Anonymous hackers have posted a YouTube video of a candid and embarrasing conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard in which investigators talk about hacking suspects. One of the suspects is a 15-year-old which a UK-based law enforcement official called “a bit of an idiot” and a “pain in the butt.”

Ironically, this sensitive conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard was recorded by the very people they are investigating - the hacking group known as Anonymous.

The group released a nearly 17-minute-long recording of what appears to be a Jan. 17 conference call devoted to tracking and prosecuting members of the loose-knit hacking group (video link included in story link below).

The FBI stated that the information “was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained” but that no FBI systems were breached. I am not sure what the FBI means when they say “systems” weren’t breached. Clearly they were or else the group would not have been able to eavesdrop on the call. The FBI says it’s not entirely clear how the hackers got their hands on the recording. Parts of the recording appear to have been edited to bleep out the names of some of the suspects being discussed.

If you listen to the recording, you can hear people entering their pass code to get into the call throughout the entire call. The first few people who called in identified themselves; however, after that, people continued to call in without identifying themselves (you can hear several beeps). Anonymous published an email purportedly sent by an FBI agent which gave details and a password for accessing the call. This sounds like the obvious way that Anonymous was able to gain information to access the call. “The FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now,” the group gloated in a message posted to Twitter.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is under investigation, told The Associated Press that authorities were looking at the possibility that the message was intercepted after a private email account of one of the invited participants was compromised.

On Friday, London police confirmed that one of its e-crimes specialist was on the intercepted conference call but said that “at this stage no operational risks” to the police service had been identified.

In the future, I think the investigators should start using handles instead of their real names. They used their first names in the call and identified their locations.

Graham Cluley, an expert with data security company Sophos, said that knowing the time, telephone number and passcode for the call meant it was all too easy to spy on the investigators.

“Even my ironing lady could have rung in and silently listened to the call just like Anonymous did,” Cluley said in an email, calling the fiasco “highly embarrassing for the cops.” Yes indeed!

The breach is likely to act as a wake-up call to law enforcement agencies globally, said Marcus Carey, who spent years securing communications for the NSA before joining security-risk assessment firm Rapid7.

The FBI says ”a criminal investigation is under way to identify and hold accountable those responsible.”

There was enough on the call to clearly hear the investigators talk about a 15-year-old who they say goes by the handle of Tehwongz, who one official said was arrested just before Christmas. The UK-based investigator said the teen was currently under the subject of a local police investigation and that his hard drive was in custody.

He said the teen had written a statement explaining how he came to become a hacker and what he has done, including hacking into a gaming site with access to 32,000 users and their financial information. The FBI might want to consider recruiting this kid.

British police say the intercepted phone call between cybercrime investigators from the FBI and Scotland Yard poses no immediate risk to operations.

Anonymous also made good on one of its promises on Friday. The group also claimed credit for defacing the Boston Police Department’s website, saying it was retaliating for police brutality against protesters at Occupy Wall Street. Anonymous has warned they were intending to go after any police officers who were caught on video pepper spraying or hitting protesters.

Anonymous, an eclectic group of hackers, pranksters and activists, has increasingly focused its attention on law enforcement agencies in general and the FBI in particular.

The group began with targeting the Church of Scientology, the music industry, and financial companies such as Visa and MasterCard. It then expanded its targets to include government, police and military targets.

Dozens of suspected members and supporters have been arrested across the world.

Read story and view video@ msnbc

Have you ever wondered if your significant other or spouse is cheating and been tempted to play sleuth? People have been catching their spouses or boyfriends/girlfriends cheating for centuries, but it took some real effort. Nowadays, it has become so easy due to technology.

Thirty-three percent of dating couples and 37 percent of spouses — slightly more women than men — say they have checked their partner’s email or call history on the sly, according to a survey last year by the gadget shopping site Retrevo.com, which queried more than 1,000 people online. Among those under 25, almost half reported snooping. Just 9 percent discovered evidence of cheating.

Retrevo.com spokeswoman Jennifer Jacobson said she doesn’t think young couples are less trusting. “It’s just that technology has made everyone’s communications highly accessible and people probably don’t see it as a violation of trust, because of how easy it is to do.”

When Patricia Masterson’s boyfriend broke into her email account in search of evidence that she had been cheating, she was deeply offended by the violation of her privacy. The fact that she had, indeed, been cheating hardly seemed like a good excuse.

She changed her tune 10 years later, when, married and pregnant, Masterson innocently spotted a text message on her husband’s cellphone from a woman regarding a baby. Her husband said it must have been sent to him by mistake, and Masterson, sensitive to privacy, left it alone — until a few months later, when the woman contacted Masterson through Facebook to reveal she’d recently given birth to her husband’s child.

Masterson said, “I became a snooper.” She poured through cellphone records and installed software to recover deleted emails, gathering all the details she could. “It was so not me; up until that point I had believed in absolute privacy.”

