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The speech patterns are randomly designed and generated to mask normal conversations from eavesdroppers. 


More...get the app here.

Bugging equipment found in Mexico lawmaker offices

philstar.com

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A search of several Mexican lawmakers' offices turned up recording equipment, leading legislators to believe they have been spied on for years, a congressman said Wednesday.
Congressman Armando Rios said security personnel found microphones and other devices that seemed to have been installed years ago.

"Some of the equipment has newer technology, but other devices are from a long time ago, which leads us to believe they were installed years ago," said Rios, a member of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD

Rios said the offices of key committees and of several lawmakers from different political parties were bugged.

"What is at stake is the vulnerability of the legislature, of one of the powers of the union," Rios said.

Congress president Guadalupe Acosta, also of the PRD, on Tuesday filed a complaint with federal prosecutors, who opened an investigation.

Acosta wouldn't identify the lawmakers who were being spied on or who he thinks was behind the espionage. Rios blamed the government of President Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.
Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire denied Rios' accusations and said the government has done nothing illegal.

Mexico's main intelligence agency allegedly spied on the government's political opponents during the 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

After PAN candidate Vicente Fox won the 2000 presidential election, he announced that the agency, the Center for National Security and Investigation, would no longer spy on political opponents. But in 2008, under Calderon, the agency hired a private company to monitor the activities of legislators.

Legislators complained they were being spied on but the government said it was simply collecting public information.

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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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Cyber-Crimes Pose 'Existential' Threat, FBI Warns

huffingtonpost.com

Despite the increased frequency and severity of online crime and espionage in 2011, many American corporations and consumers are still not taking the threat seriously, the FBI's top cyber official said Thursday.

The risk posed by criminal hackers is "existential, meaning it could eliminate whole companies," said Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director. If hackers were able to tamper with critical infrastructure such as the power grid, "it could actually cause death," Henry said in remarks at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York.

To highlight the growing threat, Henry cited several recent FBI investigations, such as one involving a smaller company that went out of business after hackers stole $5 million from accounts, another concerning a larger firm that "virtually overnight" lost a decade of research and development worth $1 billion, and still another regarding hackers who encrypted millions of records of a health services company and demanded money for the password.

"We've seen the number and sophistication of the attacks by these cyber actors increase dramatically," Henry said.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen, primarily through the financial services sector, just in the last couple years," he said. An organized crime ring in Eastern Europe, for example, earned about $750,000 per week from cyber theft, he added.

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Note: Does your company have a Cyber TSCM / Cyber Counterespionage plan in place? Contact me, I can help. ~JDL

How to Know If Someone Bugged Your Room

theatlanticwire.com


For tips on sweeping a room for surreptitious surveillance devices, look no further than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That's where members of the federal government have been going for years to find out who's wiretapped their telephone or implanted a microphone in their corner office. And now we know a lot more about the bureau's routine wiretap inspections thanks to GovernmentAttic.org, a website that publishes documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. The site has published a 66MB cache of correspondence from 1952 to 1995 detailing various issues of telephone security often involving paranoid government officials from senators to post master generals to secretaries of the Department of Agriculture to President Richard Nixon who think someone is surreptitiously listening to their conversations. 

It's going to take an army of readers to rummage through the entire cache of FBI documents but from what we've read so far, much of the correspondence involves government officials requesting wiretap inspections from the FBI, typically because they fear sensitive information has leaked from their office, and, upon inspection, the FBI finds nothing. Interestingly, they do often provide an informative report on how they went about sweeping the room.

As you can imagine, the descriptions of wiretap sweeps get much more technical from the '50s to the '70s to the '90s. In the old days, a wiretap inspection was simpler. Take this sweep of the office of Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield in 1953. 

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Note: A "Do it yourself" sweep, is kind of like "do it yourself" plumbing...you get what you pay for...

Don't let those "leaks" continue...contact me, I can help. ~JDL

VoIP eavesdropping: Hardening network security to contain VoIP risks

searchsecurity.techtarget.com

Every organization considering a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone system deployment hears the same dire warnings: “Routing voice calls over a data network exposes calls to eavesdropping.”

