Quote of the Day

"Anybody can be a spy now."
– Todd Myers, President, Computer Sights

As a private investigator, Jim Bender has tracked everything from straying spouses to strung-out trust-fund babies - sometimes following them for days at a time.

But thanks to an innovative GPS device the size of a matchbox, he can now stake out a cheating husband without leaving his Fort Lauderdale office. Or, as he has done the last few weeks, help a major company figure out who is draining the diesel fuel from its big rigs.

Technological advances have revolutionized the surveillance business, making devices smaller, cheaper and more effective than ever. And not just for professional snoops like Bender, but for everyday people. (more)

FutureWatch - Video Vigilantes

New Zealand - A Christchurch cul-de-sac has thwarted its boy-racer problem with secret video surveillance.

Business owners and the only resident of Dalziel Place in Woolston were fed up with weekly crowds of boy racers converging on their street, doing burnouts, defacing properties and throwing bottles.

Cameras set up by a surveillance company that has its headquarters on the street captured footage of six cars and their drivers breaking the law.

The footage was passed on to police and all six drivers last week had their cars impounded for 28 days. (more)

Corporate Spies Killing The CIA

The CIA is having a growing problem with their analysts and spies being recruited away by corporations. One unpleasant, for government intelligence agencies, development of the last few decades has been the growing popularity of "competitive intelligence" (corporate espionage.) It's a really big business, with most large (over a billion dollars of annual sales) corporations having separate intelligence operations. Spending on corporate intel work is over $5 billion a year, and is expected to more than double in the next four years.

The corporate recruiters have a pretty easy time of it, as they can offer higher pay, better working conditions and bonuses. (more)

Eavesdropping Movie - "Monte Rouge"

Title: Monte Rouge
Writer/Director: Eduardo del Llano
Time: 15 minutes
Plot: Electronic eavesdropping.
Setting: Cuba.
Humor: Dark, subtle; like Monte Rouge.

"...two plain-clothed security agents knock at the door of a young man, Nicanor O'Donell.

"Good morning, my name is Rodríguez. This is comrade Segura," they tell him. "We're here to install the microphones."

"Our mission is to install microphones in your home to listen directly to the anti-governmental comments you make," the SDE (state security) agent says.

Nicanor can't believe. To him it is a bad dream or a bad joke.

The agents explain that they run a pilot scheme to make their work "more inclusive." No longer will the SDE break in to the houses of suspects to place microphones, they will just knock on the door and ask the house owner to let them install them. All in the name of "more openness."

In exchange they ask that Nicanor accepts the "obvious limitations" of having only two microphones placed in the house (one in the bathroom). And, to ensure that all subversive conversations are held in that place, offering to install a free mini-bar in the bathroom to get guests to go there for these conversations.

In a mild mannered conversation (with some dark undertones), they explain they know all about him: his black market dealings (exchanging a table from a museum with a guard of the museum for a VCR), the conversations he has had with friends in bars, ... The say he was selected for this test program because of his "excellent analysis" that goes beyond "more bitching" (and the fact that he lived close to the station while they had no access to a car).

They also ensure him that the devices are independent of the electricity grid (Cuba is known for its blackouts) as it "hardly would make sense to make eavesdropping dependent of the electricity." The young man is also warned that it is known to them that he also makes some positive comments about Cuba, but that he is to refrain from that "crap" as doesn't interest them and is a waste of their time.

The author stresses that he did not mean to indict Cuba's state security system, he just wanted to create and describe an present absurd Kafkaesque situation. He succeeded.

In Cuba and abroad there is a lot of speculation that del Llano and the other participants in Monte Rouge, could face reprisals for the irreverent clip. Let's hope that the popularity of the clip will protect them."
(en español: video Part 1 video Part 2)

Answer: "Mission Creep"

Question: What happens when tiny towns are given big £'s to watch for terrorists who never come?

UK - Campaigners have called for a "root and branch review" of spy laws after it emerged local councils were using them to track dog-foulers and litter bugs.

