AT&T stores details for every call, text message, Skype chat, or other communication that has passed through its infrastructure, retaining many records dating back to 1987, according to the Times 2013 Hemisphere report. The scope and length of the collection has accumulated trillions of records and is believed to be larger than any phone record database collected by the NSA under the Patriot Act, the Times reported.
ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site | WIRED
Andy Greenberg writes:
On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site’s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica’s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.
(Source: Wired)
The New York City Police Department is increasingly monitoring and targeting young people of color on social media in what critics say amounts to racial profiling. “Is the online surveillance of black teenagers the new stop-and-frisk?” asked a headline inThe Guardian, referring to the now-banned practice of stopping people on the street for “suspicious behavior.”
On top of that, members of the Black Lives Matter protest movement are now reportedly being targeted. Vice News broke the news in August that Deray Mckesson, a prominent civil rights activist, had been identified as a “professional protester” who was “known to law enforcement” and had his Twitter account monitored by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Intercept also reported that DHS has been tracking the protest movement and even watching over events that seem innocuous, including a silent vigil and a funk music parade.
In other words, simply exercising your right to protest is enough to get you on the feds’ radar…
The threats to black privacy are why Matthew Mitchell organizes Harlem Cryptoparty. In his past life, Mitchell was a data journalist at the New York Times and, before that, a developer at CNN. Nowadays he works with journalists, activists, and specifically people in his community of Harlem, on issues surrounding digital security, privacy, and surveillance.
(Source: Vice Magazine)
Reverse Engineering Proves Journalist Security App Is Anything But Secure | Motherboard
On Friday, Motherboard reported that the new Reporta app, billed as “the only comprehensive security app available worldwide created specifically for journalists,” may not be secure at all.
After we published our story, Frederic Jacobs, Open Whisper Systems’s lead developer for their secure messaging app, Signal, spent his Friday night at home reverse engineering the Reporta binary for iOS. He published the results here. His conclusion was, in a tweet, “Sloppy engineering. Reporta is forensics & analytics rich.”
“Every action is logged,” he wrote in his report. Google Analytics is built into the app, which stores the logs in a local cache before uploading them to Google’s servers. Reporta also uses Twitter’s Crashlytics crash-reporting framework, he explained.
“If you’re building an app for journalists in ‘potentially dangerous conditions,’” Jacobs wrote in a Twitter direct message, “you shouldn’t be tracking your users that much. And certainly not giving out that information to third parties without asking for consent of their users.”
Read more on Motherboard.
(Source: Vice Magazine)
Encrypt everything, including guacamole recipes.
Making a case for encryption, from guacamole recipes to top-secret documents | IJNet
All journalists, whether they work in conflict zones, investigate corruption or cover local politics, need to learn how to encrypt their digital voice and text communications. Media adversaries, whether governments, criminal organizations, corrupt officials or companies, can now easily hack journalists’ communications, learn sources’ identities, obstruct sensitive investigations and even destroy or alter electronic documents.
(Source: ijnet.org)
I want to help my readers; I want to make a better and healthier world. But I’m selling you to make my living and have my reach. I’m selling you to hundreds of corporations and dozens of governments. I’m selling your families and your communities as well, I’m selling everyone you touch — and not just for the purposes of tracking, but of control.
Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record.
But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either.
Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.
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