Cybersecurity & Privacy

The European Commission's Communication on Cloud Computing forecasts a spend of 45 billion Euro on such services in the EU in 2020. EU has a comprehensive legal framework, surveillance measures are subject to constitutional safeguards and protections are based on fundamental rights of individuals, regardless of citizenship. The US government is seeking to water the legal framework down as much as possible with not only the biggest lobbying effort that Brussels has ever seen, but also the broadest against the EU data protection package, directly and indirectly, via trade associations and "independent" "think tanks".

The alleged benefits offered by programmes like PRISM are eclipsed by the pitfalls and dwarfed by the damage they do to society, claims UK campaigner, Andy Halsall..

The former director of the US National Security Agency has indicated that surveillance programs have "expanded" under Barack Obama's time in office and said the spy agency has more powers now than when he was in command. Michael Hayden, who served most of his tenure as NSA director under George W Bush, said there was "incredible continuity" between the two presidents.

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. Snowden was working at the NSA office in Hawaii. It is also where he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose to the world. He requested that his identity be revealed because he believes he has done nothing wrong, and that the story is not about him, but what the US government is doing. He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures.

President Obama falsely claims Congress authorised all NSA surveillance. He also defended and has tried to deflect criticism by claiming "every member of Congress has been briefed" on the mass surveillance program. That too was false. Only some members of Congress were briefed – particularly those on the intelligence committees, while the rest of U.S. Congress did not even know about it.. The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. The U.S. Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, who was the actual author the Patriot Act, say that this is an abuse of that law and vehemently disagrees...in his own words.

The NSA program called PRISM was enabled by changes to US surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under Obama in December 2012 while the Americans were too busy being distracted. The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US. It also opens the possibility of communications made entirely within the US being collected without warrants. Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks. A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret leaked document dating to April 2013, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online with Dropbox next in line.

U.S. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the US Senate Intelligence committee, has said that the state has been collecting the telephone records of millions of US Verizon customers since 2006, and the order is a three-month renewal of a 7-year continuing practice. She said that since it is carried out by the U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance under the business records section of the George W. Bush's Patriot Act, it is lawful.

The US government is collecting the phone records of millions of US customers of Verizon under a top secret court order. The top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance of American citizens under Obama. Under the terms of the order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data and the time and duration of all calls.

Apple's iPhone and iOS devices are considered by many to be more secure than other mobile offerings, but you should think twice or even thrice or even more before using someone else's charger next time your iPhone is running out of battery. Investigating the extent of these devices' security, researchers found a way to hack your iPhone within less than a minute: A malicious charger. The research team will demonstrate the proof-of-concept of the hack at upcoming BlackHat Arsenal Tool hacker conference in July 27-August 1, to be held at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, USA.

Anonymous hacktivists and Syrian Electronic Army(SEA) carried out a series of cyber attacks against Turkish Government following the violence of the police against peaceful protesters. The attack was in support of the ongoing anti-government protests. Anonymous hacked the Prime Minister’s official website and gained access to staff email addresses, passwords and phone numbers. Anonymous is said to have compromised the email addresses, passwords and phone numbers. However, they didn't share any data. Meanwhile, Syrian Electronic Army attacked the same website and leaked more than 60 email addresses, passwords.

Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees are using secret government email accounts to conduct official business, The Associated Press found, a practice that complicates agencies' legal responsibilities to find and turn over emails under public records requests and congressional inquiries.

Jun. 3, 2013 (TSR) - NATO experts have come up with a first-ever guide that seeks to adjust international law on the subject of cyberwars. Russia believes the very...