14 Year Old Kid Violates Wiretap Law ...again

PA - Police say a western Pennsylvania teen who recorded his principal making threatening comments toward him has a history of secretly recording school officials.

Chief Allen Park tells The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that Churchill police charged the 14-year-old Woodland Hills High School student with violating Pennsylvania's wiretap law earlier this year.

Park says the boy recorded a September meeting called to settle a dispute with another student without permission and then posted the audio on Facebook.

The teen now finds himself at the center of the controversy surrounding Principal Kevin Murray, who was placed on leave Wednesday after the boy produced a recording where Murray can be heard saying he would punch him in the face. more
 sing-a-long

Pennsylvania is a 2-party consent sate, meaning all parties to a recorded conversation must agree to the recording. 

And no, the principal is not me. I live in New Jersey... where the last words recorded might be, "Take him for a ride." ~Kevin

UPDATE - One of our sharp readers from Pennsylvania points out that the kid may not have broken the law after all. An exemption was amended to the state law in 2012...

§ 5704. Exceptions to prohibition of interception and disclosure of communications.

(17) Any victim, witness or private detective licensed under the act of August 21, 1953 (P.L.1273, No.361), known as The Private Detective Act of 1953, to intercept the contents of any wire, electronic or oral communication, if that person is under a reasonable suspicion that the intercepted party is committing, about to commit or has committed a crime of violence and there is reason to believe that evidence of the crime of violence may be obtained from the interception.

DHS Whimps Out on IoT Protections

On November 15, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

issued guidance to help stakeholders account for security in the development, manufacturing, implementation, and use of IoT devices.

The set of nonbinding principles and suggested best practices for IoT device security includes the following... more

Come on, DHS. Talk to Congress about regulations. ~Kevin

Spycam News: Security Check Nabs 'Moonlighting' Spy

TX - An employee of the National Security Agency in San Antonio is facing prison time for taking his agency's spying mission a little too far...

James Johannes pleaded guilty in Federal Court in San Antonio on Thursday to sneaking around outside the homes of his neighbors, and using his smart phone to take videos of little girls who were undressing, peeking through their windows and open doors.

Johannes was nabbed in a rather unconventional way. He was attending a meeting at Fort Sam Houston, and as he left, military police asked to check his cell phone. It is standard procedure to check the cell phones of people in secure areas to make sure there is no classified material on them.

The guards found videos of an underage girl getting undressed and stepping into the shower.

Other similar images were found on Johannes' cell phone, and one of the girls recognized him...because he was a youth leader at their church. more

UK Politicians Exempt Themselves from Extreme Spying Laws

UK - Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain's new wide-ranging spying laws.

The Investigatory Powers Act, which has just passed into law, brings some of the most extreme and invasive surveillance powers ever given to spies in a democratic state. But protections against those spying powers have been given to MPs. more

The Martini Olive Bug, or who was Hal Lipset?

He was a private investigator in San Francisco, and chief investigator for Sam Dash on the Senate Watergate Committee...

Francis Ford Coppola considered the implications of the professional eavesdropper when he made The Conversation... It should come as no surprise that Hal Lipset was hired as technical consultant for the picture.

Lipset spoke in Congress using the famous "bug in the martini olive" and other secret surveillance devices that he and his staff pioneered...

In 1964, Time Magazine wrote, "Hal Lipset, a seasoned San Francisco private eye, maintains a laboratory behind a false warehouse from where his eavesdropping ‘genius,' Ralph Bertsche, works out new gimmicks such as a high-powered bug that fits into a pack of filter-tip cigarettes..."

His first chance to go public on the national scene occurred the previous year when he was invited to testify before the Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee... "First I thought I’d dazzle them with an array of miniature devices they had never seen before; then I would surprise them by playing back my own testimony from a recorder I had hidden before the hearing."

The great idea worked too well. Lipset’s appearance was seen as a clever but ominous sign of   snooping running amok.
... the next time he was invited to Washington to speak before a Senate subcommittee - this one in 1965 to hear testimony specifically on eavesdropping - he renewed his efforts...

"We came up with the "bug in the martini olive" idea, it didn’t seem all that unusual. The martini glass was simply another example of how ingenious these devices could be."

