandal (more)
TX - A pioneer in cancer research is facing a second degree felony charge in an alleged plot to spy on his ex-wife while they were going through their divorce.
According to prosecutors, Dr. Steven Curley plotted with a computer expert to install a program called eBlaster. (more)
IA - ...the Iowa City landlord found guilty last year of spying on his tenants
(six counts) through bathroom peepholes in 2012, has motioned for a new trial... (speed bump) ...The city’s Housing and Inspections Services office says the city’s
housing code doesn’t address cases such as this, therefore Miller is
able to continue to own and manage the properties. (more)
PA - Forty-three years after the mysterious theft of up to 1,000 documents
from an FBI office outside Philadelphia, three former political
activists are publicly confessing to the brazen burglary, calling it an
act of “resistance” that exposed “massive illegal surveillance and
intimidation.”... Members of the burglary team, armed with little more than a crowbar and wearing suits
and ties, then walked off undetected with suitcases stuffed with
sensitive bureau files that revealed a domestic FBI spying operation
known as COINTELPRO. (more)
Canada - A St. Albert man who surreptitiously took pictures of young girls in
change rooms at five Alberta recreational facilities... was sentenced
to two years in prison Tuesday. (more)
FL - A St. Augustine man and former Putnam County deputy (and St. Johns County reserve deputy) accused of using his cellphone to record a tanning room at the U.S. 1 South World Gym was sentenced Tuesday to 300 days in jail... a woman reported that a gym employee put a cellphone in the closet of the tanning room to record people getting in and out of the booth... (more)
The Point
Anyone can be a spy. The technology is cheap, and easy to use. Just add motivation.
FutureWatch
This will become a real workplace issue in 2014.
And now, a very creepy moment of spy Zen...
Reports have surfaced that the US National Security Agency can now turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools.
That’s the word from security expert Jacob Appelbaum, who told a hacker conference in Germany that the NSA can plant iPhone malware called Dropout Jeep, which gives American intelligence agents the ability to turn the gadget into a listening post using the iPhone camera and microphone. Also, it has a spyware function that can retrieve contact information, read through text messages and emails, and listen to voicemails. (more)
(Yawn.) Spyware for smartphones has been around for years. You can purchase it with a few keystrokes.
Don't worry about the NSA. They could probably care less about you. Worry about your employer, disgruntled employee, or significant other.
Then, if the question, "Is my cell phone bugged?" pops into your mind, buy a good book, or app, and find out what to do about it.
The Annabel Melongo saga continues in the Illinois Supreme Court Tuesday, Jan. 14, marking the eighth year the case has been tied up in litigation.
Melongo was (also) indicted for eavesdropping, as a grand jury accused her of illegally recording conversations with a Cook County court reporter.
The indictment accused Melongo of:
(1) Eavesdropping without consent:
“…in that she knowingly and intentionally used an eavesdropping device, to wit: an audio recording device, for the purpose of recording a conversation, to wit: recording a conversation conducted by telephone between Annabel K. Melongo and Pamela Taylor of the Cook County Court Reporter’s Office, and without the consent of all parties to such conversation and without authorization provided by Article 108A or Article 108B of the ‘Code of Criminal Procedure of 1963,’ approved August 13, 1963, as amended.” (more)
Note to Clients: I will send you a private report this month about covert recording in the workplace, and what to do about it. You really don't want to be tied up in 8-year-long court battles.
Facebook faces a potential class action lawsuit (“Matthew Campbell v. Facebook Inc.”) for allegedly violating the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy and unfair competition laws. At issue is the company’s alleged practice of scanning private Facebook messages (first discovered in 2012) for URLs and then using that information as part of its ad targeting data. (more)
Secret agents are lurking everywhere on TV in 2014.