The Press Association contacted 97 councils to find out how they were using the powers, originally designed to combat crime and terrorism. It followed the controversy surrounding the case of a family in Poole, Dorset, who were tracked covertly for nearly three weeks to check they lived in a school catchment area...

...the research found the law was also used to find out about people who let their dog foul, a breach of planning law, an animal welfare case and an instance of littering.

Surveillance was also used to investigate alleged misuse of a disabled parking badge. (more)
Once surveillance is part of the civil infrastructure justifying usage moves from difficult to easy.

Baby's First SpyCam

(source)

Anticipated Mission Creep Arrives

UK - Anti-terrorism surveillance is being used to spy on kids

Councils are using anti-terrorism surveillance laws to spy on children trying to buy alcohol, it has emerged. One authority alone has run 70 snooping operations, including tracking youngsters and covertly filming people selling counterfeit DVDs. It also admitted using the laws to obtain phone records and e-mails of those suspected of what it described as 'petty' offences. (more)

FutureWatch - Cell Phone Crackdowns

Austria - Taking a cue from France's national railway, which offers phone-free «zen zones» on high-speed trains, Austria's second-largest city this week began ordering public transit commuters to keep their phones on silent mode.

The crackdown in the southern city of Graz has triggered a loud debate between advocates of free speech and people who say they're simply fed up with having to listen to annoying ring tones and intrusive cell phone chatter while riding a public bus or tram. (more) (etiquette) (how other are dispensing justice) (Divine justice)

Extra Credit...
''No matter the excitement in the industry he had created, Bell forever refused to have a telephone in his study. He resented its persistent jangle.'' - from ''Once Upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History'' (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994) by Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey

FutureWatch - Eavesdropping on GSM Cell Phones

A web service that will make it easy and inexpensive to crack the GSM A5/1 encryption protocol, quickly enough for a call that is still in progress, is slated to launch at the end of April. Living right at the intersection of open hardware, open source software, software as a service, and cryptography, the service will reduce the cost and effort of cracking GSM call encryption by at least an order of magnitude.

The service is being developed by members of the GSM Software Project and demonstrates just how much things have changed in the world since the GSM system was designed. Various approaches to cracking both A5/1 (the European standard) and A5/2 (the weaker US standard) have been available for some time but this one is unique in that it should be available to researchers and hackers at the end of April in hosted api form instead of pdf.

Back in 1997, this overview of the GSM system declared that "Enciphering is an option for the fairly paranoid, since the signal is already coded, interleaved, and transmitted in a TDMA manner, thus providing protection from all but the most persistent and dedicated eavesdroppers." After all, such a radio encoding scheme made the signals invisible to typical radio band scanners.

Today, however, the availability of the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), an open hardware software defined radio that sells for about $700, combined with work being done at GNU Radio project to codify the GSM waveform (also targeted for the end of this month), makes this once reasonable point of view seem quaint. Good encryption is now a must and it appears that A5 no longer qualifies. (more)

CNN Report - Chinese spies in the US

"...and she went to the hospital to have it removed! Blahaaaaaa..."

Australia - Attorney-General Robert McClelland says the proposal to let some employers access workers' emails without consent is only being considered as a way to stop cyber terrorist attacks.

He says it would not be targeted at personal communications.

"What you would be looking and permitting access to is information that would reveal an attempted infiltration," he said.

But deputy Opposition leader Julie Bishop says...
"Employers should not be burdened with the responsibility of intercepting emails involving staff suspected of behaviour that threatens Australia's national security."

"This places an unfair surveillance responsibility upon employers and effectively requires them to undertake what is a potential criminal investigation." (more)

Seriously bad idea...
- Pay IT guy to do a government intelligence agents' work?
- Pay twice!?!? Salary for IT guy and (via taxes) government intelligence agents'.
- Conflict of interest? Employees spying on friends and colleagues?
- Entrust national security to an army of untrained private employees...
- ...whose work product might equal less than educated guesswork?
- ...who may be tempted to use the snoop power for personal gain?
- Not to mention: loss of regular business productivity, opening new avenues of corporate espionage, data vulnerabilities, etc.
Outsourcing your job responsibilities should not be an option; especially when you have been entrusted with national security.