While it’s certainly true that any telephone call carries a certain degree of eavesdropping risk, is it true that VoIP calls have an inherently higher degree of risk? In this tip, we explore the ins and outs of VoIP eavesdropping.

VoIP eavesdropping is possible First, it’s important to be clear about one thing: It is absolutely possible to eavesdrop on a VoIP telephone call. It’s also possible to eavesdrop on a telephone call placed using the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). The difference lies in the tools and skill set needed to conduct the eavesdropping.

On a traditional telephone network, someone seeking to eavesdrop on a call generally must have physical access to either the telephone or telephone cable, at least at the initiation of the attack. This type of attack is typical in the movies. Whether it’s the good guys or the bad guys conducting the eavesdropping, someone gains access to either a telephone handset or the telephone network interface box -- sometimes located outside a home or office -- places a wiretap listening device on the box, and then monitors calls on an ongoing basis.


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Wiretap suits OKd against U.S., not telecoms

sfgate.com

The nation's telecommunications companies can't be sued for cooperating with the Bush administration's secret surveillance program, but their customers can sue the government for allegedly intercepting their phone calls and e-mails without a warrant, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
In a pair of decisions, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a 2008 law immunizing AT&T and other companies for their roles in wiretapping calls to alleged foreign terrorists, but revived a suit that accused the government of illegally intercepting millions of messages from U.S. residents.
That lawsuit was partly based on testimony in 2003 by former AT&T technician Mark Klein about equipment in the company's office on Folsom Street in San Francisco that allowed Internet traffic to be routed to the government.

'Dragnet' surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights organization representing AT&T customers, claimed the company had similar installations in other cities and used them for "dragnet" surveillance of everyday e-mails and phone calls, which the National Security Agency purportedly screened electronically for connections to terrorism.
"We look forward to proving the program is an unconstitutional and illegal violation of the rights of millions of ordinary Americans," said Cindy Cohn, the foundation's legal director.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd declined comment.

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Government Investigates Cellphone Wiretapping

theatlantic.com
As the government begins an investigation into Carrier IQ's cell phone-tracking software, memories of its own wiretapping scandal resurface


"Spy on unsuspecting Americans? That's our job," you can imagine federal officials indignantly declaring as they investigate cell-phone tracking by the mobile software company, Carrier IQ. The National Security Agency began secret, illegal surveillance of our phone calls and Internet activities in 2001, as we belatedly learned in 2005. Yes, 2005 is a long time ago these days, when yesterday seems like old news; but the NSA scandal deserves to be remembered, especially when the government presumes to be outraged by telecom spying.  

When it began spying on us after 9/11, the Bush Administration enlisted the assistance of telecoms willing to engage in illegal activities at its behest. (Former Qwuest CEO Joseph Nacchio later claimed that after he declined to cooperate with the surveillance program, in 2001, the government retaliated, denying the company lucrative contracts. In 2007, Nacchio was convicted of insider trading.) After the NSA program was exposed, complicit telecoms faced the risks of losing expensive civil suits. AT&T, in particular, was badly exposed, thanks to incriminating documents released by a whistleblower and a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But not surprisingly, Congress intervened. In 2007, it retroactivelyimmunized the companies for illegal activities authorized by the president. As the late, disgraced Richard Nixon explained, prematurely, "when the President does it, it's not illegal." Voting in favor of telecom immunity, then candidate and Senator Obama apparently agreed.


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Israel Convicts Conspirator Who Wiretapped Michael Cherney

israelnewsagency.com

Jerusalem, Israel --- October 26, 2011 .... On October 24th the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court in Israel convicted far-right activist Avigdor Eskin of ordering the illegal wiretapping of associates of Israel businessman and philanthropist Michael Cherney (Mikhail Chernoy).

The plea bargain consists of a penalty of six months of community service, probation and a fine of NIS 20,000.

