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How your smartphone's battery life can be used to invade your privacy A group of researchers have demonstrated how to track users with nothing more than their remaining battery power, which could compromise privacy Alex Hern Tuesday 4 August 2015 08.18 BST A little-known feature of the HTML5 specification means that websites can find out how much battery power a visitor has left on their laptop or smartphone – and now, security researchers have warned that that information can be used to track browsers online. The battery status API is currently supported in the Firefox, Opera and Chrome browsers, and...

DEABORN, MI -- Robert Snell of the Detroit News analyzed flight data that shows a single-engine, 2010 Cessna tied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation by an Associated Press investigation this June spent a good amount of time in the skies above the Muslim-concentrated city of Dearborn this weekend. The flight data showed the plane on Saturday and Sunday made 19 slow-speed, several-mile-wide loops above Dearborn, as well as neighboring cities of Allen Park, Melvindale, Dearborn Heights and Taylor. "The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times,...

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday said a controversial new surveillance bill could sweep away “important privacy protections”, a move that bodes ill for the measure’s return to the floor of the Senate this week. The latest in a series of failed attempts to reform cybersecurity, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (Cisa) grants broad latitude to tech companies, data brokers and anyone with a web-based data collection to mine user information and then share it with “appropriate Federal entities”, which themselves then have permission to share it throughout the government. Minnesota senator Al Franken queried the DHS in...

I stepped from the warmth of our source's London flat. That February night in 1977, the air was damp and cool; the buzz of traffic muted in this leafy north London suburb, in the shadow of the iconic Alexandra Palace. A fellow journalist and I had just spent three hours inside, drinking Chianti and talking about secret surveillance with our source, and now we stood on the doorstep discussing how to get back to the south coast town where I lived. Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad...

Like a lot of teenagers, Aanya Nigam reflexively shares her whereabouts, activities and thoughts on Twitter, Instagram and other social networks without a qualm. But Aanya's care-free attitude dissolved into paranoia a few months ago shortly after her mother bought Amazon's Echo, a digital assistant that can be set up in a home or office to listen for various requests, such as for a song, a sports score, the weather, or even a book to be read aloud. After using the Internet-connected device for two months, Aanya, 16, started to worry that the Echo was eavesdropping on conversations in her...

One of the things that civil liberties activists like to lament about is that the general public seems to care more about Google and Facebook using their personal data to target advertising than the government using it to target drone strikes. The reality is that both types of abuse are dangerous, and they work hand in hand. It’s hard to find a more perfect example of this collusion than in a bill that’s headed for a vote soon in the U.S. Senate: the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA. CISA is an out and out surveillance bill masquerading as a...

Christopher Soghoian THE SPIES WE TRUST: THIRD PARTY SERVICE PROVIDERS AND LAW ENFORCEMENT SURVEILLANCE Telecommunications carriers and service providers now play an essential role in fa- cilitating modern surveillance by law enforcement agencies. The police merely select the individuals to be monitored, while the actual surveillance is performed by third parties: often the same email providers, search engines and telephone companies to whom con- sumers have entrusted their private data. Assisting Big Brother has become a routine part of business. While communications surveillance is widespread, the official government reports barely scratch the surface. As such, the true scale of law...

He promised us the most transparent administration in history. And he delivered. Combined with the 4.2 million people whose Social Security numbers were stolen in a separate breach, we’re now talking about upwards of eight percent of the entire population whose sensitive personal data is in an enemy power’s hands. On that note, let me gently remind you that not a single person has been fired for any of this. Of the 21.5 million records that were stolen, 19.7 million belonged to individuals who had undergone background investigation, OPM said. The remaining 1.8 million records belonged to other individuals, mostly...

A SMALL private firm in the US has developed a surveillance system of Orwellian proportions that could very well be the future of big brother. Thirty kilometres above a chosen city, a plane hangs out of sight of the thousands of people scurrying below — continuously circling the metropolis underneath. Every second, the plane takes a photo of the entire city and all the happenings within a 64sq km radius. The images are beamed down to a control centre where they create what is akin to a real-time Google map of everything taking place. When a crime occurs, teams of...

