Conference Call Eavesdropping: The Secretary Will Disavow Any Knowledge...

CO - Kelly Cronin, former vice chancellor for institutional advancement for the Texas Tech System, is leaving her fundraising post at the University of Colorado after her assistant was found to have eavesdropped on a private meeting of the CU Foundation’s Board of Directors.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, a $40,000 outside investigation found Cronin’s assistant listened in on a closed-session conference call of the board, but found no evidence Cronin told the assistant to do so. (more)

SpyWare Stalking Apps Stalked By Congress

The U.S. Congress must pass legislation to ban mobile spying apps in order to protect victims of domestic violence, a senator said Wednesday.

Groups aiding victims of domestic violence report growing numbers of clients being stalked through mobile apps secretly installed on their phones by abusers, said Senator Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat. Tens of thousands of U.S. residents are stalked each year through spy apps, he said...

The bill would also require companies to get permission from smartphone, tablet and car navigation device owners before collecting location information, except in emergencies. It would require companies collecting the location data from more than 1,000 devices to post information online about the kind of data they collect, how they share it and how people can stop the collection. (more)

How to Deck Out Your Next Secure Conference Room

Click to enlarge.

A clear plastic table and chairs are seen in a soundproof vault built into the heart of Kiev’s tax ministry. Officials say the vault is equipped with thick walls and a white noise generator to prevent eavesdropping; they add that the transparent furniture was intended to reassure the vault’s users that their conversations weren’t being bugged. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov) (more) (shop one) (shop two)

Town Officials Accused of Eavesdropping

NH - The Cheshire County Attorney’s Office is now looking into allegations of wiretapping and eavesdropping that prompted a state police search of the Nelson town offices in late March.

According to documents filed in the 8th Circuit Court District Division in Keene, the state police investigation was triggered when several residents reported audio and visual equipment were being used in the main entry way and just outside the front doors of the town hall on Nelson Common Road.

In the recently unsealed supporting affidavit requesting the search warrant, state police Troop C Sgt. Shawn M. Skahan wrote, that on March 13, “I received an e-mail from T. Faulkner outlining his concerns that the town of Nelson has been illegally recording conversations within the town hall building.”...

Skahan concluded that based upon the evidence, there is probable cause for the crimes of wiretapping and eavesdropping. (more) (video)

Artist's Countersurveillance Masks Make You Look Like Him

Artist Leo Selvaggio launched a project called URME on Indiegogo to fund the creation of countersurveillance masks with his face on them. The campaign will conclude June 13 but has already raised more than twice its $1,000 goal.

"We don't believe you should be tracked just because you want to walk outside, and you shouldn't have to hide, either," the project's website states. "Instead, use one of our products to present an alternative identity when in public." (more)

"So, why sweep the court for bugs if you post it on the Internet?"

The U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals took a judicial mulligan Monday after staff failed last week to follow standard practice and record what was supposed to be the only such hearing in a terrorist case touching on surveillance issues broached by Edward Snowden.

The rare do-over of oral arguments at a U.S. appellate court started slowly with one judge even saying she would try and carefully recreate as best she could the questions she asked the parties in the unrecorded hearing...

Officials said last week that workers responsible for turning on a court recorder at the initial hearing were startled by U.S. agents who swept the room for bugging devices and so assumed — wrongly — that all recordings were prohibited. A recording of Monday's hearing was successfully made and promptly posted on the court website later in the afternoon. (more)

Think Tank Thinks Economic Espionage Costs World Economy About $445b

The likely annual cost of cybercrime and economic espionage to the world economy is more than $445 billion — or almost 1 percent of global income, according to estimates from a Washington think tank.

That figure is lower than the eye-popping $1 trillion figure cited by President Obama, but it nonetheless puts cybercrime in the ranks of drug trafficking in terms of worldwide economic harm.

‘‘This is a global problem and we aren’t doing enough to manage risk,’’ said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and co-writer of the report. (more)

NSA News Prompts Dance Rap Music Video

An anti-mass-surveillance music video by Shahid Buttar, director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Download the extended dance floor mix. The lyrics (annotated with hyperlinks). (more)

Banksy Confesses: He Made the Eavesdropping Mural

In a rare exchange with the public, the elusive graffiti artist Banksy has acknowledged painting a mural depicting secret agents eavesdropping on a telephone booth, which appeared in April in the city of Cheltenham, where one of Britain’s intelligence agencies has its headquarters.