When, if ever, is it OK to invade a romantic partner’s privacy? Many say it’s often the only way to confirm suspicions of infidelity when all else fails. I am not sure what “all else” includes – asking and hoping for an honest answer? Hiding behind closed doors and eavesdropping on phone conversations? Following your partner? Hiring a private detective to perform surveillance on your partner? Place a GPS tracker on their car?

According to a study, it depends on from which generation you belong that determines your probability of using today’s technology to spy on your partner.

Larry Rosen, author of “iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us” (Palgrave Macmillan), said millennials raised on a culture of Facebook stalking view privacy differently from baby boomers or Gen-Xers (roughly people over 35).

“For older people, the lines are clear: Private is private, public is public,” said Rosen, a research psychologist and professor at California State University at Dominguez Hills. “For younger people it’s much more murky.”

Flirting with Fire

Technology has made it easier to spy, but it has also made it easier to cheat, blurring the lines of what is considered appropriate relationships. Let’s take Facebook for example. I know of a few couples that broke up over Facebook “friendships.” Facebook invites flirting with exes, and some people never know whom their partner is texting. Is that OK? It depends on the couple, but it can get out of hand.

The ping of a saucy text message stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers, as does cocaine, and people want more, Rosen said.

He recommends people abide by a five-minute “e-waiting period” before sending an electronic communication so that they can be more clear-headed about whether it’s a good idea. I think that’s always a good policy anyway – especially if you are about to send an angry email. You should avoid that impulse to hit the “send” button before giving yourself time to think clearly.

“It’s an issue of higher-level thinking versus lower-order responding,” Rosen said. “We have turned into salivating dogs, and we have to back off a bit.”

Generally, a relationship is harmful if you’re redirecting intimacies and energies from your partner to someone else, or if you’re hiding behavior because you know it would make your partner uncomfortable.

“People are trying to hang on to two worlds, and it’s been my experience that those things blow up,” said Randi Gunther, an LA-based clinical psychologist and marriage counselor, and author of “Relationship Saboteurs” (New Harbinger). “Do you want to spend your life looking over your shoulder?”

I am in complete agreement on this one. You can be cheating on your partner without having any physical contact with another person. There have been numerous studies that show women are more threatened if their partner is having an emotionally intimate relationship with another woman than if he were sleeping with her – not that the latter is very comforting. The exact opposite holds true of men. They are more upset about the physical contact than about their woman seeking emotional support from another man.

Setting Parameters

It’s up to each couple to determine what’s appropriate regarding privacy, but the problem is that most couples don’t talk about their values until someone gets hurt, said Linda Young, a counseling psychologist who sits on the board of the Council on Contemporary Families. Young said couples should get on the same page about their expectations (What is cheating? How transparent should you be? Do you have access to each other’s passwords?) just as they would about children or finances.

But first, she added, it’s important to understand why you desire a certain level of privacy or transparency.

It’s unfair to project insecurities or baggage from prior betrayals onto an innocent partner and go searching for faults, Young said. Innocuous material can easily be misinterpreted and hyper-vigilance can be controlling and push someone away.

Read article@ chicagotribune

On January 23, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that law enforcement authorities do not generally have a right to affix a GPS tracking device to a suspect’s car without first obtaining a valid warrant. This case, United States v. Jones, is being referred to as one of the most important Fourth Amendment tests in a decade. However, the court’s decision only begins to address how the privacy rights of citizens will be protected in our technological world.

There are many more ways today to perform surveillance without physically trespassing on private property, a point recognized by Justice Samuel Alito in a concurrence joined by three other justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in another concurring opinion, “the Fourth Amendment is not concerned only with trespassory intrusions on property.”

Justice Alito said the court should address how expectations of privacy affect whether warrants are required for remote surveillance using electronic methods that do not require the police to install equipment, such as GPS tracking of mobile telephones.

In his opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: 

“It is important to be clear about what occurred in this case: The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”

Let’s consider our mobile phones. Mobile phone service providers log the list of cell sites to which our cell phones connect throughout the day. Mobile apps gather data on the usage patterns of our wireless devices and often track device location to the accuracy of a specific residence or office building, undermining the oft-cited claim that the data gathered is not “personal.” Much of this data is collected and then sold with our consent, in accordance with privacy policies that few of us read before accepting, to a complex ecosystem of mobile application providers and advertisers.

When we walk into a store, restaurant, office building, or sit in a taxi, images of us are recorded and date-stamped.

In the past, it would have been impractical to archive all of this information, but this is no longer the case. Retail hard drive costs are over one million times cheaper today than they were two decades ago. About $50 worth of storage can hold the information identifying the location of each of one million people to 4.5-meter accuracy at five-minute intervals, 24 hours a day for a full year.

What about data collected from video surveillance cameras or license plate cameras? It is becoming less expensive to archive data from video surveillance cameras. License plate cameras record our automobile trips. In addition, I wrote a story yesterday about the new “intellistreets” street lamps soon to be installed on Chicago streets and other cities. These “street lamps” can monitor conversations and take pictures among many other capabilities.

