NSA and CIA Double Their Warrantless Searches on Americans in Two Years
Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the NSA collects hundreds of millions of digital communications at rest and in transit from the major internet backbones running in and out of the U.S., as well as from Google, Facebook, YouTube, and other companies, involving “targets” overseas.
Americans’ communications are constitutionally protected from warrantless searches, but when those communications are swept up by the NSA “incidentally” to its main goal, those protections have been essentially ignored.
CIA Email Hackers Return With Major Law Enforcement Breach:
Hackers who broke into the personal email account of CIA Director John Brennan have struck again.
This time the group, which goes by the name Crackas With Attitude, says it gained access to an even more important target—a portal for law enforcement that grants access to arrest records and other sensitive data, including what appears to be a tool for sharing information about active shooters and terrorist events, and a system for real-time chats between law enforcement agents.
Source: Wired
WikiLeaks Is Publishing the CIA Director’s Hacked Emails:
WikiLeaks may describe itself as an outlet for whistleblowers, but it’s never hesitated to publish stolen documents offered up by a helpful hacker, either. So it’s no surprise that it’s now leaked the pilfered files of the CIA’s director, John Brennan.
Source: Wired
Teen Who Hacked CIA Director’s Email Tells How He Did It:
The hacker, who says he’s under 20 years old, told WIRED that he wasn’t working alone but that he and two other people worked on the breach. He says they first did a reverse lookup of Brennan’s mobile phone number to discover that he was a Verizon customer. Then one of them posed as a Verizon technician and called the company asking for details about Brennan’s account.
“[W]e told them we work for Verizon and we have a customer on scheduled callback,” he told WIRED. The caller told Verizon that he was unable to access Verizon’s customer database on his own because “our tools were down.”
After providing the Verizon employee with a fabricated employee Vcode—a unique code the he says Verizon assigns employees—they got the information they were seeking.
Source: Wired