According to the original indictment, filed in January 2011 by the Israel State Attorney's office, Eskin was contacted in 2007 by a Russian citizen, Alexei Drobashenko, who asked him to gather information about Michael Cherney in order to use it in a smear campaign.

At that time Alexei Drobashenko was the head of the External Relations Department at Basic Element, a financial and industrial group that belongs to Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska and Cherney are former partners in an aluminum business. In 2006 Cherney filed a law suit against Oleg Deripaska in the UK's High Court.

Cherney is seeking a 20 percent stake in RUSAL, a multinational aluminum producer. The trial is expected to go ahead in April 2012.

In February 2008, Cherney filed a suit in a Tel Aviv court, accusing a group of 10 conspirators, allegedly funded by Oleg Deripaska, of illegal wiretapping, hacking the computers of his charity fund - The Michael Cherney Foundations, publishing slanderous articles, harassing him with insulting graffiti and leaflets, hiring a UK PR company to plant hoaxes about Cherney into the UK media and Wikipedia.

The purpose of that smear campaign was allegedly to derail Cherney's lawsuit against Deripaska in UK's Commercial Court.

Aviv Mor, an Israel private investigator, together with another PI, Rafael Pridan, carried out wiretaps against Cherney's secretary Elena Skir and another of Cherney's associates, the indictment contended.

The indictment further charged that Eskin was the link between Mor and Pridan and Drobashenko, that he paid them each NIS 50,000 in cash for their services and that he also received translations of the wiretapped conversations.

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Illinois Wiretapping Law Reaching A Boiling Point

pixiq.com

Illinois police officers have to be the most smug cops in the nation knowing they have the power to arrest citizens on felony charges for recording them in public while they themselves have every right to record citizens.

That smugness is very evident in the latest case to emerge from the Land of Lincoln.

Watch the below video, and read more here...

Feds: Trio hacked Wi-Fi or burglarized 50 firms

Seattletimes.nwsource.com

Seattle police detectives say they've unraveled a theft ring that operated both in cyberspace and through old-fashioned burglaries with a technological twist — breaking into a company with the sole purpose of installing malicious software to enable future thefts.

It took nearly three years, but Seattle police detectives say they've unraveled a theft ring that operated both in cyberspace and through old-fashioned burglaries with a technological twist — breaking into a company with the sole purpose of installing malicious software to enable future thefts.

Federal prosecutors have indicted three men — Joshua Allen Witt, 34; Brad Eugene Lowe, 36; and John Earl Griffin, 36 — on charges of conspiracy and eight other counts including accessing a protected computer to further fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft.

The 20-page indictment lays out a scheme that U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan on Wednesday said was "both sophisticated and rudimentary," and combined high technology with broken glass and jimmied locks.

The trio is accused of targeting at least 53 companies, with losses expected to mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"In some cases, the victims were both burgled and cyber-burgled," Durkan said at a news conference.

The indictment accused the men of "wardriving" — cruising in a vehicle outfitted with a powerful Wi-Fi receiver to detect business wireless networks. They then would hack into the company's network from outside, cracking the security code and accessing company computers and information.

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Appeals Court OKs Challenge to Warrantless Electronic Spying

wired

A legal challenge questioning the constitutionality of a federal law authorizing warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans inched a step closer Wednesday toward resolution.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, for the second time, rejected the Obama administration’s contention that it should toss a lawsuit challenging the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. Among other things, the government said the plaintiffs — Global Fund for Women, Global Rights, Human Rights Watch, International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association, The Nation magazine, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union and others — don’t have standing to bring a constitutional challenge because they cannot demonstrate that they were subject to the eavesdropping or suffered hardships because of it.

The lawsuit, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, was lodged within hours of the FISA Amendments Act (.pdf) being signed into law by President George W. Bush in July 2008. The legislation is being challenged because it allows the National Security Agency to electronically eavesdrop on Americans without a probable-cause warrant if one of the parties to the communication resides outside the United States and is suspected of a link to terrorism.

“It is the glory of our system that even our elected leaders must defend the legality of their conduct when challenged,” (.pdf) Judge Gerard Lynch wrote.

