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As if Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) didn’t already know way too much about you, their new Reactions buttons will give them even more insight into your inner thoughts, and you’ve already given them permission to do whatever they want with this information. ... The new emotions – “love”, “sad” “wow”, “haha”, and “angry” – are being widely embraced by a user base that is desperate to tell the world exactly how it feels about everything under the sun, from the latest political issues to vacation photos. However, the new buttons do a lot more than give you another way to tell...

Former CIA Chief Says Military Could Defy Donald Trump’s Orders By Damian Paletta Feb 27, 2016 4:53 pm ET WASHINGTON – Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, who recently led the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, said the U.S. military would likely refuse to follow certain orders from Donald Trump if he is elected to the White House in November and follows through on campaign promises. "I would be incredibly concerned if a President Trump governed in a way that was consistent with the language that Candidate Trump expressed during the campaign," Gen. Hayden said during an interview will...

Up to 46,000 Internet-accessible digital video recorders (DVRs) that are used to monitor and record video streams from surveillance cameras in homes and businesses can easily be taken over by hackers. According to security researchers from vulnerability intelligence firm Risk Based Security (RBS), all the devices share the same basic vulnerability: They accept a hard-coded, unchangeable password for the highest-privileged user in their software -- the root account. Using hard-coded passwords and hidden support accounts was a common practice a decade ago, when security did not play a large role in product design and development. That mentality has changed in...

We see tremendous push from government for Apple to facilitate back door access to encryption on phones. This apparently to crack the terrorist's iPhone to find out who are their contacts, etc. This appears to be excuse to bypass privacy of phone users under the guise of security. Feds were ignorant to traffic around the terrorist's house. Now the phone is the key to find out who are their contacts? What does the phone reveal that records at the service provider, log of phone calls, doesn't? Where is the NSA and their records and alerts of possible terrorist activity? I...

GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump blames Bush for failing to stop 9/11 attacks As Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hammers away at former President George W. Bush for not stopping the September 11 attacks, another factor could be added to the debate: Mr. Bush inherited from Bill Clinton an intelligence community in terrible shape. This fact comes not from a Republican partisan but from George Tenet, President Clinton's CIA director, a post that at the time made him the country's top intelligence officer. Mr. Tenet wrote in his memoirs, "At the Center of the Storm," that Mr. Clinton left Mr....

Obama establishes Federal Privacy Council as part of massive cyber effort https://iapp.org/news/a/obama-establishes-federal-privacy-council-as-part-of-massive-cyber-effort/ Obama establishes Federal Privacy Council as part of massive cyber effort Sam Pfeifle The Privacy Advisor | Feb 9, 2016 Obama establishes Federal Privacy Council as part of massive cyber effort As part of his 2017 budget proposal for the United States, President Barack Obama is including $19 billion for cybersecurity efforts, a 35-percent increase over fiscal year 2016. The funds will go toward a Cybersecurity National Action Plan, which includes the hiring of a chief information security officer, a $3.1 billion fund for IT modernization at the...

There's a lot about Ted Cruz that should worry constitutionalists considering voting for the senator in the presidential election of 2016.Recently, Infogram published brief but illuminating biographies of several of Cruz's key foreign policy advisors. The information disclosed in these revelations could trouble many constitutionalists otherwise keen on the senator and who rely on him to restore the rule of law to the White House.The first person highlighted in the article is the chairman of Cruz's foreign policy team, Chad Sweet.Sweet's professional and political background betrays Cruz's claims of being someone who promises "not to continue going in the same...

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.