The glass held a facsimile of an olive, which could hold a tiny transmitter, the pimento inside the olive, in which we could embed the microphone, and a toothpick, which could house a copper wire as an antenna. No gin was used - that could cause a short.

It was the bug in the martini olive that made Lipset "the real star of the day," as UPI reported. Hardly an ominous indication of private snoopers taking over the world, this little olive with its toothpick antenna became a "playful" and charming toy.
                                  ---
This is the very condensed version of his story. The full story is here,  as excerpted from his biography, "The Bug in the Martini Olive," by Patricia Holt, Little Brown, 1991 ~Kevin

Angry Birdmen of Malta v Scientists in Eavesdropping Spat

Malta - The FKNK Federation for Hunting and Conservation – Malta, said on Friday said that BirdLife Malta was...

“possibly desperately resorting to illegal and corrupt methods to abolish the traditional socio-cultural practice of live-finch capturing from the Maltese islands,” claiming that BirdLife had been using electronic devices to eavesdrop on private mobile phone conversations.

“Possibly, a false GSM base station known as ‘IMSI catcher’ or similar was used to intercept the trappers’ mobile traffic in the immediate area,” the hunting federation said.

But MaltaToday has learnt that the would-be “eavesdropping equipment” are actually antennae set up for 15 to 20 minutes in different locations to establish accurate GPS positioning data as part of a research study on coastal land-sliding being carried out by an Italian team of experts on behalf of the University of Malta and with the full cooperation of local authorities. more

Telephone Eavesdropper Learns The Beatles Were Right

UK - A multi-millionaire property developer strangled a burlesque dancer after bugging her home
and learning that she was planning to “fleece him”, a court heard yesterday.

Peter Morgan, 54, had been paying Georgina Symonds, a 25-year-old single mother, up to £10,000 a month to stop seeing other men after meeting her while she was working as an escort.

He decided to murder her after listening in to a telephone conversation in which she told a male friend that she was planning to leave Mr Morgan, a jury was told. more sing-a-long

Personal Security: Your Internet Vanishing Act May Begin Here

Just FYI...
I have not tested this. Use at your own risk.
Remember... If it's "free" you're not the consumer, you're the product.
~Kevin
 
via Dan Misener, for CBC New
With all the fake news, toxic speech, and online scams out there, you might be feeling like now is a good time to scale back your online footprint. 

There's a new tool that promises to help you do just that — by essentially deleting yourself from the internet.

It's called Deseat.me, and it does one thing and one thing only — it displays a list of all the online services you've ever signed up for.

So if you had a MySpace account in the early 2000s, it'll probably show up in Deseat. If you created an avatar in Second Life, it's likely to show up as well. And of course, so will things like your Facebook or Twitter accounts...

To use Deseat.me, you first log in using a Google account. Then, once it knows your email address, it can find any accounts that have been linked in any way to that Google account.

Now, it will ask for some things which may sound creepy — it will not only ask to view your email address, but also to view your email messages and settings. Based on my experience, Deseat.me scans through your email archives to find sign-up confirmation messages from various services. more

Business Espionage: The Darknet - Where Industrial Trade Secrets are Sold

Ludwig Sandell, Dignato AS general manager, expressed his concern over how the darknet is a place where sensitive industrial trade secrets can be exchanged without repercussions.

To be more precise, he feels there are multiple local companies affected by espionage, which could significantly hurt their business if these details fall into the wrong hands...

...industrial trade secrets of a Norwegian wind power project run by Statoil are up for grabs on the darknet as we speak. The data itself was found on a memory stick – which was either lost or stolen – and includes vital measurement information. For the company itself, having that information leak to the public could spell the end of their business rather quickly. more

Are your company secrets for sale on the darknet?
Hire a service to find out. ~Kevin

Japanese Singer Calls Police to Report Spycam... gets arrested.

Fallen Japanese pop star Aska has been arrested on drugs charges after calling police to tell them he was being spied on at home by a hidden camera, police and reports said Tuesday.

The singer -- one half of folk rockers Chage and Aska -- was slurring on the call when he insisted he was being watched, Jiji Press and other media said.