The days when being tracked is the exception rather than the rule are coming to an end. Inevitably, we are building an infrastructure that enables location surveillance decisions to be made retroactively, reducing the need to determine in advance who should be surveilled.

In the future, the issue of before-the-fact location-tracking warrants will be largely irrelevant. All of the necessary data will be collected automatically. The important privacy questions will instead concern the protections that apply to that data: Who can see it and under what circumstances?

In our post-911 world, most would agree that the government needs the ability to access archived information about the movements of a person credibly believed to be planning, for example, a terrorist attack. But what about juveniles suspected of petty crimes? What types of location data should be available to parents engaged in a child custody battle? Or former business partners embroiled in a legal dispute?

The Supreme Court has not yet addressed these questions but inevitably it will. The answers/decisions, far more than the ruling in United States v. Jones, will help define the meaning of privacy in 21st-century America.

Source: yimg

New street lights called “Intellistreets” are coming to Chicago. These are not your average street lights. These lights also double as surveillance monitors. They can play music, direct traffic, monitor conversations, take pictures, and send emergency signals. The lights include “Homeland Security” applications and are being installed in a few cities, including Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit, with the aid of government funding. The first concept installation of the system was launched in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Some say these lights should be called, “Spying Street Lights.”

The system detects movement and can identify whether the movement is a car, person or animal. If too much movement is detected, the police are notified.

As you can imagine, some view this as an invasion of privacy, “creepy” and the feeling that Big Brother is watching. Others see the system as a way to keep their neighborhoods safer. One example is that some believe such a system could have prevented a deadly shooting that took place in the Uptown area of Charlotte, NC, last May. The shooting is believed to have been gang related.

The Deputy of Charlotte, North Carolina Homeland Security chief was quoted as saying, “If the City installed street lights with surveillance abilities…you would never know.”

The founder of the system, Ron Harwood, said he came up with the idea after 911 and Hurricane Katrina. He is the president of the company that manufactures these lights – Illuminating Concepts. In an interview with Fox News, Harwood said that if speakers are installed in the poles, authorities could speak to people to tell them what to do if there is an emergency. He also said that access to pictures/images would not be available to just anyone. He said that a police officer, city official or city employee would have to “ask” to retrieve an image from a pole and that image would be in the form of a “picture.” It was after Harwood’s development that he began discussions with Homeland Security.

It seems to me that law enforcement or investigators would need more than a picture if they were trying to analyze a crime – who did what and when, etc. It would seem you would need active surveillance to determine what took place during a crime. When people don’t feel they are being told everything, they aren’t going to trust the system. If the system is capable of surveillance and monitoring conversations, why would one believe that only a picture would be released to authorities?

Using street lights as surveillance tools has already been advanced by several European countries. In 2007, leaked documents out of the UK Home Office revealed that British authorities were working on proposals to fit lamp posts with CCTV cameras that would X-ray scan passers-by and “undress them” in order to “trap terror suspects.”

Dutch police also announced last year that they are developing a mobile scanner that will “see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons.”

So-called ‘talking surveillance cameras’ that use a speaker system similar to the Intellistreets model are already being used in UK cities like Middlesborough to bark orders and reprimand people for dropping litter and other minor offenses.

According to reports, one of the most common phrases used to shame people into obeying instructions is to broadcast the message, “We are watching you.”

At $3,000 a piece, Intellistreets luminaries have the potential of lowering energy costs by adjusting brightness to match the appropriate atmosphere and location. Additionally, the company says it has an endless number of entertainment options and can serve as a public address system of sorts and offer advertisements up to passersby. That’s right — it records video, counts heads and spews propaganda! When you put it that way, it’s no wonder that Harwood is in cahoots with Homeland Security.

The transformation of street lights into surveillance tools for Homeland Security purposes will only serve to heighten concerns that the United States is fast on the way to becoming a high-tech police state, with TSA agents being empowered to oversee that control grid, most recently with the announcement that TSA screeners would be manning highway checkpoints, a further indication that security measures we currently see in airports are rapidly spilling out onto the streets.

According to the Illuminating Concepts Website, the Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing for “security, energy management, data harvesting, and digital media.”

After the first installments took place in Michigan, a backlash began to hit Intellistreets and the company removed a YouTube video that offered an eerie insight into the surveillance capabilities. The video was also quick to once again note the Homeland Security features which have the potential to link up to government agencies. Infowars responded by asking, “If Intellistreets is such a cutting-edge concept that presents an array of wonderful benefits, as the promo video claims, then why remove it from You Tube?”  “Now that the company has tried to hide the video, it will only generate more suspicion about the true purpose behind Intellistreets and the level of involvement on behalf of Homeland Security,” read a blog post on the site.

Sources: Fox News, nowtheendbegins.com, forbiddenknowledgetv.com, rt.com, infowars.com