COMSEC AUDIO JAMMER APP for iPHONE

itunes.apple.com

COMSEC AUDIO JAMMER

Keep your private conversations private!

The COMSEC AUDIO JAMMER protects your sensitive room conversations by generating a random masking sound, which desensitizes any near-by microphone. Effective against any microphone based eavesdropping device including tape recorders, RF transmitters, hard-wired microphones (including contact type) and shotgun microphones. It also protects against microwave or laser reflection pickups (when used correctly).
COMSEC AUDIO JAMMER uses specially designed audio speech patterns to mask your conversations from hidden microphones & eavesdroppers.
The speech patterns are randomly designed and generated to mask normal conversations from eavesdroppers. 


More...get the app here.

Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery

Note: Having recently traveled to China, I can attest to Mr. Lieberthal's concerns....Do yourself (and your company) a favor, Just accept the fact that you "will" be collected against...and take Mr. Lieberthal's advice...very seriously.  JDL

nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.
He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”
What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets.


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Todd Haley's Bugging Allegations

bleacherreport.com
It's no surprise that former Kansas City Chiefs head coach Todd Haley is in the news right now—he is one of the hottest free agent coaching commodities on the market right now—what is odd, however, are the reasons he is showing up right now. 

Reports by the Kansas City Star, which include allegations by Haley, tell of the levels of paranoia and anxiety on Arrowhead drive.

Haley, the most high profile former staffer named in the report, tells of his fears that his phones, both in his office, and his private cell phone, may have been tapped. He spoke of his concerns that his office, and conference rooms at the facility were bugged and monitored for audio.

Others spoke of the levels of secrecy in Arrowhead stadium, which forbid non-football staffers from visiting certain parts of the complex, and which require staff with a view of the practice fields to close their blinds during team practices. They spoke of, on occasion, having meetings and phone calls interrupted by security staff charged with enforcing the rule. 

Haley claimed that he stopped speaking on the telephone altogether during his last year in Kansas City because his concerns were so severe. However, all of this begs the question, is there any substance to Haley's claims, or are these merely the rantings of a disgruntled former employee, who is becoming increasingly out-of-touch with reality?

What do these claims say about Haley, and what, if anything, do they do to his chances of being hired? Join me after the jump, as we take a look.

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DC convention helps governments spy on citizens

rt.com


Representatives from governments across the globe gathered in Washington DC last month, but it wasn’t international affairs that they were there to discuss.

The meeting, rather, was an annual conference where figureheads far and wide come together to discuss the latest and greatest ways to spy on their own citizens.

At this year’s Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) World Americas conference, the only consumers were the governments of great nations far and wide who came together in DC last month to go over the newest achievements in “lawful interception” methods, reveals an article published this week in the UK’s Guardian. According to their filing, international figureheads came together on American soil to find the freshest ways to carry out clandestine surveillance on their own citizens back home by hacking smart phones, laptops and anything else with a circuit.

The actual roster from this year’s guest list is kept top-secret, much like the information inside the exclusive DC conference room, but past reports suggest it reads like a who’s who of foreign nations. In 2008, for examples, the Spanish biometrics company Agnito said they were proud to be a participant in that year’s conference, which it describes on their website as a meeting-place that focuses on Intelligence Gathering. As the worldwide leader in voice biometrics, Agnito’s list of clients includes the Spanish Ministry of Defense, the national police of France, the prosecutor’s office of South Korea and some of the biggest banks in Spain. Don’t let that list of “friendly” nations let you think that nothing is amiss here, however. In The Guardian’s article, Jerry Lucas, president of TeleStrategies, says that the manufacturers of surveillance technologies are free to pitch products to any nation they want.

"The surveillance that we display in our conferences, and discuss how to use, is available to any country in the world,"Lucas tells The Guardian. "Do some countries use this technology to suppress political statements? Yes, I would say that's probably fair to say. But who are the vendors to say that the technology is not being used for good as well as for what you would consider not so good?"

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How the FBI Busted Anna Chapman and the Russian Spy Ring

abcnews.go.com


Anna Chapman is a television star and lingere model back in Moscow now, but before she and other Russian spies were caught by the FBI last year, they came dangerously close to accomplishing a portion of their undercover mission in the United States.