Police who visited his Tokyo home on Monday arrested the 58-year-old on suspicion of using stimulants and MDMA, a force spokesman told AFP. more

Brooklyn Prosecutor Allegedly Wiretapped Cop Love Interest's Cell Phone

NY - A Brooklyn assistant district attorney was arrested this week for allegedly wiretapping two cell phones so she could hear conversations between a cop love interest and another woman.

According to a criminal complaint, Tara Lenich, 41, forged judges' signatures to authorize the wiretapping of the aforementioned unidentified cop's cell phone, as well as a phone belonging to an unidentified woman. Lenich, who was in charge of the Violent Criminal Enterprises Bureau at the DA's office, may have been romantically attached to the cop, and tabloid reports speculate the wiretapped woman was his new love interest.

The complaint says Lenich forged warrants related to the wiretapping at least 20 times, using different judges' names, between August 20, 2015 and November 25, 2016. Lenich allegedly called the wiretapping a "secret outside investigation" when discussing it with colleagues. more

Spybuster Tip #715: How to Prevent Hacker Wi-Fi Attacks

If your Wi-Fi name (SSID) is on this list, you're at risk. 
If you ever used a Wi-Fi whose name (SSID) is on this list, you're at risk.

The list consists of approximately the 5000 most common SSIDs.

If a hacker uses this list to broadcast SSIDs, your laptop or phone may automatically connect to them. At that point, they see everything you do; user names, passwords, etc.

In a nutshell, program your device so that it does not automatically connect to a Wi-Fi SSID to which it has previously connected. Purge your previous connections list just to be sure.

Basic Spy Tradecraft: "Beware of pretty faces that you find..."

A German spy's romantic time in Latvia has ended up in a Munich court. The love-struck agent has lost his job, and a court case. 

A German spy fell in love with a Latvian woman in Riga and lost his job for violating policy. He has lost a legal battle against the BND intelligence agency.

The unnamed spy dated a Latvian woman while station chief in Riga, despite being instructed against having romantic relations with locals. Instead of informing the BND, he asked Latvia's intelligence agency to run a background check on his girlfriend, who came up clean.

Only after the Latvian woman had moved in with him did the station chief inform his superiors. That landed him in hot water, leading the BND to recall the spy and find him unfit for duty.

The man then sought compensation from the BND for lost earnings and other losses to the tune of 400,000 euros ($421,920). more sing-a-long

Spycam News: Multi-Millionaire Landlord Pleads Guilty to Secretly Filming his Tenants

Australia - A multi-millionaire Sydney landlord will face sentencing next month after pleading guilty to charges relating to secretly filming his tenants without consent to obtain sexual arousal.

Masaaki Imaeda, 66, installed hidden cameras into his rental properties so he could spy on tenants having sex or undressing...

After finding a warning about Imaeda and his spy cameras on a Japanese website, a husband and wife who rented a bedroom from him found a camera in their bedroom light fitting.

The young couple called police, who found multiple other hidden cameras inside the house...

He faces up to two years in prison. more

UK - A Starbucks customer in London was left “shocked and disgusted”* after finding a hidden camera above a toilet in a branch of the coffee shop. 

Ricci Arcari, 33, was at the Starbucks in Vauxhall when he spotted the device hidden in an air vent directly above the unisex toilet.

He told The Independent: “I go in [to the store] regularly. I ordered my drink and while I was waiting I popped in to use the toilet.

“I was standing using the toilet when I noticed a little glint Iike the way glass reflects.

“I stood on top of the toilet seat to get a better look and realised it was a webcam or some other kind of recording device.”

Mr Arcari, who used to work for Starbucks himself, said he ran out of the toilet, asked to speak to the store manager and showed him the camera.

The manager seemed “pretty shocked” and reportedly said “Oh God, that’s not good".

The device was immediately taken down and placed in a bag to be passed to police. more

 * May also be applied to the dirty air vent grill.
Protect yourself.

Business Espionage Today: Sling TV Launches Cloud DVR Hours Before DirecTV

Sling TV users will soon be able to record some TV shows and store them online for later viewing.

The feature, which will initially be available as an invite-only beta to users of Dish's online streaming video service, is being announced on the same day that a major rival is appearing on the scene. Details of AT&T's DirecTV Now will be unveiled at a press event in New York later today. more

Just coincidence? You decide. 
How secret is your marketing strategy? 
When was the last time you checked? ~Kevin