Status and stress

Moises Velasquez-Manoff writes: Although professionals may bemoan their long work hours and high-pressure careers, really, there’s stress, and then there’s Stress with a capital “S.” The former can be considered a manageable if unpleasant part of life; in the right amount, it may even strengthen one’s mettle. The latter kills.

What’s the difference? Scientists have settled on an oddly subjective explanation: the more helpless one feels when facing a given stressor, they argue, the more toxic that stressor’s effects.

That sense of control tends to decline as one descends the socioeconomic ladder, with potentially grave consequences. Those on the bottom are more than three times as likely to die prematurely as those at the top. They’re also more likely to suffer from depression, heart disease and diabetes. Perhaps most devastating, the stress of poverty early in life can have consequences that last into adulthood.

Even those who later ascend economically may show persistent effects of early-life hardship. Scientists find them more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age. [Continue reading…]

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Video: Culture of Impunity (Parts One & Two)

Part Two:

Part One:

Serious crimes have been committed. The evidence is public knowledge. They include launching a war of aggression, conspiracy to defraud Congress, and conspiracy to commit torture. And yet, today, none of the high government officials responsible for committing these crimes have been prosecuted. AlternateFocus investigates why.

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What the appointment of Martin Indyk as U.S. Middle East special envoy tells us

Richard Falk writes: It was to be expected. It was signalled in advance. And yet it is revealing.

The only other candidates considered for the job were equally known as Israeli partisans: Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel before becoming Commissioner of Israel’s Baseball League and Dennis Ross, co-founder in the 1980s (with Indyk) of the AIPAC-backed Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy who handled the 2000 Camp David negotiations on behalf of Clinton.

The winner among these three was Martin Indyk, former ambassador to Israel (1995-97; 2000-01), onetime AIPAC employee, British born, Australian educated American diplomat.

Does it not seem strange for the United States, the convening party and the unconditional supporter of Israel, to rely exclusively for diplomatic guidance in this concerted effort to revive the peace talks on persons with such strong and unmistakable pro-Israeli credentials?

What is stranger, still, is that the media never bothers to observe this peculiarity of a negotiating framework in which the side with massive advantages in hard and soft power, as well as great diplomatic leverage, needs to be further strengthened by having the mediating third-party so clearly in its corner. Is this numbness or bias? Are we so used to a biased framework that it is taken for granted, or is it overlooked because it might spoil the PR effect if mentioned out loud?

John Kerry, the Secretary of State, whose show this is, dutifully indicated when announcing the Indyk appointment that success in the negotiations will depend on the willingness of the two sides to make “reasonable compromises”. But who will decide on what is reasonable? Can one trust such a determination to a third-party that is unabashedly the political ally of Israel? [Continue reading…]

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Guantanamo tab $5.2 billion and counting

Carol Rosenberg reports: New number-crunching by Democrats campaigning for Guantanamo’s closure says the Pentagon spends nearly a half-billion dollars a year – a whopping $2.7 million per prisoner – to operate its offshore prison complex in southeast Cuba.

The figure is by far the largest per-prisoner cost ever calculated and apparently, for the first time, includes troop costs. The ostensibly temporary Pentagon prison has, since it opened in 2002, been staffed largely by troops trained up on their way to Guantanamo for rotations of nine months to a year.

The cost for this year – $454.1 million to operate, staff and build at the prison complex – comes from a report by the Defense Department’s Office of the Comptroller.

It was first provided to Congress on June 27 by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and made public last week.

The report says the Pentagon will have spent $5.242 billion by the end of 2014.

The total costs, however, are likely higher. The accounting does not appear to include the prison camps’ state-of-the-art headquarters, built in 2004 for $13.5 million, or a secret lockup for ex-CIA prisoners, called Camp 7, the price tag of which is considered classified.

In addition, the Justice Department and FBI have devoted staff to detainee operations, and probably the CIA.

