Cybersecurity & Privacy

Are you on the list? Are you one of the millions of Americans that have been designated a threat to national security by the U.S. government? Will you be subject to detention when martial law is imposed during a major national emergency? They did not tell you, but apart from PRISM, there is actually a list that contains the names of at least 8 million Americans known as "MAIN CORE" that the U.S. intelligence community has been compiling since the 1980s.

Before allegedly becoming part of the secret National Security Agency surveillance program PRISM, Yahoo fought against it in court, in what was until now a secret challenge. The company eventually lost and had to comply.

by Grace Li and Venus Wu, Reuters Jun. 15, 2013 (TSR) - A few hundred rights advocates and political activists marched through Hong Kong on Saturday to demand protection for...

PRISM provides the U.S. government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes of people around the world for many years through Microsoft's Hotmail. For years, engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government via FBI agents. Today, the NSA program copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis, and ends up in the president's daily briefing. Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But with these anonymous sources disclose to us there are two vital components to Prism's success: First, which attracts the most attention so far, is how the U.S. government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. The second and far murkier one is how PRISM fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.

With potential perjury, a crime, by U.S. top officials, and new questions about spying, let's stop assuming everything is legal. No doubt, all the U.S. statutory and constitutional questions surrounding the NSA’s surveillance operations are why when publicly claiming that the program is perfectly legal, Obama officials also, refuse to make public their jurisprudential justifications for such a claim. The U.S. administration clearly fear that when subjected to scrutiny, the PRISM program will be shown to be, as Sen. Merkley put it, “Out of sync with the plain language of the law” and illegal as American journalist explains.

Orwell is getting a heavy workout these days, but one of his lasting contributions to semantics was offering the most potent example of how totalitarian states manipulate language as a tool of control and deception. U.S. National Intel Chief James Clapper lied. That makes him a liar. There are no semantic wiggling on the fact that the U.S. government does in fact spy on everyone on the planet as writer says.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple – vigorously deny giving the Obama administration backdoor access to users' internet information, but the potential damage to their brand reputation, who built their company on trust, has left them floundering for a way to respond. However, experts say, the trust is now violated, and is difficult to re-establish regardless of whether it is real or hoax.

The American intelligence director and the White House have finally confirmed what insiders have long known: The Obama administration is spying on the entire world. Politicians in Germany are demanding answers.

Shortly before US President Barack Obama's visit to Berlin, Germans are troubled by questions regarding the extent to which the United States monitors Internet traffic worldwide. President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom. How much monitoring is too much and at what point does freedom become compromised? With its Prism spy program, the US has crossed the line writes the Federal Minister of Justice of Germany.

Meet NSA's Four-Star General "Emperor" Keith Alexander, the man who runs cyberwar efforts for the United States and who has been building a secret digital "U.S. Empire" comprise of formidable army of thousands of NSA spies, plus 14,000 cyber troops for the last 8 years. Under his command, the highly trained cyberarmy, capable of launching devastating cyberattacks against anyone and any nation, has secretly amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe, infiltrating, sabotaging, and creating mayhem on any sovereign nation who refuse to bow to USA. Edward Snowden's leaks are just the tip of one big, secret iceberg. The appearance and "outing" of NSA's Emperor Alexander is a signal that USA is now ready to unleash hell on earth, to destabilize and exploit nations, with no regard for anyone's rights and laws, just like everything else they do around the world.

Google does not participate in any government program involving a lockbox or other equipment installed at its facilities to transfer court-ordered data to the government, a company spokesman says, refuting with some finality one of the lingering theories about the NSA's Prism program. Instead the company transmits FISA information the old fashioned way: by hand, or over secure FTP.

U.S. companies that pass data from European Union citizens to the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program could be breaching the E.U.’s data-protection laws.