Wikimedia Sued NSA for Upstream Surveillance Program

Wikimedia filed suit on Tuesday against the National Security Agency (NSA) for conducting mass surveillance programs and violating the privacy which prevents individuals from sharing sensitive information.

The lawsuit challenges the NSA mass surveillance program, collecting information on large scale across the internet, and seizure of internet communications. The organization argues that their aim is to stop the mass surveillance program for the purpose of protecting privacy rights of the people around the world.

According to the law suit bulk collection there violates the constitution's First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and association, and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

One of the controversies is that upstream surveillance reduces the possibility that clients, journalists, foreign government officials, victims of human rights abuses and other individuals will share tactful information with them.

Other lawsuits have argued for the bulk collection of telephone metadata and are pending in U.S. appeals courts. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court abandoned another trial to NSA surveillance of email and other communications deciding that the litigant did not prove that they suffered any harm.

Since privacy is the essence of individual freedom. Wikimedia’s vision is to empower people share briefly all human knowledge and perception. If people are frightened then their mission is threatened.

Wikipedia is the world's most comprehensive online encyclopedia. More than 500 million people worldwide visit Wikipedia each month, and at least 75,000 people around the world append or edit the content.

Wikimedia have written more than 34 million articles in 288 different languages over the past few years. Every month, this knowledge is exposed to nearly half a billion people all around the world.

The community of dedicated global users is impassioned about the knowledge and because of their commitment to inquiry and dedication to the privacy has made it feasible for Wikimedia to file today on their behalf.
   

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by Malik korrich ~ mardi 10 mars 2015 0 commentaires

Edward Snowden: A Whistleblower Who Opened our Eyes

Edward Snowden a former NSA Contractor who turned whistleblower when he leaked the most devastating information of this decade, about how the top U.S Spy agency broke all the rules and hacked into firms like Gemalto has landed an Oscar for his documentary along with director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald. It is not easy to be a Whistleblower. Specially when your leaked information is about your countries top Spy agency. But Snowden risk it all for us and he showed us the true picture that how easy it is for these agencies to destroy our privacy.

Edword snowden who revealed information regarding global surveillance programs running by NSA expresses his regret about not coming forward sooner and exposing these documents. Snowden said after landing the Oscar for his documentary that, “I would have come sooner.”

Many described Snowden as the patriot and a hero which is pretty big words for a whistleblower. His disclosures have boosted debates over mass surveillance, government privacy, and the balance between public safety and information confidentiality.

He said that if he came forward a little sooner, these programs would not have been a lodged to that extent and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. This is something we see in almost every sector of government, not just in the national security space. Once the government is permitted some new power or authority, it becomes strenuous to give back.
Snowden participated in the question-and-answer session with Laura Poitras, a journalist and director of CITIZENFOUR and Greenwald.

Snowden said that privacy and surveillance can be a contentious topic in the next presidential elections if the people are impassioned about laying stress on politicians via advocacy because Government can only be changed if there is demand and desire of the natives.

He admitted that people have got inborn rights, they are not bestowed us by the government. But it's entirely the opposite for government their benefits are definitely equal to only those which we agonize them to enjoy.

Greenwald mentioned that “prescription related to privacy  had got a lot of support from both sides of the political span, with both Republicans and Democrats trying to constitutionalize together on the issue. The leadership of both parties is firmly behind the NSA and mass surveillance. But until there are leaders of one of the two parties willing to dissent on this issue, it will be hard to make it a big political issue," he said.

At Sunday night's Academy Awards ceremony, the host Neil Patrick Harris has poked
Snowden using the wordplay "for some treason".Snowden said that he didn’t care about Harris' comment as it was not meant as a political statement, but even if it was, that's not so bad.

He said “My perspective is if you're not willing to be called a few names to help out your country, you don't care enough."

In his response to answering a question about meeting Russian president, he refused allegations that he was a Russian spy, pointing out that it made no sense. If he had been working for Putin's pals, he argued, he wouldn’t have made any files public or gone to Hong Kong originally, and he also wouldn’t have had to spend more than a month living in a Moscow airport.

"The reality is I spent so long in that damn airport because I wouldn't play ball and nobody knew what to do with me. I refused to co-operate with Russian intelligence in any way (see my testimony to EU Parliament on this one if you're interested), and that hasn't changed," he said.

In a question Snowden was asked whether he was dishearten by the lack of public resentment over the NSA's spying activities. He replied that it is evident that people are cautious about their confidentiality but feel but they have no choice, although he said the technology community is leading the way in making alterations.

He concluded that politicians must limit the power of intelligence agencies to conduct mass surveillance and inventing software and policies to make it uneconomic. The technological community has taken considerable steps in the field.

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by Malik korrich ~ mercredi 25 février 2015 0 commentaires

Open Source Privacy Tools that Keeps you Safe from NSA

After the Gemalto security breach it is clear that Spy agencies like NSA use their Hackers to gain access to servers. Snowden documents showed that NSA goes beyond legal boundaries to keep an eye on the people at the name of National security. These security breaches by Spy agencies will never gonna stop. So it is up to users to secure their servers from the Hackers of these Spy agencies.We researched and came up with some most reliable open source privacy tools that even the NSA hackers can't crack.

