Spying requests were contrary to either German or wider EU interests
You'd think there'd be a law against that...
Germany's BND spy agency spied on European politicians and enterprises at the behest of the NSA for over a decade. Der Spiegel reports (in German) that for years the NSA sent its counterparts at the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst – Germany's Federal Intelligence Service) thousands of so-called selectors – IP addresses, emails, …
Hey Germany here is a gun, will you supply the bullets to shoot yourself and Europe in the foot please. Thanks in advance, oh and send us back the photos, to confirm that you carried out our orders - this will totally help our companies to make more profit (no silly R&D costs) which will then pay us more in taxes and aid US in the global fight with terror, honest.
And this is not like getting a racehorse to nobbe themselves, would we lie ? Think of honest Abe. Remember all the good stuff we did for you in the past. Operation paperclip, where we saved you from all those evil people working on biological weapons, chemical weapons and human experimentation, by moving them to America.
What evidence is there to support that claim?
(Spoiler alert: "none whatsoever".)
It's bog standard industrial / geopolitical espionage. We all do it. You may remember that awkwardness about Airbus vs Boeing, a few years ago? (eg http://www.glimpsefromtheglobe.com/topics/economics/explaining-airbus-boeing-rivalry/ )
Of the
UberScthumppGerlaketrinWascherMitBorherGedundlichtMachinerZuckenLiktFluftMachinen
Group.
... rough translation is 'One Peanut'.
I have nothing but praise for the Germanic Race for delivering all of their broken scheisse into the arms of the Americans such that they could break it some more and sell it back to the English as revenge for the Fly/Soup jokes.
Uncle Sam: Germany, come here!
Germany: What is it now?
Uncle Sam: Give me all your data!
Germany: But we have constitutional righ ...
Uncle Sam: You want to play naughty? Turn around and bend over. ...Uuhh, how does it feel like?
Germany: It hurts
Uncle Sam: You´re sure used to it by now. Just do what i want
We do not know what secret agreements may exist between the German and the US governments post WW2. It is possible that the price of the generous post-War settlement in the West was that Germany must perpetually do the bidding of the US where US "security" is concerned.
US spooks:"Hey, look what I found out about you!"
German spooks"Oh my God, how'd you find that out?"
US spooks:"Never mind, don't worry, We're the good guys, remember?"
German spooks:"Uh... right."
US spooks:"So, if you tell us all the dirt you can dig up on them, we're certain they'll never find out about you, Capisce?"
German Spooks:"Uh... right." -Hands over intel-
US spooks:"Right, we're all friends here, then."
-US spooks then moves on to them, lather-rinse-repeat -
"The BND helped the NSA with spying on European ministers and enterprises, without anyone in the German parliament being aware of this.
BND bosses didn't pass on their findings to the Chancellor's Office ... "
The security services of a country acted against the interests of that country and its close allies while keeping its activities a secret from its own government. How weird is that?
If somebody who worked for me did that to me, I'd drag their sorry arse over hot coals before booting it out of the door; unless of course they had some serious deep dirt on me. Hmm......
and apparently, the Attorney General has by now started an investigation. It's about time. We know because he requested insight into material available to the committee investigating the whole NSA/BND issue. Said material is provided by the BND to the German Chancellery which then in turn decides what the committee actually gets to see. Interesting approach, isn't it? From what is reported, it's a lot of fat black lines and a lot of what is readable is thought to be entirely fabricated.
What will come out of it? Nothing, of course. The Chancellery is doing the same shameful "we knew nothing, NOTHING"-dance it has been doing ever since Snowden came forward. It would be a surprise if someone, anyone actually had to take his or her hat, let alone be sent away for life as the law suggests.
Because this is Germany, the European poster-child for rule of law and democracy.
PS: Oh, and then there's that thing about Ramstein and the Drone program but boy, the Chancellery knows even less about that one. Because, you know, they actually asked the US about it and were told that it's all perfectly okay.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/ramstein/
New Zealand might have this thing called treason as well. Their spooks and the NSA have recently been outed as trying to spy on the Chinese embassy. China is one of the countries largest trading partners and responsible for its continued good fortune despite the quality of New Zealand's political and management classes. The US of course contributes very little to New Zealand except costs. It is no longer clear that the spooks anywhere in the Western half of the free world are working in the best interests of their respective countries or even who exactly they are working for. Colour me shocked that you take a group of people, exempt them from oversight and the rule of law and they start going off the rails.
It is interesting to see, how the secret services in the West including my own country seem to be able to break the law at will, while we do not know anything about them, they know all about us.
Is there still a Democracy ? Or are we living in a secret surveillance state, where secret services decide who gets a character assassination, while pushing out false information all around, to manipulate all of us in to what ever they want us to believe. I was unaware that this is what we wanted to do with our societies.
As it looks more and more that it's all about serving the 1% and it has no longer anything to do with informed decision making on the electorate part, as we are all fed misinformation. If voters can not know about reality, then there is no longer a Democracy in my opinion.
Did anybody asked for this, did anybody vote for these secret services to do what they are doing ?
I'm positively sure I never asked for this mess.
This post has been deleted by its author
Is there still a Democracy ?
That's just it. That's the whole ruse. This is that "democracy" you've been trained to worship.
1. You put a mark beside the name of one of two or three practically indistinguishable little shits.
2. One of those shits is then "duly elected" king.
3. Said king shit then commences dismantling what little remained of the oversight mechanism, flogging off what remains of the national assets, setting himself up for a retirement as one of the most wealthy and important little shits in the world by grasping at every sleazy corrupt corporate "lobbyist" he cums upon, and generally going about his business as a completely naïve avaricious narcissist fucktard who suddenly has A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY to play with. "OMG! I'm so fucking impotent now!" Obviously the fun includes having an entire national "intelligence" system to play with ("OMFG!") and attending important summits with the most "important" people in the world. "OFMFGFFF!"