From "The Avengers" to "Mission Impossible" to "24," spy thrillers always have been a TV staple, but with the National Security Agency under fire for spying on everyday Americans and others, espionage stories seem all the more resonant these days. Here's a look at several current or upcoming spy shows and several old favorites that can be seen online... (more)
Recognizing Stupid Privacy Laws
by Stewart Baker, Former government official now practicing law
It’s time to recognize just how stupid privacy law is getting. And what better way than by acknowledging the most dubious achievements of the year in privacy law? (more)
My favorite - Judge Uncovers Wiretap Plot with 425 Million Co-Conspirators
(Scroll down to Category 3 - "Dumbest Privacy Cases of the Year")
WV - A former West Virginia sheriff convicted of hacking his now ex-wife's work computer was sentenced to probation Thursday after she made an emotional plea for leniency.
Former Clay County Sheriff Miles Slack exchanged a long hug with Lisa Slack, his friends, and relatives after U.S. District Judge John T. Copenhaver sentenced him to one to two years' probation and fined him $1,000 for wiretapping...
Federal prosecutors say Slack secretly installed a keystroke logger on a computer in the county magistrate court in April where his wife worked. They were married at the time. Slack admitted he intended to monitor her activity.
Slack could have been sentenced to up to five years in prison. (more)
IT professionals are troubled by the risk of data leakage associated with employee smartphones and are focusing on bolstering endpoint security, according to a new study.
Mobile devices will pose the biggest threat in 2014, according to a survey of 676 IT and IT security professionals conducted recently by the Ponemon Institute. About three-quarters of those surveyed cited the risk posed by mobile devices as their biggest concern, up from just 9 percent in 2010.
Meanwhile, targeted attacks, designed with custom malware that can maintain a lengthy presence on corporate systems, is close behind as a troubling trend, the survey found. About 40 percent of those surveyed said their firm was the victim of a targeted attack in the past year, according to the survey, which was commissioned by vulnerability management vendor Lumension Security. (more)
Latvia - Management officials of Riga International airport were not aware of the fact that they had used budget money to buy a device that had allegedly allowed the airport’s security listen in on employees’ telephone conversations.
Security Police has launched an investigation about this possible crime.
After learning of the possible wiretapping into employees’ telephone conversations, the Board of the airport dismissed the head of its Security Department Raimonds Lazdins and two other employees. Equipment meant for wiretapping was found in the airport. (more)
Washington – A federal district judge ruled on Monday that the National Security Agency program that is systematically keeping records of all Americans’ phone calls most likely violates the Constitution, describing its technology as “almost Orwellian” and suggesting that James Madison would be “aghast” to learn that the government was encroaching on liberty in such a way.
The judge, Richard J. Leon of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, ordered the government to stop collecting data on the personal calls of the two plaintiffs in the case and to destroy the records of their calling history. But Judge Leon, appointed to the bench in 2002 by President George W. Bush, stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues,” allowing the government time to appeal it, which he said could take at least six months.
“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary’ invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” Judge Leon wrote in a 68-page ruling. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. (more)
The Android flashlight app, Brightest Flashlight!
GoldenShores Technologies, LLC, is using the onboard GPS to make money on a free app by selling the anonymized user data it collects. And, the amount is not trivial; over one million people have downloaded the flashlight app.
The reason this information finally surfaced was because the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) became involved, eventually issuing an official complaint against Goldenshores Technologies (PDF)... (more)
Listening devices in Edison police headquarters secretly recorded officers, attorneys, civilians...
NJ - Private conversations, including legally protected attorney-client discussions, have been secretly recorded inside Edison police headquarters, prompting calls for state and federal investigations and stoking new tensions in a department long wracked by internal strife.
The conversations were picked up by dozens of audio-enabled surveillance cameras installed throughout the building in January.
At the time, Police Chief Thomas Bryan assured Edison’s mayor and business administrator, along with wary union officials, that microphones on the cameras would be disabled to guard against an invasion of privacy, the officials said. Officers learned otherwise last weekend... (more)