“This group was well on their way to penetrating foreign policy circles.  They had befriended a friend of a sitting Cabinet official,” FBI Counter Intelligence Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi said. “They wanted to get their hands on the most sensitive data they could get their hands on, but we took this thing down before classified information changed hands.”

In a wide-ranging interview with ABC News, Figliuzzi said the red-headed Chapman was much more than a seductive “femme fatale.”

“This is a highly-trained intelligence officer — Chapman is new breed of illegal operative,”  Figliuzzi said, describing her as “tech savvy” and capable of spying in plain sight. Chapman and her comrades were “the cream of the crop, handpicked out of the Russian intelligence academy, because of their fluency in languages, and their ability to acclimate into another society,” he said.

FBI hidden camera surveillance videos of the spies’ operations give a fascinating look into Russian spy tradecraft as employed by Chapman and the other Russian agents.   The videos show, among other things,  the Russian infiltrators hiding messages under bridges, secretly trading information, money and contact information via “brush passes,” and digging for buried payoff money in the woods.

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Spouse Spy’s on the case

scpr.org

Tailing a philandering mate used to be so messy, complicated – and expensive. Private detectives aren’t cheap, after all, and someone always seems to end up dead – at least in the movies. But nowadays, suspicious spouses don’t need to call on Philip Marlowe. You can shadow your significant other just by installing Spouse Spy, or one of many similar apps, onto his or her cell phone.

A simple download lets you track comings and goings, read text messages, ogle photos, even listen in on conversations – all in real time. And of course, it’s all on the Q-T. – these apps are designed to be undetectable. But are they legal? A bipartisan group of senators, led by Al Franken (D-Minnesota) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has asked the Department of Justice to look into whether these so-called “stalking apps” violate any laws.

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Man Charged With Unlawfully Video Taping Woman at Counseling Center

lakeridge.patch.com

A custodian at the Healing Hearts Counseling Center in Occoquan has been arrested for allegedly video taping a woman three times with a hidden camera while she was in the shower at the center.

On Oct. 25, a staff member at the center reported to police that she discovered a video camera hidden in one of the facility's showers. When police investigated after 10 p.m. that evening, they found that custodian Americo Rudolpho Rodriguez-Zabalbeascoa had allegedly hidden the camera and taped the 37-year-old Alexandria woman three times. 

Rodriguez-Zabalbeascoa, 53, of Woodbridge, has been arrested and charged with three counts of unlawful taping. His court date is unavailable. He is being held without bond.

Mirage device to be used in espionage?

(CBS News)  

You don't have to be in the hot desert or on a long road in the summer to see an optical phenomenon - also known as a mirage - thanks to new scientific innovations.

Straight out of sci-fi novel, researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas have come up with a device that makes objects disappear using the mirage effect, a cool optical illusion that is often portrayed in classic, American western movies.

So how does it work? This device uses an optical phenomenon, in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky, according to the IOP (Institute of Physics blog).

"The most common example of a mirage is when an observer appears to see pools of water on the ground. This occurs because the air near the ground is a lot warmer than the air higher up, causing lights rays to bend upward towards the viewer's eye rather than bounce off the surface," explains the IOP.

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Devices That Can Listen In on Cellphone Traffic, Control Your Phone

wsj.com

Law enforcement and military officials are increasingly using secret devices sometimes called “stingrays” to locate people via their cellphones, even when the phones aren’t in use, the Wall Street Journal reported recently. But finding people isn’t all that this type of gear can do.

These types of machines mimic a cell tower and cause your phone to connect to the machine instead of a real cellular site. Once that happens, there’s a lot that can be done to your phone.

For starters, “they can be set up to do wiretapping of the actual content,” said Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a former researcher at AT&T Labs.

Such devices also can jam phones, fake calls and text messages and drain the phone’s battery, according to documents available online for companies such as Advanced German Technology that sell these types of devices.

Other gadgets can listen to calls “passively,” meaning that instead of forcing the phone to connect to a fake base station, they simply grab signals transmitted between the mobile phone and the cellular network, allowing the operator to capture conversations.

