Want to spy on your neighbor? Want to see where your spouse goes in the afternoon? Want to peer in on the meeting at church you weren’t invited to?
Starting in June, you could spy on all of those with a personal drone you can carry in your pocket and have airborne and spying on someone within 20 seconds.
The “Pocket Drone” by AirDroids was seeking $35,000 from the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to launch their company. With 45 days left in their funding campaign, the company has raised $365,000 from over 800 backers seeking to get their hands on a personal spy craft.
The craft will be remote controlled either with a specialized controller or from a laptop, desktop or smartphone using the Android operating system. While the system only allows for 20 minute flights before needed a recharge, it can capture hundreds of photographs in that short time.
The system will also allow users to have a “follow me” mode where a mobile device with GPS can be tracked by the drone. If the user can hack a subject’s phone, they can program the drone or series of drones to follow a target.
The drone could also be used for real-time video surveillance.
The National Security Agency reportedly has been collecting up to 200 million text messages a day from around the world.
The NSA has used the data to track locations, contact names and numbers and details of credit cards. The program, codenamed Dishfire, collections information from phones en masse and is not targeted only at subjects of surveillance.
The information was released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden to Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
The presentation from 2011 on the program was subtitled “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit.” The report claims that numbers from the United States were “minimized” from the database but confirmed numbers from citizens in Great Britain were used in the tracking.
Mobile phone companies in Europe immediately protested the actions of the NSA in spying on their customers.
A new government report shows that major automakers have been using on-board navigation systems to track where drivers travel.
The report also says that car owners cannot demand the information be destroyed by the car manufacturers.
The Government Accountability Office said in a report Monday that major automakers all had different policies regarding data collection but that every major automaker collected data.
The report included Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan and Honda.
Automakers reportedly used the data to provide real time traffic information to navigation systems and to provide information about nearby restaurants or gas stations. While the companies reportedly took steps to protect privacy of users, and reportedly did not sell the information, there was no real limits to what the companies could do with the information.
The study also tracked GPS manufacturers Garmin and TomTom with app developers Google Maps and Telenav.
None of the companies would tell the GAO how long the data was stored on their servers. However, sources inside the companies say most of them only keep the information for 24 hours.
The National Security Agency is being evasive when questioned by a U.S. Senator about their spying on members of Congress.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to the agency on Friday asking if the NSA currently is spying or has ever spied on members of Congress or any other elected American officials. The NSA’s preliminary response to the Senator on Saturday said that Congress has “the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”
The letter from the NSA never provides a direct answer to the Senator’s question regarding spying on government officials.
This is the second time the subject of NSA spying on Congress has been sidestepped by administration officials. Attorney General Eric Holder at a congressional hearing last summer said the NSA had no intent to spy on Congress but did not say it had not been done.
The National Security Agency is trying to build a new supercomputer that could break any kind of encryption used anywhere in the world.
The system would allow the NSA to break into any bank account, any government agency, and any medical record. The computer’s existence was confirmed via documents released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
The “quantum computer” is part of a program titled Penetrating Hard Targets.
The documents say the NSA has been working on its system in giant rooms that are essentially huge Faraday cages. The cages are aimed to stop any kind of electromagnetic energy from being able to access the supercomputer.
A new report exposes a piece of equipment used by the National Security Agency that allows operatives to break into computers from as far as eight miles away using WiFi technology.
The device, called NIGHTSTAND, allows the NSA to place viruses and other software on computers that use Microsoft operating systems. The system works using WiFi signals and would be completely undetectable by the computer’s users.
The project was just one of several NSA programs that were exposed in the German magazine Der Spiegel from leaks given out by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
DEITYBOUNCE was a program designed to hack into Dell servers through an exploit in the motherboard. IRONCHEF would allow two way communications between the devices.
A program called IRATEMONK was created to hack the boot programs on drives from multiple hardware manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung.
A federal judge cited the September 11th terrorist attacks in his ruling that bulk collection of American’s telephone information was legal.
U.S. District Judge William Pauley of New York said the National Security Agency’s program is the government’s counter-punch to al-Qaeda’s use of technology to plot attacks against Americans. He cited al-Qaeda’s decentralized network and that it plots many of its attacks remotely.
“This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said. “The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented.”
The ruling counters a ruling earlier this month from a different federal judge who had granted a preliminary injunction against the program. The Washington, D.C. based judge said the program likely violates the fourth amendment to the Constitution.
The judge said the NSA had intercepted seven calls from 9/11 hijackers but thought they were overseas because they could not collect information they can collect now.
While most people were focusing on a part of a report from President Obama’s task force on surveillance calling for the NSA to scale back operations, one member of the force wants people to know he thinks more surveillance of citizens is necessary.
Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, said that not only is the NSA’s telephone-data collection program necessary to avoid another 9/11 situation, that the program needs to be expanded to include e-mail surveillance.
“I would argue actually that the email data is probably more valuable than the telephony data,” Morell told te National Journal. “You can bet that the last thing a smart terrorist is going to do right now is call someone in the United States.”
Morell even claimed that had e-mail surveillance been part of the “215 program” and if it had been in place on 2000 and 2001, “I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened.”
The task force report did recommend and praise a program used to monitor e-mails sent and received outside the borders of the U.S.
Senior Israeli officials are furious after a new leak from fugitive Edward Snowden shows the NSA was tracking the e-mail of some of Israel’s highest leaders.
The report says that from 2008 to 2011, the U.S. obtained help from Britain to spy on the e-mails of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel Radio that what the NSA had done to his country was “not legitimate” intelligence gathering and he called for an agreement between the two nations regarding espionage.
A spokesman for Olmert tried to downplay the news saying the account monitored was for questions from the public and that “there is no chance there was a security or intelligence breach.”
Israel stopped all espionage actions against the U.S. when former civilian intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was caught sending classified information to the Israelis.
“I think we should expect the same relations from the U.S.,” Steinitz said.
A White House task force has called for the brakes to be applied to the National Security Agency.
The presidential advisory panel recommended close to four dozen changes for the NSA and their actions to collect electronically based data for investigations. While the group did not call for an outright ban on the use of phone and internet data, there was a clear signal that the NSA had gone too far.
One of the biggest recommendations is that the NSA be no longer allowed to store information related to American’s telephone records.
“The message to the NSA is now coming from every branch of government and from every corner of our nation: You have gone too far,” read a statement from Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. “The bulk collection of Americans’ data by the U.S. government must end. This momentous report from the President’s closest advisers is a vindication of the efforts of a bipartisan group of legislators that has been working for years to protect Americans’ privacy by reining in these intelligence authorities.”
The panel also recommended that a court sign off on any search of an individual’s phone or internet data.
President Obama is under no obligation to implement the changes suggested by the committee but has said he will discuss the report with members of his national security team.
