privacy

Ex-Stasi boss green with envy over NSA's domestic spy powers

For Wolfgang Schmidt, it was just bad luck that he was 20 years too late and living on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.

The former head of the Stasi, which was East Germany's secret police force, betrayed a fair bit of envy about the powers enjoyed by his former Cold War nemesis in the aftermath of revelations about the extent of the National Security Agency's surveillance powers.

"You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true," he said in a wide-ranging interview with McClatchy.

As a former top spook in his … Read more

Search anonymously on your phone with DuckDuckGo

If the government's PRISM program has you looking over your shoulder, perhaps you'll find yourself a little less paranoid with DuckDuckGo Search & Stories on your phone. The app was released today for iPhone and for Android.

DuckDuckGo lets you search anonymously. Unlike other search engines, it does not collect or share your personal information. Thus, should the feds request user information from DuckDuckGo, it'll have nothing to turn over.

I tried out the iPhone app and was surprised to find it's more than a simple search app. It's a blend of search and news. … Read more

Web petition urging Congress to act on NSA hits half-million mark

More than half a million people have signed an online petition demanding Congress more fully probe the recent revelations about the National Security Agency.

The petition, titled "Stop Watching Us," started a couple of weeks ago. It urges Congress to stop the government from what it describes as blanket data collection. "This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens' right to speak and associate anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy."

It's the latest public fallout following press reports based … Read more

Data, meet spies: The unfinished state of Web crypto

Revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance abilities have highlighted shortcomings in many Internet companies' security practices that can expose users' confidential communications to government eavesdroppers.

Secret government files leaked by Edward Snowden outline a U.S. and U.K. surveillance apparatus that's able to vacuum up domestic and international data flows by the exabyte. One classified document describes "collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," and another refers to the NSA's network-based surveillance of Microsoft's Hotmail servers.

Most Internet companies, however, do not use an privacy-protective encryption technique … Read more

Ad group blasts cookie-privacy project from Mozilla, Stanford

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, a group that represents hundreds of Internet advertisers, has attacked Mozilla's involvement in a Stanford Law School privacy project to judge whether individual Web sites can be trusted to set behavior-tracking browser cookies.

The IAB doesn't like the Cookie Clearninghouse, which Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and Mozilla announced on June 19. The project aims to rate individual to bring privacy ratings for browser cookies -- the small text files that Web site operators can store on people's computers. Cookies can be useful for remembering that you're logged into a … Read more

See which apps have access to your online profiles

There are 70 apps accessing my Facebook account. I did not know that before I had MyPermissions scan my account. With this free app for iPhone or for Android, you can keep track of the apps that have access to your various online profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Dropbox, Instagram, Foursquare, and Flickr. The app doesn't do anything that you can't do directly on the permissions page of a given account, but it acts as a convenient dashboard to monitor and control which apps have access to your accounts.

To check the permissions of one of your … Read more

WikiLeaks: Where's Snowden? We're not saying

WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said Monday that Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor sought by the U.S. government, is "healthy and safe."

But Assange, in a conference call with reporters this morning, would not divulge Snowden's specific whereabouts, or even which country he might be in by now.

Last Friday, the U.S. government unsealed an indictment against Snowden, who has made international headlines over the last few weeks thanks to disclosures about classified NSA surveillance programs that he made through the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers.

"Edward Snowden is not a traitor,&… Read more

Australian AG scraps ISP data retention plans

Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has said that the government will not pursue a proposal to require Internet service providers (ISPs) to retain customer data for up to two years.

The parliamentary committee investigating the data retention proposal and a number of other proposed legislative changes to telecommunications and national security legislation today issued its report, and put the decision on whether to progress with a mandatory data retention scheme back on the government.

Law enforcement agencies have pushed for the scheme, as they have said that much of the so-called metadata — such as information about when a call is … Read more

Sync two iPhones on one computer

I've actually lost track of all the iOS devices I have. From iPhones to iPads and iPods, there are a few generations of mobile Apple gadgets populating my home that are occasionally adopted or abandoned by my wife and kid.

For the most part, today's iOS devices are self-supporting. They get their updates directly, and purchased media can be downloaded and redownloaded without hassles that used to come with Apple's iTunes-focused, obnoxiously DRM-wrapped early days of iOS.

But what do you do when your kid wants you to load your Led Zeppelin bootlegs onto his iPad? Or … Read more