A Republican lawmaker is urging his colleagues in the Senate to approve without debate a bill that reaffirms the government’s power to place warrantless wiretaps on US citizens. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) asked his fellow lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week to quickly reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the end of the year. Should Congress fail to renew FISA by December ...

  What if somebody told you that you were being monitored inside and outside your home 24 hours a day? Would you believe them? Most people wouldn’t. However reality is often scarier than fiction. Chances are if you’re reading this, you likely live in a nation that utilizes the following tracking methodologies that have only one purpose…to digitally record and catalogue your every move. For the past two ...

The US government's handling of state secrets is out of date, over-cautious and incapable of keeping up with the vast quantities of electronic data produced in the digital age, a federal committee says in a report to President Barack Obama that is published on Thursday. The report from the Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee set up by Congress, paints a devastating picture of a sec ...

Think Google ad targeting is crossing the line? Verizon filed a patent for a cable television box that uses sensors to record what you’re doing and target you with specific advertisements that relate to your mood. The telecom giant Verizon wants to know you better. Much better. The company just registered a patent for its DVR of the future. The set-top box would use a depth sensor, an image sensor, an audio ...

Former top NSA mathematician and code breaker, William Binney, has gone on record to publicly reveal the scope of a top-secret surveillance program called Stellar Wind which led to his resignation in 2001. It is a program that has directly targeted everyday Americans following 9/11. Binney has endured harassment by his own government, as many other whistleblowers have when trying to reveal illegal activitie ...

The senior technician became so disgruntled earlier this year that he stopped showing up for work at the NDB, the Swiss intelligence service. But the agency only realised that something was amiss when UBS, the largest Swiss bank, expressed concern about an attempt to set up a new numbered bank account, which was traced to the technician. Swiss investigators raided his home and seized portable storage device ...

The U.S. government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the local sheriff to the FBI, to snoop on the digital trails you create every day. Authorities can often obtain your emails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a simple subpoena. Usually you won’t even be notified.The Senate last week took a st ...

Access to private data has increased by 20 per cent by Australia’s law enforcement and government agencies – and with no warrant. Australians are 26 times more prone to be placed under surveillance than people in other countries, local media report. In such a way, state structures accessed private information over 300,000 times last year – or 5,800 times every week, figures from the federal Attorney General ...

Once upon a time, privacy was not a word that was foreign to the English language. In that time long ago, police and governments would often have to manufacture an incident (like 9/11) in order to successfully push for more legal powers to monitor private conversations or access data without a warrant. However, in 2012, the premise of the invasion of privacy is no longer necessary. Now, the debate itself is ...

Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices themselves, more similar than ever to a personal computer, may allow hackers or even Samsung to see and hear yo ...