At Guantanamo, the prison camps spokesman, Navy Capt. Robert Durand, said the $2.7 million-per-prisoner figure apparently represents “fully loaded costs” of maintaining what is today a 2,000-strong staff at the sprawling detention center zone where 166 captives are confined to seven different lockups – including the hospital and psychiatric wards. [Continue reading…]

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With Snowden now free in Russia, U.S. has few options

McClatchy reports: The world’s most closely watched layover ended on Thursday as Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, the accused intelligence leaker who’d been holed up in a Moscow airport’s transit lounge since June 23.

The Obama administration, which for weeks had issued only muted criticism of Russia as it implored President Vladimir Putin’s government to “do the right thing,” lashed out at the decision to offer Snowden a haven but didn’t dwell on possible repercussions.

Members of Congress fumed, calling on President Barack Obama to respond firmly. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the affront was a “game changer” for U.S.-Russia relations. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said “Russia has stabbed us in the back” and asked Obama to recommend moving the G-20 economic summit, which is scheduled for next month in the Russian city of St. Petersburg.

But relations with Russia already are so frayed, analysts say, that there’s little the U.S. could do to punish Putin for taking in Snowden, who’s regarded by many here and abroad as a whistleblower for revealing a top-secret government spy program.

As dramatic as Snowden’s revelations are, his hiding out in Russia may not even be the worst snag in bilateral relations, which have deteriorated over the past 18 months and killed Obama’s goal of a “reset.” Other strains include disagreements over Syria, Russia’s freeze on U.S. adoptions of Russian children, and Congress’ approval of a law barring several Russian officials from entering the U.S. [Continue reading…]

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New President Hassan Rouhani makes the unimaginable imaginable for Iran

Stephen Kinzer writes: The election of Hassan Rouhani, who will be inaugurated today as Iran’s seventh president, opens intriguing possibilities. Since 2005, the world has known an Iranian president who spoke the language of provocation and seemed to delight in keeping his country isolated. That is about to change.

Finding a way to bring Iran back into the world’s mainstream will be Rouhani’s principal challenge. His power is limited, though in the fluid world of Iranian politics, he is likely to accumulate more. His adversaries, most notably supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and the United States, ridicule him as a puppet of repressive mullahs.

In public statements following his election, Rouhani has spoken in terms far more conciliatory than those his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, liked to use. He has pledged to walk more on the path of transparency and boost mutual trust between Iran and other countries.

President Obama told an interviewer in reply that he was open to “a whole range of measures” if Iran would “show the international community that you’re abiding by international treaties and obligations, that you’re not developing a nuclear weapon.”

That was an encouraging exchange, but far more will be required to thaw an icy relationship that has been disfigured by passionate emotions. [Continue reading…]

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The occupation mustn’t be called a ‘wound’ but Netanyahu still welcomes American Band-Aids

Press TV reports: Iran’s president-elect, Hassan Rohani, says the occupation of Palestine is an “old wound” on the body of the Muslim world.

“After all, in our region, there’s been a wound for years on the body of the Muslim world under the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the beloved [city of] al-Quds,” Rohani stated at a rally in the Iranian capital, Tehran, held to mark International Quds Day.

The New York Times reports: At least three Iranian news agencies appeared to misquote him as saying: the “Zionist regime is a sore which must be removed.” Later in the day they posted corrections.

Mr. Rouhani, who has sought to portray himself as a moderate, did not use the most inflammatory anti-Israeli invective sometimes heard from other Iranian leaders, most notably Mr. Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called Israel a cancerous tumor, a virus and an aberration that should be expunged from history.

Nevertheless, the initial news agency translation of Mr. Rouhani’s comments from the state television videotape infuriated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He has previously described Mr. Rouhani as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose surprising June 14 election victory was unlikely to change Iran’s policies, particularly regarding what Israel views as an Iranian determination to become a nuclear weapons power.

“Rouhani’s true face has been revealed earlier than expected,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement. “Even if they will now rush to deny his remarks, this is what the man thinks and this is the plan of the Iranian regime. These remarks by President Rouhani must rouse the world from the illusion that part of it has been caught up in since the Iranian elections.

