This past Saturday thousands of protesters rallied in Washington in front of the Capitol Reflecting Pool to voice their displeasure with the mass surveillance programs orchestrated by the NSA. The main goal of the rally was to push Congress to reform “…Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;” (source)
October 26th marked the 12-year anniversary that the Patriot Act was signed. The rally was organized by StopWatching.us, a group of over 100 organizations and companies that are pushing U.S Congress for increased accountability and reform. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Libertarian Party are some of the organizations that are a part of the coalition.
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For more information about the rally, you can visit the Stop Watching Us website here.
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Encrypted e-mail service Lavabit, which closed down over 2 months ago, is reopening its services temporarily until Thursday. The founder of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, is giving his customers 72 hours to access their accounts before it shuts down permanently. Levison was able to acquire a new SSL key to ensure data going to and from the site remains encrypted.
In a statement on Rally.org, Levison writes, “To begin this process, the user will first be allowed to change their password during a 72 hour period, beginning tonight at 7:00 PM Central. This step was created due to recent events in the news that have lead people to believe that their account information may have been compromised. If users are indeed concerned that their account information has been compromised, this will allow them to change their account password on a website with a newly secured SSL key. Following the 72 hour period, Thursday, October 17th, the website will then allow users to access email archives and their personal account data so that it may be preserved by the user.”
Lavabit was used by Edward Snowden to leak the NSA scandal and was coerced by the US government to terminate its operations back in August.
via Guardian
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Snapchat, the popular photo-sharing app among teens has revealed on their blog that they’re capable of accessing unopened Snaps and sending them to the US government.
“… if we receive a search warrant from law enforcement for the contents of Snaps and those Snaps are still on our servers, a federal law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) obliges us to produce the Snaps to the requesting law enforcement agency”, writes on their blog.
Approximately a dozen unopened Snaps have been sent to the government since May 2013. According to the company, only 2 people have access to the tool for retrieving unopened Snaps – Bobby Murphy (Co-founder and CTO) and Micah Schaffer (Director of Operations).
via Guardian
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Zimbabwe is launching a spy program where they’ll be storing emails, text messages, and phone calls in a national database. The data will be stored for up to five years and will used ‘on demand’ by state security agencies in order to prevent crime.
According to ICT expert Robert Ndlovu, police and judicial officials will have to issue a warrant in order to access the data. All SIM cards now need to be ‘registered’ with the government; those with unregistered SIM cards have 30 days to register without being charged with an offence.
via HumanIPO and AllAfrica
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