Last year, Iran blocked Telegram and many other social networks after their founders refused to help Iranian authorities to spy on their citizens.
Now it looks like Iranian government wants tighter controls on all foreign messaging and social media apps operating in the country that will give the authorities a wider ability to monitor and censor its people.
All foreign messaging and social media apps operating in Iran have one year to move 'data and activity' associated with Iranian citizens onto servers in Iran, Reuters reported.
In order to comply with the new regulations, the companies would need to set up data centers in Iran within one year, but apps may lose a larger number of users by moving data onto Iranian servers.
However, transferring data to Iran servers might not be enough, as some of the most popular messaging services like WhatsApp, Apple iMessage, and Telegram are offering end-to-end encrypted communication i.e. nobody in between, not even WhatsApp can read the content of your messages.
Just two weeks back Iranian authorities arrested eight women with involvement in online “un-Islamic” modeling photographs without wearing the compulsory headscarf, and their Instagram page has been shut down, along with Facebook pages and business websites.
"Telegram's data centres are to be moved inside the country so they can delete what they want and arrest who they want," @Mehrdxd said in a tweet.
2015-02-05T00:18:00-11:00Thursday, February 05, 2015Swati Khandelwal
The NSA and GCHQ have tracked and monitored the activities of independent and nation-state hackers, along with some of the foremost security researchers in order to gather information on targets and pilfer the stolen data from hackers' archives, top secret Snowden documents reveal.
State-sponsored, individual Blackhat hackers and hacking groups target some or other organizations on an ongoing basis. So, by monitoring the work of 'freelance' and rival state hackers, the NSA and its allies get the stolen information, such as email accounts or chats owned by target of their interest, without doing much of hard work.
HACKERS STOLE FROM TARGETS & AGENCIES STOLE FROM HACKERS
According to the latest revealed documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the hacks and sophisticated breaches on the targets were carried out by the state-sponsored and freelance hackers, but the stolen data, referred to as 'take', was then pilfered by the agencies for their own interest, "without notifying the hacking victims of these breaches."
The hackers' sophisticated email-stealing infrastructure was referred to as INTOLERANT and both Canada and the United Kingdom had hands in hacker pockets.
"Recently, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and Menwith Hill Station (MHS) discovered and began exploiting a target-rich data set being stolen by hackers," reads one of the documents quoted by the Intercept. "The hackers' sophisticated email-stealing intrusion set is known as INTOLERANT."
INTOLERANT PROGRAM
"Of the traffic observed, nearly half contains category hits because the attackers are targeting email accounts of interest to the Intelligence Community. Although a relatively new data source, [Target Offices of Primary Interest] have already written multiple reports based on INTOLERANT collect."
The state-sponsored hackers also targeted a large number of human rights organizations, diplomatic corporations, democracy activists and even journalists. Though, the data collected under the NSA's INTOLERANT project was well organized.
The agencies labeled all kind of stolen data to identify and categorize victims. The categorization in done as following:
A = Indian Diplomatic & Indian Navy
B = Central Asian diplomatic
C = Chinese Human Rights Defenders
D = Tibetan Pro-Democracy Personalities
E = Uighur Activists
F = European Special Rep to Afghanistan and Indian photo-journalism
G = Tibetan Government in Exile
LOVELY HORSE PROGRAM
In a separate document, it was revealed that the NSA had also run an open source intelligence gathering service known as Lovely Horse, a program created by GCHQ to monitor and index public discussion on Twitter and other social media by hackers and security experts including Mark Dowd, Tavis Ormandy and HD Moore.
"Analysts are potentially missing out on valuable open source information relating to cyber defence because of an inability to easily keep up to date with specific blogs and Twitter sources," one document states.
NSA AND GCHQ FOLLOW ‘THE HACKER NEWS’
Around 60 blogs and 36 other Twitter accounts, all listed by the Intercept, could be flattered by the agency's interest, the document states.
The list also include our website's THE HACKER NEWS official twitter handle (@TheHackersNews), which means that NSA and GCHQ have their eyes on every upcoming hacking news and incidents. The agencies were analyzing and collecting intelligence by monitoring our online activities. We feel proud that GCHQ and NSA found The Hacker News updates worth to follow. Stay Tuned.
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 31-year-old global surveillance whistleblower and former U.S. intelligence contractor, who has received a three- year residence permit from Russia, his lawyer announced on Today.
“On the first of August he received a three-year residence permit,” lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told RT.
He had not asked for political asylum, his lawyer added.
The former NSA contractor has not apply for Russian citizenship for now, as he will be able to apply for the Russian citizenship in five years. “A foreign citizen, who got a residence permit, will certainly be able to apply for citizenship,” Kucherena said.
“He will be able to travel freely within the country and go abroad. He’ll be able to stay abroad for not longer than three months,” Kucherena said.
Snowden is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations the NSA. The United States has charged him with the theft of government property and communicating classified information.
Snowden’s year-long permit to stay in Russia had already expired on 31 July.
The former CIA technician and NSA systems administrator had first flown to the Special Administrative Region of China on May 20 from Hawaii with an estimated 1.7 million NSA documents. He gave an estimated 200,000 documents to American journalists he met in Hong Kong.
Snowden arrived in Russia on June 23, 2013, on a flight from Hong Kong. According to his lawyer, Snowden will hold a press conference in Russia as soon as it will be possible.
2014-01-06T01:26:00-11:00Monday, January 06, 2014Mohit Kumar
Think twice before using some words like ‘Bomb’, ‘Attack’, ‘Blast’ or ‘kill’ in your Facebook status update, tweets or emails, because this may flag you as a potential terrorist under a surveillance project of Indian Security agencies.