Surveillance Desensitization Continues

Hal Niedzviecki writes...
I ask (Ursula) Lebana how things have changed since she opened Canada’s first spy store back in 1991.

“People who came into the store at that time were quite shocked,” she tells me. “They never realized cameras were that small. They said, ‘Oh my God, that’s scary. And isn’t it terrible to monitor the nanny? Where’s the trust?’”

Sixteen years later, business is booming. “Now people say, ‘Oh, I want a hidden camera,’” says Lebana, who has since opened SpyTech locations in Ottawa and London, Ontario. “They are more willing to use them now. They’re more familiar with it. I’m even getting repeat customers... (more)

India Wants to Eavesdrop on BlackBerrys

BlackBerry users, beware of the snoops. India's Telecommunications Dept. told telecom carriers, Internet service providers, and officials at Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that makes BlackBerrys, that it wants to eavesdrop on transmissions from every BlackBerry phone in the country. To comply, RIM might have to route calls and e-mails through government computer servers based in India. (more)
FutureWatch... Look for other countries to jump on this bandwagon.

Hot Boardroom Topic - Counterespionage

Security is becoming a board-level issue as the number of cyber-attacks and corporate espionage incidents are growing significantly each year...

Few people would dispute the mystique that surrounds the boardroom. This allure has been around for some time, but it was recently heightened by the popular TV series "The Apprentice" with business icon Donald Trump. Boards of directors deal with sensitive issues and handle privileged information, and board meetings themselves call to mind strategy discussion, stock discussions and major contracts.

Taking advantaged of privileged information is illegal. As you can imagine, access to privileged financial and stock information could easily be used for insider trading. The sensitive information and financial data must be controlled in order to comply with Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements.

What you may not think of are the discussions around information security, which has become a board-level issue. Cyber-attacks and corporate espionage are growing significantly year-over-year. In a training program developed by Spy-Ops, the company notes that corporate espionage worldwide is now more than a trillion-dollar problem annually and growing. Data breaches, theft of intellectual property, insider trading and other criminal acts now demand the attention of the board of directors.

"Enterprise risk management discussions and strategies have moved into the executive suites and boardrooms. This is due primarily to the significant implications associated with security breaches," said Paula Cordaro of Spy-Ops. (more)

Price Drop!!! GSM Bugs now on sale - $35.00

Alert - The hottest new bugging devices are now among the least expensive. GSM SIM bugs are like cell phones, but without the keypad. Eavesdroppers call and listen from anywhere in the world.

At one time these devices sold for $250.-$500. The price has plummeted to $35.-$55. Why? The same reason their sister product (the cell phone) is often a give-away item... Economy of scale; thus proving consumer demand is fueling mass production.

Corporate Concern...
At these prices, "salting" offices with bugs becomes practical. Imagine... Buy in bulk and get custom silk screening - "Air Quality Monitor - Do Not Disturb." Even if accidentally seen, it might be accepted - "Every office has one of these."

Corporate Solution...
Periodic Eavesdropping Detection Audits are now an integral part of corporate security. Not having an eavesdropping detection program is negligence.

from a seller's web site...
"The GSM SIM Bugs are advanced audio surveillance devices. The SIM spy ear comes with compact design and embedded microphone system. This audio surveillance listening system no need software and no configuration required. Very easy to use. The only one thing you need to do is insert a pre-paid GSM SIM card into SIM card slot of the spy sim bug. Then you could hide it in an inconspicuous location and starts excellent listening surveillance." (more)

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Trinidad & Tobago - Sweeping legislative changes, including a proposal to regulate the practice of wiretapping in the entire region, are among a series of recommendations agreed to by Caricom Heads of States, Bharrat Jagdeo, the Guyanese president, revealed yesterday.