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And, Speaking of Spies....2011 Espionage Research Institute Conference

2011 Espionage Research Institute Conference

This week marks the annual ERI conference in Reston, VA.

The Espionage Research Institute is dedicated to collecting and promulgating information on hostile espionage activity. That is done through the process of accepting, screening and editing reports of hostile activity as they are received from ERI Associates and its Advisors.

The motto of ERI is: "The Biggest Mistake That We Can Make Would Be To Miss The Changes". That expresses the basic reason that ERI exists. It attempts to keep all informed on hostile espionage activity that is directed against business and industry.

Stay tuned later this week for some interesting reports.... ~JDL

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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Administration Wiretaps Israeli Embassy

foxnews.com

Leak Offers Look at Efforts by U.S. to Spy on Israel
By SCOTT SHANE, New York Times

WASHINGTON — When Shamai K. Leibowitz, an F.B.I. translator, was sentenced to 20 months in prison last year for leaking classified information to a blogger, prosecutors revealed little about the case. They identified the blogger in court papers only as “Recipient A.” After Mr. Leibowitz pleaded guilty, even the judge said he did not know exactly what Mr. Leibowitz had disclosed.

“All I know is that it’s a serious case,” Judge Alexander Williams Jr., of United States District Court in Maryland, said at the sentencing in May 2010. “I don’t know what was divulged other than some documents, and how it compromised things, I have no idea.”

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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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US dragging its feet on wiretapping rules

presstv.ir
Citing the need to protect intellectual property and consumer information like the emails that were leaked in this week's massive Epsilon hack, the Senate Judiciary Committee called a hearing Wednesday to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Committee member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) emphasized that while amending the law and taking the time to define privacy took time, that is time that U.S. cyber security remains vulnerable.

"It's thousands of attacks a minute, not thousands of attacks a day," he said. "It's a necessary process, but it's one that's not without peril and it's not one without cost."

However, ECPA, more familiarly known as the wiretapping law, will probably not see a change in the immediate future. The Judiciary Committee called a hearing for the same reasons last year, and the process has been languishing since then. Without an official position from President Obama's administration, the amendment process will not move forward. Raw Story

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DOJ To Congress: We Shouldn’t Need A Warrant To Snoop Through Gmail

For years, privacy advocacy groups have been trying to make sure digital data has the same kinds of search and seizure protections that physical documents have. In recent times, even some major companies like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and AT&T (NYSE: T) have joined together in the Digital Due Process coalition, which wants to modernize the nation’s out-of-date wiretapping laws. Those corporations want law enforcement agents to get a warrant issued by a judge before they are able to tap into sources of data stored in the cloud, such as web email. It’s been an uphill fight—to say the least—and today, the Department of Justice took a position that’s going to make their quest even harder.

According to a report from CNET, a DOJ lawyer told a Senate committee that if cops are required to get a search warrant to tap into email stored online, it could have an “adverse impact” on investigations. “Speed is essential,” he said. “If Congress slows down the process, this would have real-life consequences, particularly where human life is involved.”

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Police Charge Man With 'Wiretapping' Because He Made A Phone Call During Traffic Stop

From the you-can't-be-serious dept..techdirt.com
We've covered the disturbing trend of police, prosecutors and the courts to abuse wiretapping laws to charge people with "wiretapping" for recording police in public. The latest such case is even more ridiculous than most. Found via Slashdot, it involves a guy charged with wiretapping the police during a routine traffic stop, because he made a phone call, to which a voicemail system recorded the call at the other end. The guy who was arrested, William Alleman, had just left a gathering of libertarians, meeting in support of an arrest of a local restaurant owner. The police were apparently waiting outside, and Alleman claims he was followed. As he got pulled over, he called the phone number of an answering service for Libertarian activists who are "in trouble with the police" and then used that to record the call. The police claim this was illegal wiretapping.

This is, of course, patently ridiculous. Recording a police officer as he has stopped you is not and should never be considered a crime.

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