One such device, available on the helpfully named spyshops.com, claims to be able to monitor a radius of up to about 3 miles and intercept 100 conversations simultaneously, according to the site. The device is “completely STEALTH – invisible and non-detectable, high performance and upgradeable,” the site says.

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How 9/11 Completely Changed Surveillance in U.S.

wired

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

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HTC Sneaks Spying App into Android 2.3.4 Phones

hothardware.com

Looks like HTC has quietly slipped its users a spying app that tracks an alarming amount of user behavior and sends that data off to itself and perhaps others via a mysterious service in the cloud. The snooping app came nestled with the 2.3.4 Android update pushed out to some of its smartphones such as the Sensation 4G and EVO 4G.

TrevE and Team Synergy of the InfectedROM site (and XDA fame), discovered the app. HTC includes an application called Carrier IQ and Carrier IQ recently added a user-behavior logging feature called IQ Insight Experience Manager.

According to the Carrier IQ website: "IQ Insight Experience Manager uses data directly from the mobile phone itself to give a precise view of how users interact with both their phones and the services delivered through them, even if the phone is not communicating with the network. ... Identify exactly how your customers interact with services and which ones they use. See which content they consume, even offline."

But wait there's more. Turns out that after HTC collects these stats, CIQ isn't the only app with access to them.



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The Little-Known Agency That Helped Kill Bin Laden

theatlantic.com

The National Geospatial Agency mapped bin Laden's compound, analyzed drone data, and helped the SEALs simulate their mission

President Obama's first brush with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was ignominious. Out for lunch in May 2009, at a Five Guys burger franchise in Washington, the new President started to shake the hands of other customers, TV cameras in tow. Then he turned to men with government ID badges.

"So what do you?" the president asked. "I work for at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency," one said.

"Outstanding. How long have you been doing that?" Obama wondered. "Six years." Obama then asked: "So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial..." His voice trailed off. "Uh, we work with, uh, satellite imagery." Obama: "Sounds like good work." The response is obscured by the audio.

Suffice it to say: Obama knows what the NGA does today.

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When Wiretapping Runs Wild

wsj.com

Despite voluminous restrictions on when they can and can’t be used, government wiretaps are still a blunt instrument.

While they can be used to land powerful evidence against insider-trading suspects, recent case have raised fresh questions about when government surveillance crosses a line into unwarranted invasion of privacy.

The WSJ’s Michael Rothfeld provides a look at the issues in this story, out Friday.

It seems that more than 40 secret recordings played for jurors at the trial of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam, which will head to the jury on Monday, have contained stretches of dialogue that appear exclusively personal.

Yes, personal. In other words: snippets of dialogue that focus on marriages and alleged extramarital affairs, social visits and vacations.

There’s a limit, it seems, to just how much personal information a judge will allow the government to tape. In a ruling on Wednesday, a judge overseeing a different but related insider-trading case excoriated the government for monitoring intimate calls between trader Craig Drimal and his wife about their marriage, which had nothing to do with the case.

The FBI is supposed to stop monitoring conversations that aren’t relevant to an investigation or involve relationships that legally are privileged, such as those with a spouse, attorney, doctor or clergy member. They are allowed, however, to tune back in periodically to make sure the discussion hasn’t changed.

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On The Internet, No One Watches The Wiretappers

Note: Heads up, this just in from our friend "Mike"...JDL
forbes.com
When Twitter revealed in January that it had received a Department of Justice order to hand over information on three users associated with WikiLeaks, the real surprise wasn’t that an Internet company had been asked to secretly spill user data for a criminal investigation. It was that, for once, the firm didn’t kept quiet about it.

Chris Soghoian, a privacy researcher at Indiana University and the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, has been following that Twitter case closely as a potentially precedent-shaping test for how and when the government can nab users’ online information. And now he’s released a paper that puts the case in context, outlining just how little Americans are told about the extent of government surveillance on the Internet.

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Lawsuit Filed Over Listening Devices

wytv.com
A lawsuit involving two dozen plaintiffs and 18 defendants has been filed over alleged illegal wiretapping at the Newton Falls Police Department.

The lawsuit was filed Friday in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court by an attorney with the Fraternal Order of Police on behalf of employees, mostly police officers, and citizens of Newton Falls. Defendants include current and former city officials who "have approved the expenditures for the installation and upkeep of the illegal wiretapping system."

