ICT Security-Sécurité PC et Internet

The Supreme Court has approved a rule change that will allow US judges to issue search warrants for accessing computers and devices in any jurisdiction.

That would greatly expand the FBI's hacking capability, say civil liberties groups, who are opposing the planned changes.

Under existing rules, judges can only issue orders within their jurisdiction, often only a few miles across or a few local districts.

But the Justice Dept. argued the changes are necessary to keep up the pace against criminals, who often work across multiple jurisdictions -- even countries.

In September, the FBI shut down the Silk Road online drug marketplace, and it started seizing bitcoins belonging to the Dread Pirate Roberts — the operator of the illicit online marketplace, who they say is American man named Ross Ulbricht.

CNET has learned the FBI has developed custom 'port reader' software to intercept Internet metadata in real time. And, in some cases, it wants to force Internet providers to use the software. Read this article by Declan McCullagh on CNET News.

US-Behörden wollen Verschlüsselung zuvorkommen.

SSL-verschlüsselte Verbindungen sind Überwachern naturgemäß ein Dorn im Auge. Anscheinend versuchen deshalb jetzt die US-Behörden NSA und FBI, Provider zur Herausgabe von SSL-Keys zu veranlassen.

Steven Chabinsky, former top lawyer in the FBI's cybersecurity section, thinks attackers are ahead of us and we need to change our defensive thinking.

"When that happens, you know you have a strategy problem on your hands. Had the strategy been working, people would have been executing properly and succeeding. But it isn't. The government and private sector were executing on their plans very well and they didn't improve cybersecurity every year. There was objectively better security, but subjectively, against threat actors, they were gaining momentum. The threat continues to outpace us."

Read more, a MUST:

http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/think-differently-cybersecurity-or-fall-farther-behind-former-fbi-lawyer-says-091912

Director Robert Mueller tells Congress that police are 'increasingly unable' to bring criminals to justice because rapid advances in technology thwart surveillance. Read this blog post by Declan McCullagh on Politics and Law.

The FBI is renewing its request for new Internet surveillance laws, saying technological advances hinder surveillance and warning that companies should be required to build in backdoors for police.

An internal FBI strategy document from 2007 recently posted by Cryptome.org refers to "proposed amendments" to CALEA that would codify the authority of police to "process a subject's communications traffic, including IP/packet-based communications."

Read more:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57518265-38/fbi-renews-broad-internet-surveillance-push/

The FBI is building a massive facial recognition database that could contain as many as 52 million images by 2015, including 4.3 million non-criminal images, according to information obtained by th...

Learn more:

• http://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/12/21/privacy-in-the-digital-world-shouldnt-we-talk-about-it/
• http://gustmees.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/smartphone-pictures-pose-privacy-risks/

November 26, 2013

This is a long article about the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU), which is basically its own internal NSA.

It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies -- an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.

[...]

The unit works closely with the "big three" U.S. telecommunications companies -- AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint -- to ensure its ability to intercept the telephone and Internet communications of its domestic targets, as well as the NSA's ability to intercept electronic communications transiting through the United States on fiber-optic cables.

[...]

After Prism was disclosed in the Washington Post and the Guardian, some technology company executives claimed they knew nothing about a collection program run by the NSA. And that may have been true. The companies would likely have interacted only with officials from the DITU and others in the FBI and the Justice Department, said sources who have worked with the unit to implement surveillance orders.

[...]

La demande d'extradition d'un homme accusé d'avoir hébergé des contenus à caractère pédopornographique par le FBI soulève des questions sur les méthodes de la police fédérale américaine.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the FBI employs a number of high-tech hacker tactics in its efforts to round up information on suspects, including the ability to remotely activate microphones on Android devices and notebook computers,...