Registered Traveler Company Frozen After Losing Flier Data
Ryan Singel | Wired.com The Transportation Security Administration suspended Verified Identity Pass from enrolling any new passengers in its get-through-security-faster program on Tuesday, after the company lost (and then oddly found) a unencrypted laptop containing personal information of 33,000 people who had applied for the so-called Registered Traveler program. The company learned of the loss of an unencrypted laptop from [...]
Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier — Congress Reacts
Kevin Poulsen | Wired.com A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003. “What I thought was alarming is [...]
Navy Research Paper: ‘Disrupt Economies’ with Man-Made ‘Floods,’ ‘Droughts’
Noah Shachtman | wired.com A recently-unearthed U.S. Navy research project calls for creating mad-made floods and droughts to “disrupt [the] economy” of an enemy state. “Weather modification was used successfully in Viet Nam to (among other things) hinder and impede the movement of personnel and material from North Viet Nam to South Viet Nam,” notes [...]
Point, Click … Eavesdrop: How the FBI Wiretap Net Operates
By Ryan Singel 08.29.07 | 2:00 AM The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI [...]