1. PGP

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a very secure open source tool developed by Phil Zimmermann. This tool is almost impossible to crack because PGP encryption uses a serial combination of hashing, data compression, symmetric-key cryptography, and finally public-key cryptography; each step uses one of several supported algorithms. The software was developed in earl 1990's and as the Snowden documents showed how the NSA can't crack the PGP. 

This doesn't mean that PGP has no flaws. There are two major flaws in this tool one is related to the experience of the user while the other flaw is a technical one. But even with these two flaw's the NSA failed to crack PGP with is a pretty amazing thing when you realize how easily this Spy agency is breaching the servers around the world.

PGP messages can't be "forward secure," so if a key is stolen, then all previous messages can be decrypted. As for the UX issue, it's well known by now that Glenn Greenwald almost missed the reporting on the Snowden documents by not being able to set up PGP properly. Right now it's too hard to use for most people.

2. OTR

Off The Recod (OTR)  is another privacy tool that will help to to secure your data from many Spy agencies. OTR is a cryptographic protocol which is used widely because of it has the power to encrypt every massage with a new key. The OTR was designed by Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borisov. OTR protocol is used in multiple clients including in Pidgin, Jitsi and Adium for desktop or in mobile clients such as CryptoCat and ChatSecure.

The main objective behind this protocol is providing deniable authentication for the person or group while keeping the conversation between two parties confidential like in real life when people are discussing something behind closed doors.  The documents leaked by Snowden didn't say anything about TextSecure's Axolotl because it dated back to 2012 or before that when Axolotl was not created.

3. Tor 

Tor is a software that cost you nothing and helps you to communicate anonymously. Tor was released in 2002 and need OS like windows or Linux to run smoothly. Tor and Tor browser has made it very difficult for the NSA to have a track of those who are using it. But it is not impossible for the NSA to track the people who are on their target if even they are using Tor services. But this can be possible if the person didn't updated his Tor browser with latest patches.

If your Tor browser if upto date the it is an impossible task for even NSA to have a track of you. But still there are some mistakes that the person who is on target can make to get caught.  Such as log-in to the accounts that uses their real name and addresses. So, its pretty clear now that Tor can help you to be anonymous but you also have to sharp if you do not wanna get caught, 

4. Tails

The basic function of this Linux based OS is to preserve privacy and anonymity. Its all outgoings are forced to go through Tor which helps to user to remain anonymous. That's why it is very hard to agencies like NSA to identify a certain person who they really are. The one thing that can get you caught is if you are using Tails as your main machine. Because when you log-in to your personal email account or even your social networking site anyone who is tracking you will know who you are. So never use Tails as your main machine if you wanna remain anonymous. 

If you want some more security then Tails can be used from a DVD, ensuring no malware that's meant to expose you can be written to it. Then, every time you use Tails it will be like using a clean install of it. Which is a pretty good solution of your problem. 

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by Malik korrich ~ mardi 24 février 2015 0 commentaires

NSA Spied on Companies and Groups including U.S Allies

The National Security Agency has spied on hundreds of companies and groups around the world, including in countries allied with the US government, as part of an effort designed to allow agents to hack into any cellphone network, no matter where it's located, according to a report published Thursday.

Armed with technical details of a specific provider's current or planned networks, agents secretly attempt to identify or introduce flaws that will make it possible for communications to be covertly tapped, according to an article published by The Intercept. Security experts warned that programs that introduce security flaws or suppress fixes for existing vulnerabilities could cause widespread harm, since the bugs can also be exploited by criminal hackers or governments of nations around the world.


"Even if you love the NSA and you say you have nothing to hide, you should be against a policy that introduces security vulnerabilities," Karsten Nohl, a cryptographer and smartphone security expert, told The Intercept. "Because once NSA introduces a weakness, a vulnerability, it's not only the NSA that can exploit it."

It's not the first time the US agency has been reported to introduce backdoors into widely used technologies. Last year documents provided by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden—the same source for documents supporting Thursday's story by The Intercept—showed that the NSA worked with standards bodies to adopt encryption technologies with known vulnerabilities in them. Two weeks later, the RSA division of EMC warned customers to stop using the default configuration of its BSAFE BSAFE toolkit and Data Protection Manager because it contained code reported to contain an NSA-engineered vulnerability.

The program reported Thursday, codenamed AURORAGOLD, has monitored messages sent and received by more than 1,200 email accounts associated with large cellphone operators around the world. One surveillance target is the GSM Association (GSMA), a UK-based group that works with Microsoft, Facebook, AT&T, Cisco Systems, and many other companies to ensure their hardware and software related to cellular technology is compatible. At the same time the NSA has been monitoring the group, other arms of the US government has funded GSMA programs designed to boost privacy on mobile networks.

