On Sunday, President Bush signed a law that expands the government’s surveillance abilities on foreign terrorist suspects. The new law is an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and allows the government to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a warrant.
The surveillance can be approved by either the attorney general or the director of national intelligence.
According to cnn.com, the bill was pushed by Bush after a court ruling maintained that warrants were needed to eavesdrop on overseas calls because many of these calls use U.S. call centers. The new law would allow intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on the calls of foreign terror suspects that pass through the U.S.
However, some people worry that this new law can lead to the possibility of eavesdropping on any U.S. citizen.
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Used to be if spies wanted to eavesdrop, they planted a bug. These days, it’s much easier. Because we all carry potential bugs in our pockets—smartphones. One team of researchers used an iPhone to track typing on a nearby computer keyboard with up to 80 percent accuracy. They presented the findings at a computer security conference in Chicago. [Philip Marquardt et al., (sp)iPhone: Decoding Vibrations from Nearby Keyboards Using Mobile Phone Accelerometers, 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security]
The researchers designed a malicious app for the iPhone 4. When you place the phone near a keyboard, it exploits accelerometer and gyroscope data to sense vibrations as the victim types—detecting whether keystrokes come from the left or right side of the keyboard, and how near or far subsequent keys are from each other. Then, using that seismic fingerprint, the app checks a pre-created “vibrational” dictionary for the most likely words—a technique that works reliably on words of three letters or more.
Of course, you’d need to install the app to allow it to spy. But whereas most apps have to ask permission to access location data or the camera, that’s not so for the accelerometer. This kind of attack may offer good reason to limit accelerometer access too—and keep iPhones from becoming “spiPhones.”
—Christopher Intagliata
Who’s reading your email, besides you? If you send it from work, it’s probably your boss or some rogue tech admin. If you send it from home, it may be your spouse, your kids, or your nosy neighbors. (I told you not to write your password on a Post-it note and leave your Wi-Fi router open.) From an Internet cafĂ©? Probably some slacker with a goatee, unless you remembered to log out first and/or encrypt your connection.
And if you send or receive email from any of those places, your Uncle may also be reading it — you know, the guy with the top hat, the snowy beard, and the fondness for red-white-and-blue ensembles? Him.
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Plans by Federal Government to push a security related bill that would empower it to eavesdrop on telephone conversations of the general public is generating some controversy. SHUAIB SHUAIB examines the issues, citing related examples from India, Turkey and the USA to throw light on the pitfalls of the idea.
The Federal Government under the ruling People’s Democratic Party has been reported to be working on a bill that will give it powers to eavesdrop on telephone conversations of the general public all in the hope of curbing and detecting crime. As expected, the challenges of foiling terrorist attacks is the main motive for the upcoming bill; which could also come in handy in the array of arsenal available to any sitting government to keep tabs on the activities of opposition politicians, inquisitive journalists, intransigent lawmakers and even judges exhibiting too much independence.
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The hackers who breached the Nasdaq stock exchange network last year had installed remote-monitoring
software that allowed them to spy on corporate directors, according to Reuters.
The unknown attackers were able to install the monitoring tool and steal confidential documents and
communications of board directors on the compromised platform, Reuters reported
Oct. 20.
Investigators have evidence that the attackers installed monitoring software and spied on
“scores” of directors who had logged on to directorsdesk.com, but did
not know how long the software was running on the network before it was detected
and removed last October.
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