“The president there has changed, but the goal of the regime has not: to achieve nuclear weapons in order to threaten Israel, the Middle East and the peace and security of the entire world. A country that threatens the destruction of the state of Israel must not be allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction.”

When told later that the original translation had been wrong, and that the videotape showed Mr. Rouhani had in fact not referred directly to Israel or said anything about removing the “sore,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office was unmoved and seemingly uninterested in nuance. “We stand by what we say,” said his spokesman, Mark Regev. “The remarks attributed to him we think, we are sure, that represents his true outlook.”

Tumors have to be removed, but wounds can heal.

Is healing an image that offends Netanyahu? Probably, because for as long as Israel has enemies it will feel justified in retaining its position as the Middle East’s sole nuclear power and also its Qualitative Military Edge as the region’s super-power.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Kerry can keep on handing out Band-Aids — just so long as no one refers to what they are covering up as a “wound.”

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When al Qaeda says ‘jump,’ America jumps

The New York Times reports: The United States intercepted electronic communications this week among senior operatives of Al Qaeda, in which the terrorists discussed attacks against American interests in the Middle East and North Africa, American officials said Friday.

The intercepts and a subsequent analysis of them by American intelligence agencies prompted the United States to issue an unusual global travel alert to American citizens on Friday, warning of the potential for terrorist attacks by operatives of Al Qaeda and their associates beginning Sunday through the end of August. Intelligence officials said the threat focused on the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, which has been tied to plots to blow up American-bound cargo and commercial flights.

The bulletin to travelers and expatriates, issued by the State Department, came less than a day after the department announced that it was closing nearly two dozen American diplomatic missions in the Middle East and North Africa, including facilities in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Britain said Friday that it would close its embassy in Yemen on Monday and Tuesday because of “increased security concerns.”

It is unusual for the United States to come across discussions among senior Qaeda operatives about operational planning — through informants, intercepted e-mails or eavesdropping on cellphone calls. So when the high-level intercepts were collected and analyzed this week, senior officials at the C.I.A., State Department and White House immediately seized on their significance. Members of Congress have been provided classified briefings on the matter, officials said Friday.

And if nothing happens, everyone can claim victory.

Officials in Washington will solemnly talk about the need to maintain constant vigilance, and al Qaeda leaders will duly note that all it takes to force the U.S. to shut down all its embassies across the region is to shoot off a few emails. Can cyber-warfare get any easier?

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In failing to defend the First Amendment, Obama follows in Nixon’s footsteps

The New York Times reports: The federal government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed.

These developments are rapidly revising the conventional view of the role of the First Amendment in national security cases. The scale of disclosures made possible by digital media, the government’s vast surveillance apparatus and the rise of unorthodox publishers like WikiLeaks have unsettled time-honored understandings of the role of mass media in American democracy.

This is so even where the government was the nominal loser. Consider the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning, who dodged a legal bullet on Tuesday, winning an acquittal on the most serious charge against him: that releasing government secrets to the public amounted to “aiding the enemy.”

But a dodged bullet is still a bullet.

The military judge in Private Manning’s case ruled last year that there was no First Amendment problem with the government’s legal theory. Providing classified information for mass distribution, she said, is a sort of treason if the government can prove the defendant knew “he was giving intelligence to the enemy” by “indirect means.”

The verdict thus means only that military prosecutors did not prove their case. The legal theory stands, and it troubles even usual critics of unauthorized disclosures of government secrets. [Continue reading…]

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Despite administration promises, few signs of change in drone wars

The New York Times reports: There were more drone strikes in Pakistan last month than any month since January. Three missile strikes were carried out in Yemen in the last week alone. And after Secretary of State John Kerry told Pakistanis on Thursday that the United States was winding down the drone wars there, officials back in Washington quickly contradicted him.

More than two months after President Obama signaled a sharp shift in America’s targeted-killing operations, there is little public evidence of change in a strategy that has come to define the administration’s approach to combating terrorism.