Speaking to reporters outside of the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Trinidad where a special security meeting of the Caricom Heads of Government was concluded. Jagdeo disclosed that he had personal knowledge that wiretapping is done throughout the region and revealed that it was agreed by heads of government that the practice should be regulated by legislation.

“People wiretap now,” he said, “but they can’t use it for evidence because it’s done illegally.” (more)

Bet you never heard of CARICOM.
Guess how many countries we are talking about here...
Full Members
Antigua and Barbuda
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Dominica
Grenada
Guyana
Haiti
Jamaica
Montserrat
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Suriname
Trinidad and Tobago
Associate Members
Anguilla
Bermuda
British Virgin Islands
Cayman Islands
Turks and Caicos Islands
Observers
Aruba
Colombia
Dominican Republic
Mexico
Netherlands Antilles
Puerto Rico (U.S.)
Venezuela

That's a lot of wiretappers who will soon be able to present their evidence in court!
It may also change some old saws...
"Sunny places attract shady characters."
may now become...
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

Spy Buster Locates Sophisticated Wireless Eavesdropping Devices

According to the Freedonia Group, a market research group in Cleveland, Ohio, companies spend over $95 billion annually on corporate security.


One of the fastest growing areas for this spending is corporate espionage prevention.

Factors in this growth include everything from globalization to decreased employee loyalty and the fact that the most valuable asset of a corporation these days is information, which can be easier to steal than a piece of machinery.

So what’s a worried executive or security professional to do?
Increasingly, companies and government agencies are turning to firms that specialize in detecting and removing eavesdropping and other surveillance devices... (more)

Track My Treads - The TPMS Privacy Blowout

via hexview.com
New technologies always come with privacy issues.
Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) is one of those technologies.

What is TPMS?
TPMS lets on-board vehicle computers measure air pressure in the tires.

How does TPMS work?
In a typical TPMS, each wheel of the vehicle contains a device (TPMS sensor) - usually attached to the inflation valve - that measures air pressure and, optionally, temperature, vehicle state (moving or not), and the health of the sensor's battery. Each sensor transmits this information (either periodically or upon request) to the on-board computer in the vehicle. To differentiate between its own wheels and wheels of the vehicle in the next lane, each TPMS sensor contains a unique id.

TPMS transmits data that uniquely identifies your car!
Here is where privacy problems become obvious: Each wheel of the vehicle transmits a unique ID, easily readable using off-the-shelf receiver. Although the transmitter’s power is very low, the signal is still readable from a fair distance using a good directional antenna.

Why is this a problem?
If you live in the United States, chances are, you have heard about the “traffic-improving” ideas where transportation authorities looked for the possibility to track all vehicles in nearly real time in order to issue speeding tickets or impose mileage-adjusted taxes... Guess what? With minor limitations, TPMS can be used for the very purpose of tracking your vehicle in real time with no substantial investments! TPMS can also be used to measure the speed of your vehicle... (remember) car manufacturers know serial numbers of every part in your vehicle, including unique IDs of TPMS sensors.
("Your ticket is in the mail.")

Now, no article is complete unless it mentions terrorists...
It is now super easy to blow up someone's car. There's no need to fix the explosive to the vehicle. No more wires and buttons. No human factor. A high-school kid with passion for electronics can assemble a device that will trigger the detonator when the right vehicle passes by. (more)

The Case of the Telepathic Ray Gun, or...

..."Does that ringing in my ears bother you?"
via Discovery.com
I know some of you may not want to believe this, but the U.S. government may well already have the ability to beam secret commands to you through the fillings in your teeth. Well, not exactly. But close. A recently declassified 1998 U.S. Army report, “Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons,” describes government plans for a microwave weapon that would transmit voice communication that seems to emanate from within a human target’s own brain. (It was obtained and posted on the Web by Freedom From Covert Harassment & Surveillance, a Cincinnati-based organization that advocates on behalf of people who believe they are being stalked and subjected to “electromagnetic harassment.”)

