Edward Snowden: Smartphones can be hacked into with just one text message and then used to spy on th

[wildbilln864]

The world’s spying agencies have tools that allow them to take over smartphones with just a text message, according to Edward Snowden, and there is “very little” that their owners can do to stop it.

The UK’s intelligence agency has a suite of tools that let it listen on phones and their owners, Snowden told the BBC’s Panorama in Moscow. All spies would need to do is send a special text message and they will be able to gain access to the camera and its microphones, the BBC reported Snowden as saying.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/edward-snowden-smartphones-can-be-hacked-into-with-just-one-text-message-and-then-used-to-spy-on-a6680546.html

[arcane1]

1. Dammit, why are we just hearing about this now??

[Control-Z]

4. We heard about it during the

winter olympics.

[Egnever]

17. Because snowden just read the news

If you need him to read the news to you, I would say that is a problem.


http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-patches-stagefright-2-0-in-nexus-fixes-land-in-nightly-cyanogenmod-builds/

Revealed last Friday, Stagefright 2.0, like its predecessor, has left virtually every Android device in the wild exposed to a dangerous attack on the operating system's media player engine, which can be triggered after receiving a malicious MP3 or MP4 media file.

[ohnoyoudidnt]

24. Actually, this ability has been known about for almost a decade.

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him. ....

"functioned whether the phone was powered on or off."..... can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."

http://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/

[leveymg]

31. The tell-tale is excess unexplained battery usage.

It's like any other open ap. If you want privacy, take the battery out or leave it in another room.

[MrMickeysMom]

2. Yeah, apparently even when the iPhone is turned off...

Just when I get an iPhone, I'm more lethal than ever.

[bemildred]

3. No smartphone, no problem. nt

[kelliekat44]

5. Wonder what else Snowden is helping the Russians with? nt

[zalinda]

14. Just for the record

the United States stranded him in Russia. They voided his passport in midair, so when he landed in Russia, he couldn't leave. It was a political stunt to make him appear to be a spy. Those damn commies!

The Chinese and Russians know a hell of a lot more than our backwards politicians, and they didn't need Snowden to teach them. Our politicians seem to think we are still fighting the cold war.

Z

[pnwmom]

38. The US didn't force him to fly to Russia. nt

[zalinda]

39. Russia was not his final destination. n/t

[pnwmom]

40. And his proof of that is what? Buying an airplane ticket?

I think he was involved with Russia all along.

[wildbilln864]

41. based on what?

I think you just want to believe that based on nothing. And I have just as much evidence to base my assumption on as you do.

[villager]

29. Wonder what else our constitutional scholar is letting spy agencies do to us? nt

[postulater]

6. So what is the special text message.

I'll watch for it.

[cui bono]

10. Gimme your number and I'll send it to you.

[postulater]

11. 1-703-482-0623

Thanks.

[cui bono]

12. Hey! Don't post my work number!

I mean, um... er...

[Renew Deal]

13. .

[snooper2]

25. Calling Name for 7034820623 is Central Intelli , Verizon Virginia TN out of WSNGTNZN19

[BlueJazz]

7. It's really not that hard to do if you know a little about electrical..

..engineering and cell usage.

[Octafish]

8. Ray McGovern called the situation: ''J Edgar Hoover on Supercomputers''

Worse. The guys who got rid of Nixon -- and Frank Church -- have the latest gear.

J. Edgar Hoover With Supercomputers

by Ray McGovern
AntiWar.com, January 6, 2006

On Dec. 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Mike Hayden held a press conference in which they once again misled the American people.

Gonzales and Hayden answered questions about reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), which Hayden directed from 1999 to 2005, was eavesdropping on Americans via a special program in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The implications for privacy – and our system of checks and balances – are immense.

As long as he read from his prepared statement, Attorney General Gonzales did just fine with the press. He conceded that FISA requires a court order to authorize the surveillance the president ordered the NSA to undertake, and then hammered home the administration's "legal analysis:" the twin arguments that Congress' post-9/11 authorization of force and the president's power as commander in chief trump the legal constraints of FISA.

When the reporters' questions began, though, Gonzales faltered and twice spilled the beans. Asked why the administration decided to flout rather than amend FISA, choosing instead a "backdoor approach," Gonzales said:

"We have had discussions with Congress … as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."

So they went ahead and did it anyway.

SNIP...

[font color="green"]Another concern is that, among the groups of American citizens most likely to be sucked up by the NSA's vacuum cleaner – because of the nature of their work and their international calls/contacts – are members of Congress and journalists. A key question that raises its ugly head is this: If hundreds of calls and e-mails involving Americans are being intercepted each and every day, and juicy tidbits are learned about, say, prominent officials or other persons, there will be an almost irresistible temptation to make use of this information. Former FBI special agent Coleen Rowley, who for many years monitored court-authorized electronic surveillances and wiretaps relating to organized criminal and drug conspiracy groups, recently underscored how much one can learn about someone by listening in on his/her private communications. She reminds us that the blackmail potential is clear.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=8349

Hannah Arendt warned us where all this is going:



The goal of wholesale surveillance, [font color="green"]as (Hannah) Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” [/font color]And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

Chris Hedges, The Last Gasp of American Democracy

Secret Government Spying is so undemocratic, it's STASI. Remember when people on DU used to talk about it, wildbilln864?

[wildbilln864]

9. oh yes I remember....

now no one seems to care. At least not our "representatives". Who will step up?

[Octafish]

21. All this spying must be doing somebody some good. ''Good'' being a ''relative'' term.

Proof that Power, Money and Crushing Dissent Are NSA’s Real Motives for Spying

By Washington's Blog
Washington's Blog 24 October 2013

The NSA not only spied on the leaders of Germany, Brazil and Mexico, but on at least 35 world leaders.