From a private communication: Lots of people casing streets with dogs sunglasses and baseball caps, always in pairs. They get real long hard looks up every driveway that doesn’t have a security camera at the end of it (as soon as they spot a camera the ground suddenly becomes really interesting). Seen this behavior myself more than a few times. Dogs always have their noses to the ground and the edges of the property. I have never seen an untrained dog sniff like a bloodhound quite like that. It doesn’t help [my paranoia] that every pair of people I’ve seen...

Suspicious activity noted ahead of #JadeHelm15 CHINO HILLS, Calif. (INTELLIHUB) — A reader, John Temblador, retired California State Peace Officer, CDC, witnessed a vehicle dashing through a Walmart parking lot on June 4. “at a high rate of speed”, bearing no “E” plate.Temblador thinks that the vehicle may have been conducting a “covert scan” of some type.The vehicle appears to be equipped with license plate scanning technology or code catcher technology, aimed both forward and aft to either side of the vehicle to catch every plate in the parking lot.

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Govs. Scott Walker and Chris Christie said presidential rivals in the Senate don't do anything. Sen. Marco Rubio denounced "old ways" in an indirect slap at older contenders. Sen. Lindsey Graham said his party may be going down a "death spiral" if it doesn't embrace minority and younger voters. In fighting for attention Friday at a luxury mountainside donor retreat convened by 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, several 2016 contenders let loose some elbows at each other. Most did not name names, but Christie did. "If you want to know how little they know," he...

Tucked into the surveillance bill that became law was a little-noticed section that will let the United States complete ratification of two long-stalled treaties aimed at stopping a frightening scenario: terrorists wielding radioactive bombs. "Today, nearly 2,000 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials remain spread across hundreds of sites around the globe — some of it poorly secured," said former Sen. Sam Nunn, co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization in Washington that works on the issue. "We know that to get the materials needed to build a bomb, terrorists will not necessarily go where there is the most...

Just when we thought the absurdity that marks every single day of Obama's reign could not possibly be surpassed, we learned that 4 hours (3 hours and 47 minutes to be precise) after the US president vowed to sign a new law banning bulk data collection by the NSA (named, for purely grotesque reasons, the "USA Freedom Act"), the Obama administration asked the secret Fisa surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months....

The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months. The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

At Powerline this week, Steve Hayward penned a post aptly entitled “The Insincerity of Rand Paul.” The senator’s legal arguments against the Patriot Act, he posits, mimic papa Ron Paul’s 2003 calls for a formal declaration of war against Iraq: mere “constitutional punctilio to cover his real feelings.” Steve is right. Congress statutorily authorized the use of military force in Iraq. Nothing more was constitutionally required. The real reason for Representative Ron Paul’s formalistic nattering about a declaration of war was his opposition to American intervention in Iraq. That, in turn, was driven by his theory that it was American...

China has begun dispatching surveillance vessels off the coast of Hawaii in response to theNavy's monitoring activities of disputed islands in the South China Sea, according to the Taiwan newspaper Want China Times. The purported surveillance comes on the heels of raised tensions between China and the United States late last month. A Navy P-8A Poseidon surveillance plane was flying over the Spratly Islands near the Philippines and Malaysia when a Chinese radio dispatcher warned it several times to depart the airspace. China has been enlarging some of the uninhabited atolls by dredging up sand from the sea bottom, claiming...

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents. In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show. The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer...

He’s turning out to be a lot like his father, unable or unwilling to adjust to changing political realities within his party.There are many reasons to be bullish about Rand Paul's unconventional campaign for president. He's relentlessly courting support from young voters and African Americans, making the explicit case that outreach can translate into wider support. He's embracing issues that Republicans usually don't dare touch, such as criminal-justice reform, drug decriminalization, and reining in government surveillance. And based on the early polls, he's finding himself in solid shape, running competitively against Hillary Clinton and in the top tier of Republican...

Good morning Baltimore. Crime is up and arrests are down. Residents are afraid to go outside following the recent surge in homicides, the worst in 15 years. But have no fear, Al Sharpton has come to the rescue to bring peace and harmony to the mean streets of a city near you. America’s law-and-order champion has been calling for the deployment of a federal police force to take over local law enforcement in riot-troubled cities such as Baltimore and Ferguson. “We need the Justice Department to step in and take over policing in this country,” he said. He also suggested...