The lawsuit claims oral communications were illicitly recorded by hidden microphones placed in public and private areas of the police department. The suit alleges that former Police Chief Robert Carlson had the devices installed and intercepted conversations during contract talks to negotiate less beneficial contracts.

The new chief, John Kuivila, has said he found the devices in May of 2009.

Carlson, who is now retired, said he never intercepted any conversations and said he has done nothing wrong.

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Bugged cuckoo clock scandal rocks government

swissinfo.ch

The Swiss government has been accused of hiding surveillance systems in cuckoo clocks and then giving them as official gifts to at least 30 embassies.

The foreign ministry has yet to comment officially on the claims, made in United States diplomatic cables released last week by the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing website.

The alleged bugging came to light in cables sent in September 2006 from the US embassy in Bern to the US State Department.

In it, an unnamed official expressed security concerns about the cuckoo clock – a pendulum-driven “Chalet” model with music box – which had been presented to the ambassador the previous month as part of Swiss National Day celebrations.

“The latest addition to the living room is proving to be a good conversation piece, but I’m not sure we should be holding conversations around it,” the official wrote on September 14.

“The bird came out at midnight yesterday and I swear something flashed.”

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Tools of Tradecraft: More Spy Gear From the CIA, Others

wired
Every good spy story needs a sequel.

Last month, we published a gallery of CIA spy tools that was so popular, we decided to publish a follow-up with more gear.

We've expanded the rogue's gallery of ingenious spy gadgets with a raft of devious tricks from the former Soviet bloc and other countries, including a lipstick gun, shoe bug and a seriously savage rectal Houdini kit (you'll understand it when you see the pic). We hope you like these as much as you liked the others. All images are courtesy of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Kiss of Death

For the spy-op gone bad, or simply for any Natscha who found herself out to dinner with the date from hell, this Cold War-era KGB lipstick gun delivered the kiss of death with a single 4.5mm shot.

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Department of Defense, Major Private Contractor Potentially Vulnerable in Cyber Attack

abcnews.go.com
A U.S. cyber security company charged with protecting computers for the U.S. government and thousands of private clients has itself been the target of a hacking attack, potentially compromising the security of software used by the Department of Defense and major defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

While the U.S. government has been aware of the attack and working with the company on plugging the security breach for more than a week, according to sources familiar with the investigation, it was only Thursday that Massachusetts-based company RSA alerted the public. RSA, the security division of EMC, claims over 25,000 clients and 40 million users of its security token technology worldwide.

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2 UI employees disciplined in baby monitor bugging case

necn.com
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A University of Iowa hospital supervisor abruptly left employment Thursday as the school announced it had disciplined two employees over a plan to use a baby monitor to listen to subordinates' conversations.

Pamela Snider, an office coordinator in the Department of Urology, no longer works for the university, UI Vice President for Strategic Communication Tysen Kendig said. He would not say whether she was one of the two employees disciplined in the case, saying those were confidential personnel matters.

AFSCME Local 12 President John Stellmach had filed complaints with UI Department of Public Safety and human resources officials alleging that Snider told department employees she hid a baby monitor in a secretarial work area to determine whether they were talking too much. Stellmach's complaints alleged department administrator Glenn Kell approved the device's use.

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UI investigates use of baby monitor on employees

chicagotribune.com

IOWA CITY, Iowa

The University of Iowa launched an investigation Tuesday after employees at a medical clinic complained their supervisors used a hidden baby monitor to eavesdrop and determine whether they were talking too much.

Department of Urology workers discovered the monitor hidden on a shelf in a secretarial work area Monday, and one complained to the university's ombudsperson and her union that they considered the monitoring without their knowledge a privacy violation, said AFSCME Local 12 President John Stellmach. An employee took photos showing the monitor turned on sitting next to a package of cotton balls.

The monitor picked up chatter by several secretaries and clerical workers, and the receiver was placed in a supervisor's office, said Stellmach, whose union represents 5,000 university employees. After it was discovered, a supervisor first played it off as a joke and then explained it was set up after another worker complained they were chatting too much and would be in place for a week, Stellmach said. But after employees complained, the monitor was removed later Monday. It was not clear how long it was in place.

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