The Guardian reports:

One unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately “tasked” for monitoring by the NSA.

SNIP...

And even the argument that 9/11 changed everything holds no water. Spying started before 9/11 … and various excuses have been used to spy on Americans over the years. Even NSA’s industrial espionage has been going on for many decades. And the NSA was already spying on American Senators more than 40 years ago.

Governments who spy on their own population always do it to crush dissent. (Why do you think that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing which King George did to the American colonists … which led to the Revolutionary War?)

Of course, if even half of what a NSA whistleblower Russel Tice says – that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top American government officials and military officers (and see this) – then things are really out of whack.

SOURCE with LINKS to details and sources:

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/proof-that-nsa-spying-is-not-really-focused-on-terrorism.html

[wildbilln864]

42. Spy on everyone...

Get the goods on enough members in powerful places and you essentially control their policy decisions.

[leveymg]

33. It isn't just the US Government that's listening (and blackmailing). Recall Bill telling Monica the

Israeli Embassy was listening in? That put the President right into the honey trap that Mossad had laid out for Clinton through Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp.

Yet, Bill went right ahead with his late-night calls to Monica, anyway. Talk about obsessive behaviors . . .

[Octafish]

35. UK spies on USA as a work-around.

What do they do with all that info?

Wall Street and War Inc. are where the really Big Bucks go to get made.

Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude. And these are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.

Note some interesting ties to the subject this on that General Walker fellah. The guy's almost forgotten these days, but was the rage in Dixie and of the rightwing nutjobs at the John Birch Society, founded by Fred Koch.

From 2005: Know your BFEE: War Profiteers

PS: Thanks or the kind reminder. Spot-on analysis of the whole freaking thing. I had wondered about certain odd, yet telling behaviors, such as falling in with the vile and infamous and planted. "Ah was investigating the MOSSAD and needed the pizza." "No one else was around and I didn't want some passer-by to take the bag." You know the drill.

[leveymg]

36. Privatiziation of services extends across the gov't from CIA to DOS to DOD. "War is a Racket"

That has never been more true now than it was when Gen. Butler said it about the US invasions of Panama and the Philippines.

Socialization of risk, privatization of profits. The Bushes and the Clintons are business partners in WarsRUs.

[sub.theory]

15. Will Snowden just disappear up his own butthole already?

No one with an IQ above room temperature ever assumed their telecommunications were unhackable. His constant shrieking "The sky is falling!!! Everyone pay attention to me!!!" routine was old years ago. Stop giving this raging narcissist the attention he so clearly craves.

[treestar]

32. +1

Every once in a while, he or Julian get bored and stir up some shit.

[Binkie The Clown]

16. One more reason to love my flip phone. n/t

[IDemo]

22. Seriously

For $3.99, I can call, email, message, shoot photos and avoid all the bs associated with so-called "smart" phones.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/tracfone-lg-440g-no-contract-mobile-phone-black/6775586.p?id=1218806579876&skuId=6775586

[Binkie The Clown]

23. Mine's more basic. No camera, no email, but...

I got mine at Radio Shack about 5 years ago. I pre-pay for minutes and a $25 refill lasts me 3 months, so my phone bill is $8.33 per month.

[TygrBright]

18. No smart phone. Text messaging disabled on my mobile phone account.

Sorry, Agent Mike.

We never quite got into the text messaging thing, especially at a buck-fifty a pop.

philosophically,
Bright

[nationalize the fed]

19. k/r

Here's the full half hour, at least until the BEEB takes it down. Well worth watching. Typical BBC quality, even though they try to make Eddie sweat.

BBC Panorama Edward Snowden Spies and the Law (HD) #Full interview# Published on Oct 6, 2015

[C Moon]

20. Boy would they be bored out their minds if they hacked my phone.

Dogs, the ocean, dog parks, dog beaches, vegetarian restaurants with my dog...

[OriginalGeek]

28. Dogs, beaches, food...

sounds like a fantastic way to spend the day. Or years.

[WestCoastLib]

26. Why would this be news to anybody?

Guess what? Your computer can be hacked too.

We carry around networked, personal computers in our pockets that are much more powerful than the home computers we had a quarter century ago.

Is anybody not aware of this?
Is anybody not aware that a computer can be hacked?

Oh no! your phone can be hacked? Better get rid of it! Oh no! your computer can be hacked? Better get rid of it!Oh no! people can see me on social media? Better get rid of it! The fear mongering is hilarious.

Embrace technology or reject it as you wish, but don't expect it to be something it's not. Your phone is as secure as your computer...because it is a computer.

[snooper2]

27. sure snowy LOL- prove it non-hacker dude

[LittleBlue]

30. This had better not be true

So fucked up.

[olddots]

34. I keep my Galaxy 5 xxt turbo wicked Smahht phone in my back pocket

When I fart let the hackers beware .

[zappaman]

37. And this is true cuz he says so?

Yeah, I know he's a real "expert" but I ain't buying it.

[wildbilln864]

43. good for you zap!

[Octafish]

44. Snowden has an elegant solution to Doctors Without Borders hospital issue.

C130 war planes have gun cameras and voice recorders. Get that flight's data and make it public. We'll see if it was a war crime or not with our own eyes and ears.

[Logical]

45. I bet it "malfunctioned" on that mission. nt

[wildbilln864]

46. excellent idea! thanks! n/t

[bluedigger]

47. They learned it from Belichick.

He posted about it on Snapface.