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It lights you up like a Vegas casino, says compsci boffin Usenix Enigma Although the cops and Feds wont stop banging on and on about encryption - the spies have a different take on the use of crypto. To be brutally blunt, they love it. Why? Because using detectable encryption technology like PGP, Tor, VPNs and so on, lights you up on the intelligence agencies' dashboards. Agents and analysts don't even have to see the contents of the communications - the metadata is enough for g-men to start making your life difficult. "To be honest, the spooks love PGP," Nicholas...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau remains "the most out-of-control, unaccountable, and nontransparent agency in the federal government... And we can say that without reservation because this is one of the only agencies that literally operates outside of congressional oversight," added Wise, whose Virgina-based organization "works to protect consumers' right to access free-market goods and services." The CFPB, created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, is funded largely by fees banks pay to the Federal Reserve. While its director, Richard Cordray, has bragged that his bureau has levied more than $141 million in fines used for CFPB education programs or reparation to...

A proposed bill in New York seeks to require that all smartphones sold in the state can be decrypted or unlocked and proposes hefty fines for vendors failing to comply.The proposed law marks the latest effort by lawmakers to make it easier for law enforcement to access and read encrypted data stored on smartphones. Should the proposed bill successfully pass through New York's state assembly and senate, Apple and Google could face fines of $2,500 per device sold in the state after January 1, 2016, if a retailer knowingly sold a smartphone that could not be unlocked or decrypted by...

Perhaps nobody on the planet knows more about intelligence protocol than Edward Snowden. If Snowden says it's "completely ridiculous" to believe that Clinton's emails were safe, then yes, it's fair to include his viewpoint in any critique of Hillary Clinton's latest controversy. In addition, since I believe Senator Bernie Sanders is desperately needed at this point in U.S. history, and electing Clinton or a Republican would essentially be nominating the same president on war and foreign policy, it's important to address relevant analysis of the email controversy. There seems to be a bizarre paradigm of thought among some Democrats that...

While most of the attention on Hillary Clinton's emails dealt with a document that included instructions from Clinton to tamper with the headings of a possibly classified subject, another, even more explosive email is big news in Sudan and could potentially lead to criminal charges. The email in question is from Sid Blumenthal, close Clinton friend and ally, who was in Libya trying to drum up business with the Libyan government for some business associates. To ingratiate himself with Secretary Clinton and get the State Department to intercede with the Libyan government on his behalf, he sent her "intelligence" briefs...

Now, after learning that the Executive branch of the U.S. government spied on the Legislative branch, it’s less confusing as to why the former Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), and his compadre in the Senate, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), seemed so reticent in resisting this president.

Juniper has confirmed it will stop using a piece of security code that analysts believe was developed by the National Security Agency in order to eavesdrop through technology products. The Silicon Valley maker of networking gear said it would ship new versions of security software in the first half of this year to replace those that rely on numbers generated by Dual Elliptic Curve technology. The statement on a blog post came a day after the presentation at a Stanford University conference of research by a team of cryptographers who found that Juniper's code had been changed in multiple ways...

Back in October I told you that Hillary Clinton’s email troubles were anything but over, and that the scandal over her misuse of communications while she was Secretary of State was sure to get worse. Sure enough, EmailGate continues to be a thorn in the side of Hillary’s presidential campaign and may have just entered a new, potentially explosive phase with grave ramifications, both political and legal. The latest court-ordered dump of her email, just placed online by the State Department, brings more troubles for Team Hillary. This release of over 3,000 pages includes 66 “Unclassified” messages that the State...

The National Security Agency said on Thursday it was "confident" in its powers under a new phone records collection scheme, a claim that backs up assertions from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).In a post on the influential legal blog Lawfare, NSA general counsel Glenn Gerstell addressed the operations of the spy agency's new program, which began in November following a tough congressional fight last summer."NSA will in due course, as it gains experience with the new process, report to Congress about the efficiency of the new arrangement," Gerstell wrote. "NSA is confident, however, that it can operate the new scheme in...

"I tend to err on the side of security," said 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on the Hugh Hewitt Show. 2016 Republican presidential candidate and billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump said that he supports reauthorizing the USA PATRIOT Act and bulk cell phone metadata collection by the National Security Agency in an interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show earlier this month. In the above-embedded clip, Hewitt asks Trump, “On metadata collection, Ted Cruz is glad the NSA got out of it. Marco Rubio wants it back. What’s Donald Trump think?” “Well, I tend to err on the side...