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by Malik korrich ~ jeudi 4 décembre 2014 0 commentaires

NSA’s ‘MonsterMind’ Could Launch Cyber Counterattacks Against Hackers

As the story covered by infosecurity-magazine, A new cyber defense system being developed by the NSA could automatically launch counter-strikes against attackers who target the US, whistleblower Edward Snowden has claimed.

The MonsterMind project, still under development at the spy agency, features algorithms which would automatically scan vast chunks of metadata with the aim of picking out malicious traffic.


With that intelligence the NSA system could then neutralize the threat and even theoretically launch a retaliatory strike autonomously, Snowden told Wired.

However, such a capability could end up targeting the innocent compromised computers being used by an attacker as a botnet to launch the initial threat, the whistleblower cautioned.

“These attacks can be spoofed,” Snowden told the site.

“You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

The second issue is that for the system to work effectively, the NSA would have to gain access to all communications traffic coming into the US. Seizing private comms without a warrant and with no suspicion of wrongdoing would violate the Fourth Amendment, Snowden added.

Sean Sullivan, security consultant at F-Secure, agreed that the MonsterMind may end up counter-attacking botnets comprised of compromised computers belonging to US citizens or allies of the States.

“Counterattack options are only useful if the adversary has something to lose. Take North Korea as an example,” he continued.

“It might attempt to launch an attack from comprised resources. But even if it used its own servers to attack US infrastructure – what besides those servers is there to counterattack? North Korea isn’t wired – it basically has nothing to lose.”

Sullivan labelled it an “overly complicated defense strategy”.

“A fraction of the money used by ‘MonsterMind’ could be spend on bug hunting and eliminating vulnerabilities to achieve greater results,” he told Infosecurity.
 

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by Malik korrich ~ dimanche 17 août 2014 0 commentaires

nsa automatically tracks users who search for "tor "

Xkeyscore one of the nsa's  surveillance program's source code was revealed by security experts,as nsa is tracking users automatically who search for tor,as tor helps users to prevent their privacy and anonymity,as the users of tor makes nsa's program(xkeyscore) much difficult to surveillance on the  user.now its seems they found a way to surveillance users ,before they hide themself from the internet,if any user who search for tor or tails in the popular search engines like google ,yahoo their ip address will automatically added to the list for surveillance,this not it,the monitored websites like

• freeproxies.org
• hotspot shield
• privacy.li
• megaproxy
• and anonymous email service namely"mixminion".

the identity of users who simply visit the pages is recoreded and saved on the nsa's server,
 “This shows that Tor is working well enough that Tor has become a target for the intelligence services,” said Sebastian Hahn, who runs one of the key Tor servers. “For me this means that I will definitely go ahead with the project.”

meet hackers
www.meethackers.com

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by Malik korrich ~ vendredi 4 juillet 2014 0 commentaires

Your Apps are Spying on You - Edward Snowden

A report published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and ProPublica claims that Angry Birds and Google Maps are being used as a spying tool to collect user information. This claim has made on the basis of documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Report claims that National Security Agency (NSA) of U.S.A and Britain's Government Communications Headquarter (GCHQ) were cooperating to each other by 2007 in order to collect user information from smart phone Apps.

The agencies have traded methods for collecting location data from a user of Google Maps and for gathering address books, buddy lists, phone logs and geographic data embedded in photos when a user posts to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services, the Times said.

The NSA and GCHQ are able to tap into that metadat to collect a wealth of key data points about a person’s life, including age, gender, marital status (“Options include single, married, divorced, swinger and more,” The Guardian said), income, education level and more.

Angry Birds maker Rovio said it had no knowledge of any NSA or GCHQ programs or mechanisms for tapping into its users’ data.

Source

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by Malik korrich ~ mardi 28 janvier 2014 0 commentaires

President Obama Reveal NSA reforms on Jan. 17

President Obama will convey his exceptionally expected discourse on changes to the National Security Agency (NSA) on Jan, 17. White House announced.

In front of his discourse, Obama has been gathering with legislators, intelligence officials, technology companies and privacy groups. He's likewise acknowledging more than 40 proposals from a presidential requisition that proposed adjustment to the NSA's authority.

In front of his discourse, Obama has been gathering with legislators, intelligence officials, technology companies and privacy groups. He's likewise acknowledging more than 40 proposals from a presidential requisition that proposed adjustment to the NSA's authority.

Administration furnished no insights in the vicinity of a venue for the discourse, where the president is expected to affirm clearing adjustment to the work of the National Security Agency (NSA).

The address will come in the wake of a report issued a month ago by the president's audit group calling for clearing progressions to the legislature's observation works on, incorporating constraining the NSA to surrender its database of records on all U.S telephone calls.

U.S. defense and intelligence agencies have contended that such data is important to keep the general population safe. Anyway a White House bulletin board report issued in December. 13 discovered no proof that such information had averted any terrorist strike.

Source

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by Malik korrich ~ dimanche 12 janvier 2014 0 commentaires