Tag Archives: Snooping

Over the past five years, 133 police officers working in New Zealand were found to have illegally looked through confidential police files, leading to criminal charges for two, and 16 to resign. While many used the police systems to look at their own profiles, others used them to check on …

Amid all the arguments about encryption ongoing in the press and government right now, it's easy to forget that it's something that GCHQ and other intelligence agencies have been railing against for some time. I turns out that in 2010, it helped to reject a smartphone encryption standard that would …

Following the years of failed-attempts by politicians and copyright lobby groups to have the world accept distasteful bills like PIPA and SOPA, it's no surprise that the tactics to push them through have changed. Nowadays they're hidden within legislation like trade bills in the case of the TTIP and TPP, …

The Commission for the Protection of Privacy (CBPL), Belgium's data authority, has been investigating Facebook and has now accused it of NSA-style snooping. The Commission has been looking in to the social network for quite some time now and things have only gotten worse since the Snowden revelations. Back in …

Shortly after his appointment as the United Nations' first head of privacy, Joseph Cannataci has called the current state of digital surveillance in the UK a “joke,” describing it as worse than anything George Orwell may have conjured up in his novel 1984. To address this and the oversight over …

Earlier this month, we learned that hackers – possibly from China – had infiltrated the White House Office of Personnel Management and had copied documents on millions of government employees. While there were concerns that financial and employment data, possibly even security clearance information had been compromised, it's also shed …

One of the biggest revelations in tech in recent years, was that the United States' intelligence agency, the NSA, has spent a lot of time, money and energy recording and storing the digital communications of Americans and foreigners, regardless of criminal activity or intent. This was huge, but it turns …

Since the original Edward Snowden revelations came out just over a year and a half ago, it's become very easy to feel despondent about the whole thing. “Of course they're spying,” is almost as often said now in the comment sections of these articles as the “if you have nothing …

It's no secret at this point that every member of the Five Eyes spying network (essentially every English speaking nation) has been snooping on not only their citizens, but everyone else's over the past few years, under the guise of anti-terrorism efforts. Despite this though, new revelations every few months …

In 2013, the United States riled up a lot of people, as Edward Snowden released a bevy of classified NSA documents to the press, which revealed the extent of the spying perpetrated by the NSA and its international contemporaries. However one person it really angered was German chancellor, Angela Merkel, …

China looks set to turtle up its tech industry in the near future, with the government soon to debate a new draft legislation that would see foreign tech companies need to meet security minimums before being able to sell to Chinese banks. The plan is thought to be to make …

Along with MEGA, the successor to MegaUpload, one of the tools that internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom has been keen to develop since the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013, was an encrypted chat service. Since it came to light that companies like Skype were working with the NSA and could be …

A lot of privacy advocates got a little worried during the press-conference where US President Barack Obama addressed the Sony hack, as he stated that the security breach was exactly why extra online powers needed to be given to intelligence agencies to thwart those responsible. However, just a few weeks later and …

One of the keystone shocks of the big Edward Snowden reveals last year, was that tech giants like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and many others had been forced into handing over information to the governments in the five-eyes intelligence alliance (USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada), without being able to …

Annie Machon, ex-member of the MI5 British Intelligence agency and partner of MI6 whistle blower, David Shalyer, who exposed investigations into British Politicians for socialist ties in the late 90s, has spoken out against the current climate of surveillance in Britain and the US. Not only did she claim that …

Over the past year, the world has become much more aware of the way government's sniff out data on potential criminals: in short, everything is recorded. Edward Snowden's revelations about this have helped create a growing tide of disquiet with regards to overly intrusive surveillance and especially when it comes …

Despite denying it for months, the director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), admitted yesterday that his organisation had spied on senate staff members while they were using specific systems set up to allow them to investigate claims of torture at the CIA. Email searchers and keyword filtering took …

Do you know what the government hopes the most about its recently rushed through DRIP legislation? That you'll forget about it. For those that don't know, DRIP, or the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers law, is a bill that was pushed through last week that forces ISPs and in-fact any …

Whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke at a New York based hacking conference, Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) this weekend. Broadcasting himseelf via a video feed from Moscow where he currently resides under threat of extradition to the US, he called on those assembled and other hackers and technology leaders around the …

Despite the drumming that trust in government spy agencies has taken over the past year thanks to Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA and GCHQ data collection and retention schemes, US president Obama's administration is still pushing its luck with the kind of data it's allowed to collect. In its …

In the wake of the Edward Snowden leaks from early 2013, the western world and specifically US and British citizens, have come to accept that the NSA and GCHQ have no doubt snooped in our conversations, metadata, Facebook posts and more, with the excuse that they're protecting us from terrorism. …

Even if you're one of those people that isn't a big fan of European intervention in British politics, you surely have to admit that it's nice to see Europe weighing in on our behalf in this instance. The EU Court of Human Rights has issued a demand that will see …

Since Edward Snowden dropped the bombshell last year that the NSA and other intelligence agencies (we're looking at you – while you look at us – GCHQ) around the world were snooping through our digital underwear drawers, there's one person we all wanted to hear from: Obama. While he's not …

Maybe it's time we put our scepticism aside for a second and considered that maybe not all politicians are liars and charlatans. Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the US' Patriot Act, has called for the NSA's ability to survey its own citizens to be severely curtailed …

In a report that shows the capabilities of a piece of social networking snooping technology, developed by Raytheon, a US defence contractor, it has emerged that the tool, while not sold to any foreign parties, was shared with the US government in 2010. This means that the technology, dubbed ironically …