Most elements of the drone program remain in place, including a base in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia that the Central Intelligence Agency continues to use to carry out drone strikes in Yemen. In late May, administration officials said that the bulk of drone operations would shift to the Pentagon from the C.I.A.

But the C.I.A. continues to run America’s secret air war in Pakistan, where Mr. Kerry’s comments underscored the administration’s haphazard approach to discussing these issues publicly. During a television interview in Pakistan on Thursday, Mr. Kerry said the United States had a “timeline” to end drone strikes in that country’s western mountains, adding, “We hope it’s going to be very, very soon.”

But the Obama administration is expected to carry out drone strikes in Pakistan well into the future. Hours after Mr. Kerry’s interview, the State Department issued a statement saying there was no definite timetable to end the targeted killing program in Pakistan, and a department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said, “In no way would we ever deprive ourselves of a tool to fight a threat if it arises.”

Micah Zenko, a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, who closely follows American drone operations, said Mr. Kerry seemed to have been out of sync with the rest of the Obama administration in talking about the drone program. “There’s nothing that indicates this administration is going to unilaterally end drone strikes in Pakistan,” Mr. Zenko said, “or Yemen for that matter.” [Continue reading…]

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A cheap spying tool with a high creepy factor

The New York Times: Brendan O’Connor is a security researcher. How easy would it be, he recently wondered, to monitor the movement of everyone on the street – not by a government intelligence agency, but by a private citizen with a few hundred dollars to spare?

Mr. O’Connor, 27, bought some plastic boxes and stuffed them with a $25, credit-card size Raspberry Pi Model A computer and a few over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters. He connected each of those boxes to a command and control system, and he built a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.

Each box cost $57. He produced 10 of them, and then he turned them on – to spy on himself. He could pick up the Web sites he browsed when he connected to a public Wi-Fi – say at a cafe – and he scooped up the unique identifier connected to his phone and iPad. Gobs of information traveled over the Internet in the clear, meaning they were entirely unencrypted and simple to scoop up.

Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi “pings.” His iPhone pinged the iMessage server to check for new messages. When he logged on to an unsecured Wi-Fi, it revealed what operating system he was using on what kind of device, and whether he was using Dropbox or went on a dating site or browsed for shoes on an e-commerce site. One site might leak his e-mail address, another his photo.

“Actually it’s not hard,” he concluded. “It’s terrifyingly easy.”

Also creepy – which is why he called his contraption “creepyDOL.”

“It could be used for anything depending on how creepy you want to be,” he said.

You could spy on your ex-lover, by placing the sensor boxes near the places the person frequents, or your teenage child, or the residents of a particular neighborhood. You could keep tabs on people who gather at a certain house of worship or take part in a protest demonstration in a town square. Their phones and tablets, Mr. O’Connor argued, would surely leak some information about them – and certainly if they then connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi. The boxes are small enough to be tucked under a cafe table or dropped from a hobby drone. They can be scattered around a city and go unnoticed.

Mr. O’Connor says he did none of that – and for a reason. In addition to being a security researcher and founder of a consulting firm called Malice Afterthought, he is also a law student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He says he stuck to snooping on himself – and did not, deliberately, seek to scoop up anyone else’s data – because of a federal law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Some of his fellow security researchers have been prosecuted under that law. One of them, Andrew Auernheimer, whose hacker alias is Weev, was sentenced to 41 months in prison for exploiting a security hole in the computer system of AT&T, which made e-mail addresses accessible for over 100,000 iPad owners; Mr. Aurnheimer is appealing the case.

“I haven’t done a full deployment of this because the United States government has made a practice of prosecuting security researchers,” he contends. “Everyone is terrified.” [Continue reading…]

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With rising global temperatures, rising violence and conflicts

UC Berkeley NewsCenter: Shifts in climate are strongly linked to human violence around the world, and according to a new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University, even relatively minor departures from normal temperatures or rainfall can substantially increase the risk of conflict.

