Eideard

Microsoft has filed a patent that describes a “legal intercept” of VoIP communications.

Filed in December 2009, the document was created when Microsoft may have had no intentions of acquiring Skype, but the company makes clear statements that it applies to Skype and similar services.

According to the patent – and it is just an application at this point – Microsoft envisions a variety of possibilities to use “recording agents” as a way to intercept, monitor, record and store recorded calls. The agent could be placed in a router, call server, or within the network of an organization.

The agent can also be a software module that is placed between the call server or the network. Microsoft does not mention the recording agent to be hidden part of the client software. However, since Microsoft now owns the Skype infrastructure, that may not be a problem anymore.

The good news, depending on your view, is that the technology is only targeted to become a tool that can be requested by law enforcement. The downside, also depending on your view, is that those Skype calls may not be as anonymous as you think and your private information may actually be easily accessible by government organizations.

Microsoft did not say if it already uses eavesdropping technology in Skype or other VoIP applications.

Our government, the government of sleazy Berlusconi, many self-righteous nanny states have resented the encryption built into Skype that defeats official snooping. Essentially, this is why Skype is the VOIP of choice for dissent and revolution – as well as Mafias – throughout the world.

Are we supposed to trust Microsoft to confront government snoops and the several flavors of Patriot Act enacted in the fearfilled West and come down on the side of privacy, liberty?

In response to calls for increased security from enterprise clients, Apple has hired cybersecurity expert and author David Rice as its director of global security…

A “deeply respected name in IT security circles,” according to those who know him, Rice is reportedly being brought on to bolster Apple’s security and gain the trust of corporate CIOs.

Rice graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1994 and received a master’s degree in Information Warfare and Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School. He previously worked as a Global Network Vulnerability analyst for the National Security Agency and as a Special Duty Cryptologic officer for the Navy…Rice is also the author of “Geekonomics,” a 2007 book which likens software security vulnerabilities to weakened bridges and other physical infrastructure.

Apple has ramped up its security efforts in recent years, in part to gain the trust of corporations and government agencies who have begun adopting the iPhone and iPad. As the iPhone maker has upgraded the security of iOS, it has found itself gaining ground on Research in Motion, the self-professed leader in “CIO friendliness…”

A recent partnership with Unisys is also meant to boost Apple’s security reputation. In an interview last October, a Unisys executive said the deal came about because his company had “put a lot of heavyweight engineering into securing the [iPhone], which, frankly, no one else has figured out yet.”

My experiences with government security types lead me to believe that Rice’s own top-level clearances are somewhat compromised by the fact that he went to work with geeks at Apple. That has nothing to do with the realities of security or politics. Just bureaucratic silliness.

BTW – if you’d like a look into his public brain, drop by his blog.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Google has declined comment on a Washington Post report that it has asked the National Security Agency to help track down the cyberattackers who recently breached its databases.

Reporter Ellen Nakashima’s front page story on Thursday rekindled concerns about corporations collaborating with government sleuth agencies. You might recall the alarm raised by privacy and civil liberties advocates in 2006 after a USA TODAY investigation revealed how the NSA secretly analyzed phone records of tens of millions of Americans.

At the time, public backlash was directed mainly at telecom giants AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth for so readily giving up their customers’ private phone records to a government agency.

In a similar vein, Google, the world’s dominant search service, amasses data on the surfing habits of most Internet users, and stores vast amounts of sensitive data belonging to users of its popular Gmail and Google Apps online services, says Amrit Williams, CTO of security firm Big Fix. Because the NSA is an “opaque intelligence organization . . .the potential for abuse of private information at the intelligence or government level is very high,” he says…

That’s possible – perhaps, likely; but, it’s an unsound logical statement. It’s opinion.

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Our government’s preferred email filter

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.

The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, officials said.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation…

Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey and chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, has been investigating the incidents and said he had become increasingly troubled by the agency’s handling of domestic communications.

In an interview, Mr. Holt disputed assertions by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was inadvertent.

RTFA. Creeps and spooks will hate this. They hate to admit this crap is still going on.

Former Justice official, James Comey, tried to halt collection of “meta-data” of American e-mail messages – the details of e-mail traffic listed by identifying who, when and where, is e-mailing whom. Of course, it’s a violation of Constitutional law – and our president, the Constitution expert, should take time to back up the few people in Congress who are standing up to the N.S.A..

The Foundering Fathers – Cheney, Alexander, Bush
Daylife/Getty Images

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts…

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems but said in a statement that “when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.”

The questions may not be settled yet. Intelligence officials say they are still examining the scope of the N.S.A. practices, and Congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americans’ privacy occurred. It is not clear to what extent the agency may have actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them.

One of the better chuckles in the article is that the FBI finally got up on their hind legs and began to investigate NSA excess – after the last Congressional elections.

I guess the writing on the wall prompted a decision that protecting the rights of citizens might be more important than aiding the most reactionary elements in the American spy community. For a change.

The U.S. government’s director for cybersecurity has resigned, criticizing the excessive role of the National Security Agency in countering threats to the country’s computer systems, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Former Silicon Valley entrepreneur Rod Beckstrom said in his resignation letter that having the National Security Agency, which is part of the Department of Defense, play a central role in cybersecurity, was “a bad strategy.”

Beckstrom headed the National Cybersecurity Center, which was created last March to coordinate all government cybersecurity efforts and answers to the Department of Homeland Security.

In reality, “NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts,” Mr. Beckstrom wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Thursday in his resignation letter [.pdf], posted by the Journal on its website. “While acknowledging the critical importance of NSA to our intelligence efforts, I believe this is a bad strategy on multiple grounds,” he wrote.

National Security Agency officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

IMHO, the NSA plays a reactionary role in everything they touch. The standing joke about the United States among spooks and spies around the world is that the CIA are Liberals, the FBI are Conservatives and the NSA are Nazis.

Congress is looking into allegations that National Security Agency linguists have been eavesdropping on Americans abroad. Government linguists say the U.S. eavesdropped on Americans, including military officers serving in Iraq.

The congressional oversight committees said Thursday that the Americans targeted included military officers in Iraq who called friends and family in the United States.

The allegations were made by two former military intercept operators on a television news report.

Adrienne Kinne, a former U.S. Army Reserves Arab linguist, told ABC News the NSA was listening to the phone calls of U.S. military officers, journalists and aid workers overseas who were talking about “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”

David Murfee Faulk, a former U.S. Navy Arab linguist, said in the news report that he and his colleagues were listening to the conversations of military officers in Iraq who were talking with their spouses or girlfriends in the United States.

According to Faulk, they would often share the contents of some of the more salacious calls stored on their computers, listening to what he called “phone sex” and “pillow talk.”

Relying on Congressional oversight is worse than letting the fox guard the henhouse. The fox has a vested interest in eating the hens. Congress only cares about lining their pockets and exercising enough political power to tickle their testosterone.

They will “question” the crooks and parrot their answers.