Tag Archives: Western Intel

NSA combining national ID cards, Internet intercepts, facial databases

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“The NSA is harvesting millions of facial images from the Web for use in facial recognition algorithms through a program called ‘Identity Intelligence.’  The NSA is linking these facial images with other biometrics, identity data, and ‘behavioral’ data including ‘travel, financial, behaviors, social network.’  The NSA’s goal — in which it has been moderately successful — is to match images from disparate databases, including databases of intercepted videoconferences, images captured by airports of fliers, and hacked national identity card databases from other countries. According to the article, the NSA is trying to hack the national ID card databases of ‘Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.'”

http://boingboing.net/2014/06/01/nsa-facial-recognition-combin.html

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N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

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“The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its ‘next generation identification’ project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.  The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.  The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?_r=1

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Do Not Look to Politics to Remedy NSA Overreach

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“People should leverage their own resources and abilities. They should strive to take ‘human action’ wherever possible to protect themselves and their families. Such human action probably includes the purchase of some precious metals and the implementation of a variety of sensible measures involving items necessary to survival in tumultuous times. A second passport, a domicile abroad and the creation of foreign holdings of a measure of wealth are also important. One may wish to believe in the self-cleansing aspects of regulatory democracy but history shows us that when political systems begin to unravel it is difficult for them to recover.”

http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/35367/Do-Not-Look-to-Politics-to-Remedy-NSA-Overreach/

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China to ditch US consulting firms over suspected espionage

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“State-owned Chinese companies will cease to work with US consulting companies like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group over fears they are spying on behalf of the US government.  US consulting companies McKinsey, BCG, Bain & Company, and Strategy&, formerly Booz & Co., will all be snubbed by state-owned Chinese companies.  The dictate follows the US Justice Department’s indictment of five Chinese military officers it suspects of committing cyber crimes against a number of major US companies.  The US-China fallout came after revelations by Edward Snowden that the US uses economic cyber espionage to spy on international competitors, including China.”

http://rt.com/business/161476-us-spying-china-ban/

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First Chinese military officials charged with stealing US companies’ data

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“The US Justice Department indicted five Chinese military officers with stealing data from six US companies and unions on Monday, inaugurating a major escalation of tensions with China over economic spycraft.  Attorney general Eric Holder announced that the US for the first time would seek to bring officials of a foreign government to the US to face charges of infiltrating American computer networks to steal data beneficial to US trade competitors. The Justice Department even went as far as printing ‘wanted’ posters.  The charges come as revelations about the scale of NSA surveillance indicate that at least some US surveillance carries an economic benefit.”

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/19/us-chinese-military-officials-cyber-espionage

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NSA Records All Cell Phone Calls in the Bahamas

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“If you’ve been to the Bahamas recently, the National Security Agency (NSA) knows who you called and what you said while you were there. If you called some guy whose number a friend of a friend provided for you to score some weed while on the island to help you relax, because you’re one of those people who actually gets even more wound up while on vacation, the NSA knows that, too. The latest big revelation from Edward Snowden’s files is that the NSA has the ability to record and store the content (not just the metadata) of all cell phone conversations in the Bahamas and at least one other country. The Bahamas: A hotbed of terrorism activity?”

http://reason.com/blog/2014/05/20/nsa-records-all-phone-calls-in-bahamas

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How Snowden’s Revelations Have Strengthened the NSA

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“A year has gone by, and nothing has changed. This is a grant of legitimacy to the NSA that it did not have before Snowden’s revelations. Before, the NSA worked in secrecy from the public. Now the NSA knows that the worst possible light can be thrown on the NSA’s activities, and nothing is done to roll back the NSA. It has survived Snowden’s revelations, and now it can continue without any major threat to its operations.  I’m glad that Snowden did what he did, because I wanted to hear evidence that backed up what James Bamford wrote about the NSA over two decades ago. But nobody cared about Bamford’s book, and nobody really cares about Snowden’s revelations.”

http://www.garynorth.com/public/12446.cfm

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Wendy McElroy: America’s Electronic Police State

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“The fusion centers share many characteristics of a surveillance state with the NSA. These characteristics include a disregard for civil rights, secret records, the use of informants, little to no transparency, the targeting of political opponents, and an ever-expanding mission.  Since Snowden’s revelations, the NSA has been under a spotlight that reduces its ability to hide activities such as the warrantless recording of emails and phone calls. NSA is subjected to public controversy, with civil liberty groups pushing to rein in its power. By contrast, the fusion centers are comparatively invisible, which allows them to operate covertly in a manner more typical of a surveillance state.”

http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/americas-electronic-police-state

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The Revolutionary Quantum Computer That May Not Be Quantum at All

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“It was just a thought experiment until 1994, when mathematician Peter Shor hit upon a killer app: a quantum algorithm that could find the prime factors of massive numbers. Cryptography, the science of making and breaking codes, relies on a quirk of math, which is that if you multiply two large prime numbers together, it’s devilishly hard to break the answer back down into its constituent parts. You need huge amounts of processing power and lots of time. But if you had a quantum computer and Shor’s algorithm, you could cheat that math.  [..]  D-Wave pulled in $100 million from investors like Jeff Bezos and In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.”

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/quantum-computing

 

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China responds to NSA tampering with network gear vetting process

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“The US government used security concerns to essentially drive Chinese companies out of the American networking marketplace. Now China is doing the same thing, as the Chinese government is planning to require all products sold in the country to pass a ‘cyber security vetting process,’ the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency reported.  Jiang Jun, a spokesman for the State Internet Information Office, told Xinhua that the move was to counter large-scale spying, saying that the networks of Chinese government agencies, universities, businesses and telecommunications providers have ‘suffered extensive invasion and wiretapping,’ the news service reported.”

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/china-responds-to-nsa-tampering-with-network-gear-with-vetting-process/

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