Tag Archives: surveillance

Hacking Team Plans to Continue Operations

UPDATE–It has been absolutely brutal week for Hacking Team. All of the company’s documents, internal communications, emails with customers, and invoices have been published, including its dealings with oppressive regimes and customers in sanctioned countries. But even with all that, company officials said they have no plans to cease operations, even as they’re asking customers […]

Apple Pushing Developers Toward HTTPS Connections From Apps

Apple is encouraging developers who create apps for iOS to begin moving their apps to an HTTPS-only model as soon as possible in an effort to thwart eavesdropping on insecure, plaintext HTTP connections. The move is yet one more sign that major Internet and technology companies are becoming ever more resistant to large-scale, passive surveillance […]

Rights Groups Call for More Change Two Years After Snowden Revelations Began

It’s been two years now since the first stories about NSA surveillance capabilities began to appear, and the environment has shifted dramatically in that time. Awareness of and resistance to mass surveillance has increased greatly, but the changes to policy and laws that many observers had hoped for haven’t necessarily emerged. A new report from Privacy […]

Appeals Court Rules NSA Metadata Collection Not Authorized by Section 215

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act does not authorize the bulk collection of phone records by the NSA. The ruling undermines the key foundation upon which the federal government’s phone metadata surveillance program is built, Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That program was the […]

TextSecure to Drop Support for Encrypted SMS

Open Whisper Systems is phasing out support for encrypted SMS and MMS messages in its TextSecure messaging product. The move does not spell the end for encrypted messaging for users of the Android app, as the company plans to switch to its own transport protocol to address some of the security and performance issues inherent […]

Gemalto: ‘SIM Products Are Secure’

Gemalto officials say that while they are still in the process of investigating whether the company was compromised by the NSA and GCHQ to access the encryption keys for its SIM cards, they say they believe their products and platforms are secure. In a statement issued Monday, Gemalto officials said they are still trying to […]