A January 2021 FBI document outlines what types of data and metadata can be lawfully obtained by the FBI from messaging apps. Rolling Stone broke the story and it’s been written about elsewhere. I don’t see a lot of surprises in the document. Lots of apps leak all sorts of metadata: iMessage and WhatsApp seem … Read More “Law Enforcement Access to Chat Data and Metadata” »
Category: privacy
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I hope this is true: According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it “quite clear” that the incoming government of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject “the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the guise of the fight against child abuse” by the … Read More “New German Government is Pro-Encryption and Anti-Backdoors” »
Since 2017, someone is running about a thousand — 10% of the total — Tor servers in an attempt to deanonymize the network: Grouping these servers under the KAX17 umbrella, Nusenu says this threat actor has constantly added servers with no contact details to the Tor network in industrial quantities, operating servers in the realm … Read More “Someone Is Running Lots of Tor Relays” »
I received email from two people who told me that Microsoft Edge enabled synching without warning or consent, which means that Microsoft sucked up all of their bookmarks. Of course they can turn synching off, but it’s too late. Has this happened to anyone else, or was this user error of some sort? If this … Read More “Is Microsoft Stealing People’s Bookmarks?” »
Vice has a detailed article about how the FBI gets data from cell phone providers like AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, based on a leaked (I think) 2019 139-page presentation. Powered by WPeMatico
Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs: By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequence for 5-digit PINs 30% of the time, and reached 41% for 4-digit PINs. This works even if … Read More “Using Machine Learning to Guess PINs from Video” »
It’s not actually banned in the EU yet — the legislative process is much more complicated than that — but it’s a step: a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. To respect “privacy and human dignity,” MEPs said that EU lawmakers should pass a permanent ban on the automated recognition of individuals in public spaces, … Read More “The European Parliament Voted to Ban Remote Biometric Surveillance” »
Susan Landau wrote an essay on the privacy, efficacy, and equity of contract-tracing smartphone apps. Also see her excellent book on the topic. Powered by WPeMatico
After being compelled by a Swiss court to monitor IP logs for a particular user, ProtonMail no longer claims that “we do not keep any IP logs.” Powered by WPeMatico
Vice has an article about how data brokers sell access to the Internet backbone. This is netflow data. It’s useful for cybersecurity forensics, but can also be used for things like tracing VPN activity. At a high level, netflow data creates a picture of traffic flow and volume across a network. It can show which … Read More “Surveillance of the Internet Backbone” »