To quote the report:
Because the frequency of the sound heard is dependent upon the pulse characteristics of the RF energy, it seems possible that this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person’s head.

This is possible because of something called the Microwave Auditory Effect, which was first discovered during World War II, when people working in the vicinity of radar transponders complained of hearing strange clicking noises that other people nearby didn’t notice. The effect is caused by thermal expansion of the region around the cochlea. In the 1960s, neuroscientist Allan H. Frey, who was the first to publish research on the effect, was able to induce it in human subjects with pulsed microwaves from a transmitter 100 meters away.

It’s unclear just how far the government’s microwave auditory research and development efforts have progressed since 1993, when the report was written... (more)

How To Make Your Phone Untappable

In 1991, Philip Zimmermann developed a humble-sounding electronic encryption technology known as Pretty Good Privacy. In fact, it was very good--so good that not even the federal government has been able to crack it, a fact that has made Zimmermann a folk hero to privacy advocates and a headache to law enforcement.

Now Zimmermann, the CEO of PGP Corp., has found himself back in the fiery debate between federal investigators and those who oppose their snooping--this time thanks to ZRTP, a technology for encrypting Internet telephone calls. ZRTP throws a wrench in the Bush administration's controversial warrant-free wiretapping program and its proposed legal immunity for the telecommunications companies. So far, not even teams of supercomputers and cyberspies at the National Security Agency have cracked ZRTP. That means anyone who uses Zimmermann's Zfone software, a ZRTP-enabled voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) program available for free on his Web site, can skirt the feds' wiretapping altogether.

Forbes.com spoke with Zimmermann about how his small company has been able to produce an encryption product that not even the U.S. government can break, what ZRTP means for national security, and why cutting off the government's access to our phones is necessary to keep out the truly malicious spies. (more)

Free advice.
Free software.
An end to wiretapping woes.
Come on. What more do you want from me?
The least you could do is send me some M&M's. :)
~Kevin

On the Road to Thought Eavesdropping

"All right, who said, 'They're higher than a kite'?!?"

from switched.com...
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will award contracts to design and build an unmanned spy plane they've dreamed up that will stay aloft for for an amazing five years. The pseudo satellite will circle the globe for years at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet, gathering photos, communications, and generally watching everything you do. (more)

Bugs - The Ultimate Bugs

The agency that the Pentagon set up to turn outlandish sci-fi concepts into reality has come closer to creating an army -- or air force -- of cybugs: cyber-moths and beetles that can spy on the enemy.

Inspired by Thomas Easton's 1990 novel, Sparrowhawk, in which animals enlarged by genetic engineering were fitted with implanted control systems, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) set out to insert microsystems into living insects as they undergo metamorphosis.

The plan is that their organs will grow around the chips and wires that make up the remote-control devices. (more)

...and who complained about the raincoat brigade!

Filming people secretly and without permission will be subject to big fines and prison sentences under new laws being introduced in the South Australian Parliament.

The Attorney-General, Michael Atkinson, wants to crack down on modern-day peeping toms using mobile phones to capture images of people without permission.

"We're also concerned with indecent filming, filming people going to the lavatory, filming people engaged in private acts, namely sexual acts, that occur only in private," he said.

"The Rann Government is keen to protect peoples' privacy from modern-day peeping toms, the raincoat brigade and some of the more extreme elements of the paparazzi. (more)

FutureWatch - Brain Eavesdropping Progresses

Mind-reading with a brain scan
Scientists have developed a way of ‘decoding’ someone’s brain activity to determine what they are looking at.

“The problem is analogous to the classic ‘pick a card, any card’ magic trick,” says Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley, who led the study. But while a magician uses a ploy to pretend to ‘read the mind’ of the subject staring at a card, now researchers can do it for real using brain-scanning instruments. “When the deck of cards, or photographs, has about 120 images, we can do better than 90% correct,” says Gallant. (more)

In-house NSA

A rapid way to spot insider threats from individuals within an organization such as a multinational company or military installation is reported in the current issue of the International Journal of Security and Networks. The technology uses data mining techniques to scour email and build up a picture of social network interactions. The technology could prevent serious security breaches, sabotage, and even terrorist activity.