The study, which includes more data than prior research in this field and covers all major regions of the globe, shows the Earth’s climate plays a more influential role in human affairs than previously thought. The results were published today (Thursday, Aug. 1) in the journal Science.

The authors found similar patterns of conflict around the world that were linked to changes in climatic, such as increased drought or higher than average annual temperature. Examples include spikes in domestic violence in India and Australia; increased assaults and murders in the United States and Tanzania; ethnic violence in Europe and South Asia; land invasions in Brazil; police using force in the Netherlands; civil conflicts throughout the tropics; and even the collapse of Mayan and Chinese empires.

The study could have critical implications for understanding the impact of future climate change on human societies, as many climate models project global temperature increases of at least 2 degrees Celsius over the next 50 years.

The study draws on a variety of research fields including climatology, archaeology, economics, political science and psychology to provide a comprehensive look at how climatic changes shape human conflict and violence.

“What was lacking was a clear picture of what this body of research as a whole was telling us,” said Solomon Hsiang, the study’s lead author, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at Princeton during the research project and is now an assistant professor of public policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. “We collected 60 existing studies containing 45 different data sets and we re-analyzed their data and findings using a common statistical framework. The results were striking.”

They examined various aspects of climate such as rainfall, drought or temperature, and their associations with various forms of violence within three broad categories of conflict:

  • Personal violence and crime such as murder, assault, rape, and domestic violence;
  • Intergroup violence and political instability, like civil wars, riots, ethnic violence, and land invasions;
  • Institutional breakdowns, such as abrupt and major changes in governing institutions or the collapse of entire civilizations.

The results proved all three types of conflict exhibit systematic and large responses to changes in climate, with the effect on intergroup conflict being the most pronounced. Conflict responded most consistently to temperature, with all 27 out of 27 studies of modern societies finding a positive relationship between high temperatures and greater violence.

A central contribution of the study was to develop a method for comparing results around the world, because the nature of climatic events differs across locations. The authors’ new approach was to convert climate changes into location-specific units known to statisticians as standard deviations.

“We found that a 1 standard deviation shift towards hotter conditions causes the likelihood of personal violence to rise 4 percent and intergroup conflict to rise 14 percent,” said Marshall Burke, the study’s co-lead author and a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

“We often think of modern society as largely independent of the environment, due to technological advances, but our findings challenge that notion,” said study coauthor Edward Miguel, UC Berkeley’s Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics and director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) based at UC Berkeley.

“Our results shed new light on how the future climate will shape human societies,” said Burke. The findings of the study suggest that a global temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius could increase the rate of intergroup conflicts, such as civil wars, by over 50 percent in many parts of the world.

The researchers said that exactly why climate affects conflict and violence is the most pressing question for future related research. While the study finds strong evidence that climatic events may be a cause of conflict, the researchers stressed that they are not claiming that climate is the only or primary cause of conflict, cautioning that conflict dynamics are complex and remain poorly understood.

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NSA pays £100m in secret funding for GCHQ. Is Britain now getting paid to do America’s dirty work?

The Guardian reports: The US government has paid at least £100m to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to secure access to and influence over Britain’s intelligence gathering programmes.

The top secret payments are set out in documents which make clear that the Americans expect a return on the investment, and that GCHQ has to work hard to meet their demands. “GCHQ must pull its weight and be seen to pull its weight,” a GCHQ strategy briefing said.

The funding underlines the closeness of the relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency. But it will raise fears about the hold Washington has over the UK’s biggest and most important intelligence agency, and whether Britain’s dependency on the NSA has become too great.

In one revealing document from 2010, GCHQ acknowledged that the US had “raised a number of issues with regards to meeting NSA’s minimum expectations”. It said GCHQ “still remains short of the full NSA ask”.

Ministers have denied that GCHQ does the NSA’s “dirty work”, but in the documents GCHQ describes Britain’s surveillance laws and regulatory regime as a “selling point” for the Americans.