BOONE, IOWA – Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 79% privately defended the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, even as he publicly condemned the practice. Rubio and his ally Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) 86% discussed the matter privately in a room away from reporters early Wednesday morning at the Royal Amsterdam Hotel in Pella, Iowa. The two men talked before they set out on a three-stop Iowa campaign tour to showcase Gowdy’s endorsement of Rubio. This reporter heard the conversation while picking up a laptop computer and other materials left in a back...

In the midst of its espionage operations against the State of Israel, the Obama administration's National Security Agency (NSA) listened in on private conversations conducted with members of the U.S. Congress and American-Jewish groups, a late Tuesday report in the Wall Street Journal reveals. The NSA operations revealed to President Obama that Israeli officials had coordinated on messaging with U.S. Jewish groups that had come out against the Iran nuclear deal, the report says, citing unnamed officials familiar with the espionage operations. At the time, President Obama was facing a wave of criticism from European leaders-such as French President Francois Hollande...

A House panel on Wednesday announced it is opening an investigation into U.S. intelligence collection that may have swept up members of Congress. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's announcement of the probe comes after a Wall Street Journal report that the U.S. collected information on private exchanges between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of Congress during ongoing negotiations for nuclear deal with Iran.

WSJ: White House Used NSA to Spy on Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, Members of Congress, American Jewish Groups Dec. 30, 2015 7:23am Sharona Schwartz Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the target of National Security Agency eavesdropping which also netted the private conversations of members of U.S. Congress and American Jewish groups, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The alleged spying took place despite a promise two years ago by President Barack Obama -- after it was revealed that the NSA had listened in on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone calls -- that the U.S. "will not monitor the communications of...

U.S. spying programs scooped up communications between members of Congress and Israeli leaders, giving the White House insight into Israel’s lobbying of U.S. lawmakers against the Iran nuclear deal, current and former U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. The article, published Tuesday afternoon, reports that the U.S. continued to spy on select leaders of allied nations despite President Barack Obama’s pledge to curb such surveillance two years ago, and that it was a top priority to maintain spying on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. As part of that continued surveillance, the National Security Agency also swept...

Dual_EC weaknesses and Juniper error exploited, researchers say. Security researchers suspect the United States' National Security Agency may have had a hand in the planting of unauthorised backdoors in Juniper's enterprise firewalls. The network equipment vendor last week issued an urgent security alert for its NetScreen enterprise firewalls, after discovering "unauthorised code" in the device operating system that allows them to be fully compromised. Juniper had discovered the code during an internal review. The backdoors - which had been in existence since 2012 - meant attackers could gain administrative access and decrypt VPN connections unnoticed. Researchers have now said the...

Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz clashed over their opposing votes on a key surveillance bill during Tuesday night's GOP debate, with each senator trying to establish himself as the strongest on national security.Rubio accused Cruz of hampering intelligence agencies by supporting the USA Freedom Act, which ended the National Security Agency's vast collection of millions of U.S. phone records. That information could have been critical in investigating the shooting in San Bernardino, California, Rubio argued. "We are now at a time where we need more tools, not less tools," the Florida Republican said. "And that tool we lost, the...

Once again our national security agencies failed at detecting dangerous terrorists. ... Who knew that collecting massive amounts of irrelevant data on tens of millions of innocent Americans unrelated to terrorism does not prevent terrorist attacks? Actually, making the data haystack bigger makes it harder to find the needle. Like the country music song “Looking For Love in All the Wrong Places,” our country is determined to look for terrorists in all the wrong places. Our government responded by patting down grandmothers and young children at airport security screening, after the trauma of the terrorist attacks on September 11, while...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday offered an impassioned defense of his vote to rein in the government's bulk phone surveillance, blasting those in his party who he said wanted to "exploit the current crisis by calling on Americans to surrender our constitutional liberties as the only way to ensure our safety."The Republican presidential candidate, who has been gaining in recent early-state primary polling, used a speech at the conservative Heritage Foundation to respond to criticism from two fellow candidates, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for his vote to end the National Security Agency's mass...

As the investigation into the San Bernardino terrorists moves into its second week, there are increasing indications that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were on the radar of authorities – or should have been, according to some lawmakers. “You have to say it was an intelligence failure,” Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Az., said Thursday following a closed-door House briefing on the shooting. “You have to. Because it was.”