This Indian Internet surveillance project named as NETRA (Network Traffic Analysis),capable of detecting and capture any dubious voice traffic passing through software such as Skype or Google Talk, according to the Economic Times.
In Hindi, NETRA means "eye" and this project is an Indian version of PRISM i.e. A spying project by US National Security Agency (NSA), that also allows the government to monitor the Internet and telephone records of citizens.
Reportedly, NETRA is under testing right now by the Indian Intelligence Bureau and Cabinet Secretariat and after on success will be deployed by all Indian National security agencies.
Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), a lab under Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is still hardworking on 'Netra' project to give it extraordinary features like NSA's PRISM.
One of the fun fact about the project is that, NETRA is defined to use only 300 GB of storage space for storing the intercepted internet traffic... Are they serious..? HOW is it POSSIBLE? and this data will be shared with only maximum three security agencies, including the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and Cabinet Secretariat.
At this time, even I am not sure that what does they mean by "300 GB of storage space", but we are trying to contact DRDO guys for more further information on this matter.
Anyway, NSA has a 100,000 square foot "mission critical data center", where they are intercepting 1.7 billion American electronic records and communications a day, using 5 Zettabytes (1 Trillion GB) space to keep every information stored for next 500s years at least.
Also some questions arise here that:
Do they have the capability to handle and analyze such huge amount of data? (If it is not 300GB only)
Other than terrorist attacks, will they also deal with Computer Security Incidents and vulnerabilities?
What does that 300 GB of storage space mean?
The government should clear the objectives and ability of the NETRA project. Because according to the population of Internet users in India, words like ‘Bomb’, ‘Attack’, ‘Blast’ or ‘kill’ will trigger RED ALARM millions of times a day and if they don't have the capability to trace down right mischief people, rather than disturbing elements, which may purposefully divert the attention of security agencies for various means.
Another major concern is Privacy, unwarranted digital intrusions and interference with citizens’ online communications.
Forbes India reported that, India has more than around 50 different laws, rules and regulations that aim to uphold privacy and confidentiality in various domains. Unfortunately, most of those policies are very dated and do not sufficiently take into account the challenges of contemporary information societies.
Do they believe that secrecy, confidentiality and, most importantly, privacy, must be sacrificed for national security? Bruce Schneier, security technologist said before,“There is no security without privacy. And liberty requires both security and privacy.”
Update:
I have more information about "300 GB of storage space" from my sources i.e. NETRA is a hardware device, and will be installed at ISP (Internet service provider) level on more than 1000 locations. Each location will be called as "Node", with 300GB of storage space. So, there are 1000 nodes x 300GB = 300,000GB of total space is initially decided to set up.
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2013-06-17T04:23:00-11:00Monday, June 17, 2013Mohit Kumar
If you have followed the startling revelations about the scope of the US government's surveillance efforts, you may have thought you were reading about the end of privacy, and about the Enemies of the Internet.
“My computer was arrested before I was.” a perceptive comment by an internet activist who had been arrested by means of online surveillance. Online surveillance is a growing danger for journalists, bloggers, citizen-journalists and human rights defenders.
Over the last few years, law enforcement agencies have been pushing for unprecedented powers of surveillance and access to your private online communications.
This week the PRISM surveillance scandal has consumed the Internet as the implications of massive scale U.S. Government spying begin to sink in. The US National Security Organization (NSA) is almost certainly one of (if not the) most technologically sophisticated, well-funded and secretive organizations in the world. The Prism initiative was launched by National Security Agency(NSA) in the year 2007.
The surveillance program, known as ‘Prism’ involves monitoring of not just the United States telecoms companies data including Verizon who have 98.9 million customers , but also of some most popular, widely used, and highly respected giants of the internet, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple.
What’s worse, the NSA got direct access Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and Microsoft servers which allowed it to harvest internet usage details of millions of unsuspecting American citizens. This means for example, that if you usually stay signed in to your Gmail account, all your internet searches using the Google search engine are likely to be harvested by the NSA. The NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, and other incidents, showed how easily US surveillance laws could be subverted.
What’s interesting about this story is that it’s not exactly new information. The only difference now is that the public knows about it, and they are outraged. Perhaps this is the turning point when the general public begins to take their online security seriously.
If Soldiers care about their physical safety, they take a helmet and bullet-proof vest when they venture into the field. Similarly, similarly all of us should equip with a digital survival kit if exchanging sensitive information online or storing it on a computer or mobile phone.
It is possible to avoid all kinds of surveillance by using anonymizing services like virtual private networks(VPNs), or Tor, encrypts your content and hides your origin very effectively when used correctly.
As for phone calls, if you want to shield against eavesdropping or stop the NSA obtaining records of who you are calling and when, there are a few options. You could use an encryption app such as RedPhone for Android, TextSecure or Silent Circle to make and receive encrypted calls and send encrypted texts and files, through your communications will be fully secure only if both parties to the call, text or file transfer are using the app.
Surveillance technology can be used in two different ways. It can be used for the legitimate purpose of combating cybercrime. BUT in the hands of authoritarian regimes, it can be turned into formidable censorship and surveillance weapons against human rights defenders and independent news providers.
Surveillance laws need updating. The lack of legislation and oversight of trade in these digital weapons allows authoritarian governments to identify critical journalists and citizen-journalists and go after them.
All new bills including CISPA in the US, the CCDP in the UK, Central Monitoring System (CMS) in India and the current surveillance proposals in Australia, have one thing in common: they aim to make it easier for law enforcement to monitor everyday Internet activities, such as web browsing and emailing.
It’s not like Government are using some kind of advanced technology to do it. So, Make no mistake, abuse of power by law enforcement extends to the online world.
