Tag: NSA
A tiny violin is playing for Police Commissioner Bill Bratton today because he’s unhappy that Google and Apple’s new encryption techniques won’t allow law enforcement to search your phone. Responding to the companies’ latest effort to make phones with default encryption settings that even they can’t access, Bratton says: It’s disgraceful that these two companies are… consciously… thwarting […]
Diego Trujillo’s This Tape Will Self Destruct prints “a mixture of images and texts extracted from Cold War fictions paired up with excerpts from current secret documents.” Shortly after, these print-outs burst into flames. With the Kremlin security agencies going back to typewriter and paper to prevent computer leaks and the Guardian having to destroy the hardware which […]
ANIMAL will be bringing you continuing coverage from The New York Film Festival, which rans Sep 26 – Oct 12 at Film Society of Lincoln Center. Citizenfour will be released on October 24th in New York. Citizenfour, the latest documentary by Laura Poitras, attempts to give us an overview of the NSA’s shocking invasions into […]
Titan — the outdoor advertising company responsible for placings ads on pay phone booths throughout the city and equipping hundreds of them with “beacons” that track passing cellphones — has announced that they will get rid of the controversial devices. A City Hall spokesman tells Buzzfeed that the pseudo-surveillance gizmos “will be removed over the coming days.” Gimbal, the […]
Hundreds of “beacons” have been installed in phone booths throughout New York City in order to collect data from passing cellphones, bringing us one step closer to dystopian science fiction where ads follow everyone around. Titan, an advertisement placement company, uses the bluetooth enabled devices to push ads to a phone and transmit “anonymous” data to a third-party server. As […]
A hacktivist calling himself Phineas Fisher, has hacked into Gamma International, a UK-based spyware company that makes malware for governments, and leaked 40 GB of internal documents including the source code of their premier spy agency tool, FinSpy or FinFisher. The tools’ source has been released on BitTorrent, meaning now you too can be your […]
In theme with Russia’s war on anonymity and “extremism” on the internet, the country’s interior ministry is recruiting hackers to decrypt identities of Tor users. The ministry is offering 3.9 million rubles (about $110,000) to anyone who can crack the encryption service, BBC reports, which is a lot better than their previous contest where you get a free refrigerator for giving birth on June […]
In a recent in-depth interview with the Guardian, former security contractor Edward Snowden has stated that documents completely irrelevant to the NSA’s work — like nude photos, discovered during routine surveillance — were regularly passed around the office. Though we’ve become somewhat jaded to ongoing revelations of the NSA’s abuses of power and personal violations, Snowden’s new comments […]
Software engineer and artist David Huerta has made a mixtape that is encrypted against NSA surveillance, for the express purpose of sending it to the NSA. This snarky subversion is inspired by the “cypherpunks” of the 90’s, whose open sourcing of encryption software allowed regular people access to government-level privacy enforcement. “I work outside the […]
A piece of code used by the NSA to label online “extremists” has been uncovered for the first time. The German public television network ARD reported that the popular encryption service Tor, which is based in Germany, was one of the entities that had become a target for the NSA’s labeling as part of their […]
