The Facts In April, the Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules proposed amendments to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that would give authorities “more leeway to secretly hack into the suspected criminal’s computer,” so The Hacker News in a recent report. According to the draft minutes of the Criminal Rules Meeting, the subcommittee on Rule […]

On March 20, 2014, the German Bundestag, the country’s federal parliament, formed a parliamentary investigative commission to probe the surveillance activities of the 5-eyes states, in particular of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), that targeted and involved Germany. The inquiry panel has taken up work, as the German Attorney General has […]

Today, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) recounted the happenings around the Heartbleed Bug, a pervasively occurring vulnerability of the widespread OpenSSL cryptographic software that was revealed by Google and a Finnish security firm on Monday. Along with the public notification, the information website heartbleed.com was established, explaining that “[t]he Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet […]

Following yesterday’s introduction and preparation on day 1 of the Cyber Dialogue 2014, the conference participants started day 2 in their assigned working groups, covering specific challenges to effective oversight mechanisms (group 1: “From Surveillance to Cyber War: What are the Limits and Impacts?”), or more general topics like viable governance models (group 5: “Power Shift? […]

The Issue Last week, London-based surveillance watchdog Privacy International raised awareness of governments’ and private spyware suppliers’ engagement in an unregulated market that supplies them with intelligence on security flaws of widely-used software. Such exclusive knowledge about generally unknown vulnerabilities is a crucial part of any cyber eavesdropping operation. It allows the operator to access […]