The papers are the latest to emerge from the cache leaked by the American whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has railed at the reach of the US and UK intelligence agencies. [Continue reading…]

Nick Hopkins writes: The influence the NSA has over GCHQ seems considerable. Whether this is down to the money, or the pressure a senior partner in a relationship can bring to bear, is not entirely clear.

Common sense suggests it’s a mixture of the two. What is clear is this: the Snowden files are littered with remarks from GCHQ senior and middle managers worrying about the NSA “ask” and whether the British agency is doing enough to meet it.

One budget report states GCHQ will spend money according to NSA and UK government requirements – in that order. Does GCHQ feel compromised by this? If it does, it seems the imperative of keeping close to the Americans is overriding. That appears to be the view of the Cabinet Office too.

Asked about the NSA payments, the American demands and the concerns that the UK might be vulnerable to being pushed about, the Cabinet Office said: “In a 60-year close alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions.”

It may be entirely unsurprising in Whitehall that our subservience has been institutionalised in this way, but everyone else is entitled to ask whether that makes it healthy or right.

People are also entitled to ponder whether the price of keeping the Americans so close might involve undertaking some of their “dirty work” – developing intelligence-gathering techniques that are beyond the US legislative and judicial framework, but can be accommodated within ours. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. shuts down 21 embassies based on non-specific threat. Al Qaeda could strike — somewhere

The NSA might have developed an extraordinary capacity to keep track of global communications and everything every American does online. But when it comes to keeping track of al Qaeda, it appears the NSA and the CIA are still struggling.

Or to put it another way, U.S. intelligence can gather an unlimited amount of hay, but it still can’t find needles — or for that matter explain why there’s any reason to expect that the needles it might hope to find would be located in the haystacks it has created.

CNN reports: A State Department travel alert Friday said al Qaeda may launch attacks in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond, as the United States is closing 21 embassies and consulates Sunday as a precaution.

“Current information suggests that al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” said the alert, which covers the entire month.

It warned that “terrorists may elect to use a variety of means and weapons and target both official and private interests.”

A separate State Department list showed the 21 embassies and consulates that will close on Sunday, normally the start of the work week in the countries affected.

They included embassies in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen and 11 other countries, as well as consulates in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Other embassies to be closed were in the United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Jordan, Djibouti, Bangladesh, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Mauritania and Sudan.

A senior State Department official said the agency told the diplomatic facilities to close Sunday, normally the beginning of the work week, and that additional days could be added. The U.S. Embassy in Israel also will be closed as normal on Sunday.

I guess this could all be a cunning ploy to make it look like State doesn’t have very specific intelligence when in reality it does, but I’m more inclined to think that they are getting hints something bad might happen somewhere and everyone wants to play safe.

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FBI uses hacking tools to spy on suspects

The Wall Street Journal reports: Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can’t be wiretapped like a phone, is called “going dark” among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment. [Continue reading…]

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64,019 searches: A dark journey into my Google history

Tom Gara writes: Let’s run through a little thought experiment.

Imagine there’s a list somewhere that contains every single webpage you have visited in the last five years. It also has everything you have ever searched for, every address you looked up on Google Maps, every email you sent, every chat message, every YouTube video you watched. Each entry is time-stamped, so it’s clear exactly, down to the minute, when all of this was done.

Now imagine that list is all searchable. And imagine it’s on a clean, easy-to-use website. With all that imagined, can you think of a way a hacker, with access to this, could use it against you?

And once you’ve imagined all that, go over to google.com/dashboard, and see it all become reality.

For a piece complementing today’s story on Google and privacy by the WSJ’s Amir Efrati, I took a deep dive into Google Dashboard, a kind of Grand Central Terminus for all the information the company has stored on you. It’s a truly amazing amount, especially if, like me, you have been a heavy Gmail user since its launch in 2004. As long as you are logged into Gmail, or any other Google account, the company isn’t just keeping track of how you use its own service — it’s noting every site you visit on the web. [Continue reading…]

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