Gilbert Peterson and colleagues at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson AFB, in Ohio are developing technology that could help any organization sniff out insider threats by analyzing email activity or find individuals among potentially tens of thousands of employees with latent interests in sensitive topics. The same technology might also be used to spot individuals who feel alienated within the organization as well as unraveling any worrying changes in their social network interactions. (more)

Alert - The Wikileaks.org ruling affects you, too.

Quick review...
(from Jan. 9, 2008)
"WikiLeaks.org is developing an uncensorable version of WikiPedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis."

Every coin has it light side and dark side.
The flip side of this coin is extortionography.

"What is Extortionography?"
Using audio / video / photographic or other evidence for personal or monetary gain, or to force a desired result or outcome.

"Do [insert demand here] or I will send [insert audio, video or other info-leak here] to WikiLeaks!"
------------------------
First blowback...
(from Feb. 20, 2008)
Recent days have brought two federal court decisions with disputed First Amendment legitimacy.

In San Francisco, District Judge Jeffrey White acceded to a request by a Cayman Islands bank to shut access to the Web site Wikileaks.org, which "invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging 'unethical behavior' by corporations and governments," as the New York Times reports.

In this case, the bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust, accused "a disgruntled ex-employee" of giving stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of banking laws and a confidentiality agreement. (more)
------------------------
This weeki...
Free speech advocates immediately hailed as a victory the decision on Friday of a federal judge to withdraw a prior order turning off the Web address of the site Wikileaks.org ...

“Maybe that’s just the reality of the world that we live in,” Judge White said. “When this genie gets out of the bottle, that’s it.” (more)
------------------------
"What does this mean to me?," you ask yourself.
- The court has given extortionography the green light for now.
- Don't assume your business information is protected from leakers.
- Reassess your information security procedures, today.
- The most damning leaks are always the audio and visual leaks.
- Conduct eavesdropping and spycam detection audits frequently.
Need help? Call us.

TSCM Technology - Keeping Pace

The tools of the trade change fast in the world of TSCM.
Blink, and you're sweep business is history.
Here are three examples of the latest tools...

Recently
Too many digital radio signals. Some of them flash on/off, quickly. Some frequency hop, quickly. Some hide within other signals. This year, a new instrument came out of the R&D labs called RSA6114A . It never blinks. It catches it all.

NOW
Too many digital radio signals. How can one identify them all? This week, a new instrument came out of the R&D labs called H600 RFhawk Signal Hunter. It knows all. It tells all... at a reasonable price.


The Future
Having Superman x-ray vision would be a big help in finding eavesdropping devices. A new instrument is in the R&D labs called LEXID. Handheld x-ray vision. Just point, and see!

TSCM challenges do not become easier with time. You can, however, count on us to keep pace and slightly ahead.

Global Info Survey - CIO's Get Smart

A growing number of organizations recognize information security can provide more than just protection of corporate assets, with the delivery of IT and operational efficiencies and improving overall business performance emerging as critical objectives. That is the word from Ernst & Young's 10th annual global information security survey. The survey canvassed nearly 1,300 senior executives in more than 50 countries. (more)

FutureWatch - New technology spells end for wiretapping

It's the stuff the best spy stories are made of, the broadsheets this week had a small story in their technology sections about the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) National Institute for Electronics and Encryption Research (UEKAE) having developed a completely original software package that allows mobile phones to be encrypted.

This makes it possible for mobiles to be safe enough to discuss national secrets without fear of interception. This type of protection is, officials at TÜBİTAK say, especially vital in the field of military communication when phone calls intercepted by foreign agencies could have potentially fatal consequences for soldiers in the field.

According to TÜBİTAK's February press statement, they have been wo