The mural had not been claimed by the artist until Tuesday, when he posted the admission on his official website. In a question and answer session he was asked: “Did you paint the spies in Cheltenham?” “Yes,” he replied. He is known to communicate with the public only via email. (more)

REPORT: Vodafone Reveals Existence of Secret Wires that allow State Surveillance

Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.

The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday. At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.

The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a "nightmare scenario" that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.

In Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, it is unlawful to disclose any information related to wiretapping or interception of the content of phone calls and messages including whether such capabilities exist. (more)

How to Find a Perp? Just Ask Their Cell Phone.

...the cops deployed a secretive device called a stingray, which operates as a fake cell phone tower used to track targeted phones.  

Though law enforcement typically fights attempts to learn how stingrays work or how often they are used, a court victory by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has just unsealed Tallahassee police testimony of exactly how the 2008 cell phone hunt happened.

This newly released transcript (PDF) provides what is likely the first-ever verbatim account of how stingrays are used in actual police operations. And it shows that stingrays are so accurate, they can pinpoint the very room in which a phone is located. (more)

How Your iPhone Could Eavesdrop on You Even When Switched-Off

...Like any magic trick, the most plausible method of eavesdropping through a switched-off phone starts with an illusion. Security researchers posit that if an attacker has a chance to install malware before you shut down your phone, that software could make the phone look like it’s shutting down—complete with a fake “slide to power off” screen. Instead of powering down, it enters a low-power mode that leaves its baseband chip—which controls communication with the carrier—on.

This “playing dead” state would allow the phone to receive commands, including one to activate its microphone, says Eric McDonald, a hardware engineer in Los Angeles. McDonald is also a member of the Evad3rs, a team of iPhone hackers who created jailbreaks for the two previous iPhone operating systems. If the NSA used an exploit like those McDonald’s worked on to infect phone with malware that fakes a shutdown, “the screen would look black and nothing would happen if you pressed buttons,” he says. “But it’s conceivable that the baseband is still on, or turns on periodically. And it would be very difficult to know whether the phone has been compromised.”

The Solution
McDonald suggests users turn off their iPhones by putting them into device firmware upgrade (DFU) mode, a kind of “panic” state designed to let the phone reinstall its firmware or recover from repeated operating system crashes. In DFU mode, says McDonald, all elements of the phone are entirely shut down except its USB port, which is designed to wait for a signal from iTunes to install new firmware. (more)


P.S. If you do this, be sure to watch the tutorial about getting your iPhone out of DFU mode.

SpyCam Stalker (11,000 covert images) Receives Suspended Sentence and Fine

UK - A cyber stalker who bugged computers to spy on women has walked free from court with a 12-month suspended sentence and a fine.

Andrew Meldrum, 30, secretly installed spying software on his victims' computers, allowing him to access private, nude pictures taken covertly. 

 
Andrew Meldrum's 11,000 covert images included some of one victim naked, in her underwear, on the toilet and "in positions of intimacy". Credit: Police handout 

Meldrum admitted three counts of unauthorized access to computer material and was found guilty of two counts of voyeurism after a trial at Woolwich Crown Court.

One of his victims wept in court and held her head in her hands at the sentence. (more)

Sealed Court Files Obscure Rise in Electronic Surveillance

Law-Enforcement Requests to Monitor Cellphones Are Routinely Sealed—And Stay That Way

In eight years as a federal magistrate judge in Texas, Brian Owsley approved scores of government requests for electronic surveillance in connection with criminal investigations—then sealed them at the government's request. The secrecy nagged at him.

So before he left the bench last year, the judge decided to unseal more than 100 of his own orders, along with the government's legal justification for the surveillance. The investigations, he says, involved ordinary crimes such as bank robbery and drug trafficking, not "state secrets." Most had long since ended.

A senior judge halted the effort with a one-paragraph order that offered no explanation for the decision and that itself was sealed. Mr. Owsley's orders remain buried in folders in a federal courthouse overlooking Corpus Christi Bay. "It's like something out of Kafka," says Mr. Owsley, recently a visiting law professor at Texas Tech University. (more)

"Spy this!" or A Public Taste of One's Own Medicine

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono allowed journalists to listen in to a conversation with Australia's leader Tony Abbott, the BBC reported.

Australia's ABC quoted top-level Indonesian sources as saying the eavesdropping was a "mistake."

Reporters were apparently in the same room as Mr Yudhoyono during the call and one of them recorded the exchange.

The two leaders are due to meet this week, with tension still high over claims of Australian spying. (more)