The iPhone Has Reportedly Been Fully Hacked by the NSA Since 2008

Image via CrunchBase

Devindra Hardawar | Venture Beat | Reader Supported News | January 1, 2014

s 2013 edges to a close, reports of the NSA’s widespread surveillance capabilities have reached new heights of absurdity.

A report from Der Spiegel over the weekend highlighted the NSA’s elite TAO hacking unit, which directly targets corporate networks and can even place spyware on devices while they’re being shipped to recipients. And yesterday, security researcher Jacob Applebaum and Der Spiegel blew the lid off another NSA program, dubbed “DROPOUTJEEP,” which gives the agency fully control of Apple’s iPhone.

Once the NSA’s malware is on an iPhone, the agency can access just about any data on the device, including text messages, contact lists, geolocation history, and voicemail, according to a leaked NSA document (below). It can also remotely enable the iPhone’s camera and microphone.

Applebaum, who coauthored the story in Der Spiegel also detailed how the NSA’s iPhone surveillance works during a talk at this week’s Chaos Communications Congress, an annual hacker get-together. You can view the second part of his talk below, with the iPhone discussion beginning at 44:30.

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German president becomes first head of state to boycott Sochi Olympics

English: Joachim Gauck, 2011 Deutsch: Joachim Gauck, 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Joe Morgan | Gay Star News | December 8, 2013

The German president has become the first head of state to reportedly boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics in February next year.

Joachim Gauck has informed the Kremlin of his decision, according to Der Spiegel, understood to be a response to Russia’s violations of human rights – including the law banning ‘gay propaganda’.

Aformer Lutheran pastor, the president has refused to visit Russia since coming to office in March 2012.

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John McCain Says NSA Chief Keith Alexander ‘Should Resign or Be Fired’

English: John McCain official photo portrait. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Karen McVeigh | Guardian UK | Reader Supported News | November 11, 2013

Senator gives interview to Der Spiegel, saying general should ‘be held accountable’ for Edward Snowden leaks.

enator John McCain has called for Keith Alexander to “resign or be fired” as the head of the National Security Agency, in an interview with the German news weekly Der Spiegel published on Sunday.

The senator for Arizona, a former Republican presidential candidate, said Alexander should be held accountable for the leaks of thousands of documents by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed NSA surveillance and spying on a massive scale. McCain said Snowden, who worked for the NSA as a contractor, should never have had access to classified information.

“And now we have a contractor employee, not a government employee, who has access to information which is, when revealed, most damaging to the standing prestige of the United States and our relations with some of our best friends,” McCain said. “Why did Edward Snowden have that information? And what are we doing as far as screening people who have access to this information? It’s outrageous, and someone ought to be held accountable.”

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Close the N.S.A.’s Back Doors

The seal of the U.S. National Security Agency. The first use was in September 1966, replacing an older seal which was used briefly. For more information, see here and here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE EDITORIAL BOARD | New York Times | September 21, 2013

In 2006, a federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, helped build an international encryption system to help countries and industries fend off computer hacking and theft. Unbeknown to the many users of the system, a different government arm, the National Security Agency, secretly inserted a “back door” into the system that allowed federal spies to crack open any data that was encoded using its technology.

Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make clear that the agency has never met an encryption system that it has not tried to penetrate. And it frequently tries to take the easy way out. Because modern cryptography can be so hard to break, even using the brute force of the agency’s powerful supercomputers, the agency prefers to collaborate with big software companies and cipher authors, getting hidden access built right into their systems.

The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica recently reported that the agency now has access to the codes that protect commerce and banking systems, trade secrets and medical records, and everyone’s e-mail and Internet chat messages, including virtual private networks. In some cases, the agency pressured companies to give it access; as The Guardian reported earlier this year, Microsoft provided access to Hotmail, Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Skype. According to some of the Snowden documents given to Der Spiegel, the N.S.A. also has access to the encryption protecting data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry phones.

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Internet S.O.S.

Image via CrunchBase

Timothy Karr | Media Citizen | Reader Supported News | September 15, 2013

s the Internet on life support?

Last week we learned that U.S. and British intelligence agencies have broken the back of digital encryption – the coded technology hundreds of millions of Internet users rely on to keep their communications private.

Over the weekend, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA and its British counterpart are also hacking into smartphones to monitor our daily lives in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before the age of the iPhone.

This news, just the latest revelations from the files of Edward Snowden, only heighten our sense that we can no longer assume anything we say or do online is secure.

But that’s not all. In a case that was heard in a U.S. federal appeals court on Monday, telecommunications colossus Verizon is arguing that it has the First Amendment right to block and censor Internet users. (That’s right. Verizon is claiming that, as a corporation, it has the free speech right to silence the online expression of everybody else.)

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How the NSA Accesses Smartphone Data

Seal of the United States National Security Agency, used between 1963 and 1966 before being replaced by the current seal. The NSA was formed in 1955, but did not have its own seal for several years. This seal was first used in February 1963, before being replaced in September 1966 with the seal used today. The NSA has no information on the origin or design of this seal. For more information, see here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Marcel Rosenbach, Laura Poitras, Holger Stark | Der Spiegel | Reader Supported News | September 9, 2013

The US intelligence agency NSA has been taking advantage of the smartphone boom. It has developed the ability to hack into iPhones, android devices and even the BlackBerry, previously believed to be particularly secure.

Michael Hayden has an interesting story to tell about the iPhone. He and his wife were in an Apple store in Virginia, Hayden, the former head of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), said at a conference in Washington recently. A salesman approached and raved about the iPhone, saying that there were already “400,000 apps” for the device. Hayden, amused, turned to his wife and quietly asked: “This kid doesn’t know who I am, does he? Four-hundred-thousand apps means 400,000 possibilities for attacks.”

Hayden was apparently exaggerating only slightly. According to internal NSA documents from the Edward Snowden archive that SPIEGEL has been granted access to, the US intelligence service doesn’t just bug embassies and access data from undersea cables to gain information. The NSA is also extremely interested in that new form of communication which has experienced such breathtaking success in recent years: smartphones.

In Germany, more than 50 percent of all mobile phone users now possess a smartphone; in the UK, the share is two-thirds. About 130 million people in the US have such a device. The mini-computers have become personal communication centers, digital assistants and life coaches, and they often know more about their users than most users suspect.

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Der Spiegel: NSA Bugged UN Headquarters

National Security Agency Seal (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)

Tabassum Zakaria | Reuters | Reader Supported News | August 25, 2013

There was a time when the U.S. National Security Agency was so secretive that government officials dared not speak its name in public. NSA, the joke went, stood for “No Such Agency.”

That same agency this month held an on-the-record conference call with reporters, issued a lengthy press release to rebut a newspaper story, and posted documents on a newly launched open website – icontherecord.tumblr.com (which stands for intelligence community on the record).

The steps were taken under pressure as President Barack Obama’s administration tries to calm a public storm over disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the surveillance agency and its British counterpart scoop up far more Internet and phone data than previously known.

The NSA’s moves out of the shadows were meant to show that it operates lawfully and fixes mistakes when they are detected, but not everyone is convinced that it is a fundamental shift toward more openness at the intelligence agencies.

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Jimmy Carter: US “Has No Functioning Democracy”

English: US President Jimmy Carter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Alberto Riva | International Business Times | Reader Supported News | July 19, 2013

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of American democracy.

“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik Bruecke, a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S. relationship. The association’s name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”

Carter’s remarks didn’t appear in the American mainstream press but were reported from Atlanta by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, whose Washington correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz said on Twitter he was present at the event. The story doesn’t appear in the English-language section of the Spiegel website and is only available in German.

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