4. In the event of dissent, king shit shouts DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. DEMOCRACY. MANDATE. until it goes away. Perhaps also unleashing the party activists, editorial commentaries, riot police, water canon, etc. if it gets really serious. Then he gets back to fucking the place up.
5. GOTO 1
Catching T's, the ultimate get out of jail free clause...? Citizenfour spelled it all out clearly: every company, politician, diplomat, competing economy is fair game for US monitoring and tracking.....
Complicit media is to blame too, for giving the Five Eyes a podium while never raising difficult questions like this particular report....
Windows PowerShell is enormously useful, extremely prevalent, and often targeted by crooks because it offers an express route into the heart of Windows servers and networks.
Some have therefore suggested the tool is a liability that should be disabled in the interest of improved security.
But on Wednesday national cybersecurity agencies from the US, UK, and New Zealand decided that's a bit drastic. Instead, the agencies recommend securing PowerShell prudently.
RSA Conference A heightened state of defensive cyber security posture is the new normal, according to federal cyber security chiefs speaking at the RSA Conference on Tuesday. This requires greater transparency and threat intel sharing between the government and private sector, they added.
"There'll never be a time when we don't defend ourselves –— especially in cyberspace," National Cyber Director Chris Inglis said, referencing an opinion piece that he and CISA director Jen Easterly published earlier this week that described CISA's Shields Up initiative as the new normal.
"Now, we all know that we can't sustain the highest level of alert for an extensive period of time, which is why we're thinking about, number one, what's that relationship that government needs to have with the private sector," Easterly said on the RSA Conference panel with Inglis and National Security Agency (NSA) cybersecurity director Rob Joyce.
State-sponsored Chinese attackers are actively exploiting old vulnerabilities to "establish a broad network of compromised infrastructure" then using it to attack telcos and network services providers.
So say the United States National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which took the unusual step of issuing a joint advisory that warns allied governments, critical infrastructure operators, and private industry organizations to hurry up and fix their IT estates.
The advisory states that network devices are the target of this campaign and lists 16 flaws – some dating back to 2017 and none more recent than April 2021 – that the three agencies rate as the most frequently exploited.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has spent about $2.8 billion over the past 14 years on a massive surveillance "dragnet" that uses big data and facial-recognition technology to secretly spy on most Americans, according to a report from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology.
The research took two years and included "hundreds" of Freedom of Information Act requests, along with reviews of ICE's contracting and procurement records. It details how ICE surveillance spending jumped from about $71 million annually in 2008 to about $388 million per year as of 2021. The network it has purchased with this $2.8 billion means that "ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency" and its methods cross "legal and ethical lines," the report concludes.
ICE did not respond to The Register's request for comment.
Comment Many information security practices use surveillance of users' activities. Logging, monitoring, observability – call it what you will, we have built a digital panopticon for our colleagues at work, and it's time to rethink this approach.
The flaws of surveillance-based infosec are already appreciated. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) recently found that mass surveillance of the population was an unjustified intrusion into privacy, even when the goal is to combat serious crime. Why, then, do we consider it reasonable to implement invasive surveillance to address the flawed computer systems we choose to use?
Does watching staff 24x7 really make things more secure?
In brief San Francisco police have been using driverless cars for surveillance to assist in law enforcement investigations.
According to an SFPD training document obtained by Motherboard [PDF]: "Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads."
It indicates that police officers will receive additional information about how to access this evidence, and added: "Investigations have already done this several times."
False-flag cyberattacks represent a red line that even nation states like Russia and China don't want to cross, according to Mandiant CEO Kevin Mandia.
"It's one of the last rules of the playground that a modern nation may not want to break because they don't want everyone doing false flags," he said, speaking on a panel this week at Vanderbilt University's Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats.
US Cyber Command chief General Paul Nakasone has revealed the agency he leads conducted nine "hunt forward" operations last year, sending teams to different counties to help them improve their defensive security posture and hunt for cyberthreats.
These missions provide "security for our nation in cyberspace," said Nakasone, who is also director of the National Security Agency, during a Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats at Vanderbilt University. "It provides an inoculation of these threats, and it provides a partnership with a nation that has asked us for assistance."
Such missions are a win-win for both participating governments, he said. The foreign countries benefit from US cybersecurity tools and threat intel, and US Cyber Command gets to put sensors on these nation's networks, which gives the military better visibility into threats beyond America's border.
Security flaws in Log4j, Microsoft Exchange, and Atlassian's workspace collaboration software were among the bugs most frequently exploited by "malicious cyber actors" in 2021 , according to a joint advisory by the Five Eyes nations' cybersecurity and law enforcement agencies.
It's worth noting that 11 of the 15 flaws on the list were disclosed in 2021, as previous years' lists often found miscreants exploiting the older vulns for which patches had been available for years.
Of course, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and friends note that malicious cyber actors have not stopped trying to exploit older flaws – but reckon those efforts are happening to a "lesser extent" than in the past.
Google has made changes to its Play Store policies, effectively banning third-party call-recording apps beginning May 11, claiming it seeks to close alternative use accessibility APIs for things other than accessibility.
Google has for a while blocked real call recording on Android 6 and over the microphone on Android 10. Developers have been using accessibility APIs as a workaround to enable the recording of calls on Android.
Accessibility Service APIs are tools that offer additional services that can help those with disabilities overcome challenges. Using these services against their designed intentions, i.e. to achieve a goal not geared at overcoming disabilities, remains the only way for third-party apps to record calls.
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