EU Wants to Read Your PRIVATE Messages – But Outrage STALLS Final Vote

June 24, 2024 | The EU council of ministers has failed to pass a very controversial new regulation known as Chat Control. It would require apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram to scan private messages before they are sent to the receiver in an attempt to combat the spread of unlawful content on these apps. The proposal by Swedish commissioner Ylva Johansson would allow all pictures and videos sent on these apps to be scanned and it would put an end to fully private and encrypted communication in the EU. In the council, the vote failed (but barely) due to the resistance of Germany and some other member states that argue that this is a huge and non-proportional violation of the basic right to privacy in the European Union.

'Digital Strip-search' UK Muslim Activist Faces Charges for Not Giving Up Passwords at Airport

Imagine arriving in the UK, going through airport security and then being ordered to hand over your phone and laptop with all passwords - for examination. A British Muslim activist was arrested after he refused to do it.

'I Used to Think US Best Country for Privacy & Freedom' - Lavabit Founder

His business suffered in the wake of the NSA leaks scandal because the service he provided was used by the person now most wanted in the US - Edward Snowden. SophieCo is talking to Ladar Levison, founder and owner of encrypted email service Lavabit.com, who says all he cares for is the privacy and the trust of his clients.

US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet

THE GUARDIAN: • NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'

US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves. » | James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald | Thursday, September 05, 2013

Avoiding Big Bro: Prying Eyes Make Privacy a Thing of the Past

Snowden's become a wanted man after showing the world just how much US security services watch people all over the world. The NSA's stranglehold on digital data communications makes privacy seem like a thing of the past. RT's Marina Portnaya tried to see if she could avoid Big Brother, while going about her daily business in New York.

Global Surveillance: The Public Must Fight for Its Right to Privacy
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: The British-American surveillance program Tempora marks a historic turning point. Unnoticed by the public, intelligence agencies have pursued total surveillance. Governments have deliberately concealed from the public the extent to which we are being watched.

The term, "information superhighway" has always been insufficient to describe the Internet. In reality, the Web is a global communication space containing the private information of a large part of the population of every developed country. If someone were able to train an all-seeing eye onto the Internet, the blackmail potential would be almost limitless.

It is precisely this all-seeing eye that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have developed under the name Tempora. An appropriate real-world metaphor for the program might be something like this: In every room of every house and every apartment, cameras and microphones are installed, every letter is opened and copied, every telephone tapped. Everything that happens is recorded and can be accessed as needed. » | A Commentary by Christian Stöcker | Monday, June 24, 2013