Related Issues: Privacy

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NSA Spying

The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001.

News reports in December 2005 first revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ phone calls and Internet communications. Those news reports, plus a USA Today story in May 2006 and the statements of several members of Congress, revealed that the NSA is also receiving wholesale copies of their telephone and other communications records. All of these surveillance activities are in violation of the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution.

The evidence also shows that the government did not act alone. EFF has obtained whistleblower evidence [PDF] from former AT&T technician Mark Klein showing that AT&T is cooperating with the illegal surveillance. The undisputed documents show that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers, and provides those copies to the NSA. This copying includes both domestic and international Internet activities of AT&T customers. As one expert observed, “this isn’t a wiretap, it’s a country-tap.”

EFF is fighting these illegal activities on multiple fronts. In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF filed the first case against a telecom for violating its customers' privacy. In addition, EFF is representing victims of the illegal surveillance program in Jewel v. NSA, a lawsuit filed in September 2008 against the government seeking to stop the warrantless wiretapping and hold the government officials behind the program accountable.

EFF is not alone in this fight. There are multiple cases challenging various parts of the illegal surveillance against both the telecoms and the government. This page collects information on EFF's cases as well as cases brought by individuals, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and of Illinois, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and others.

Deeplinks Posts

• December 22, 2010 Case Closed? Court Issues Final Judgment in NSA Spying Case, Al-Haramain v. Obama
• November 23, 2010 EFF Urges Supreme Court to Block Government Overreach in State Secret Contract Dispute
• October 18, 2010 In Jewel v. NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Appeal, Government Still Singing Same Old State Secrecy Tune

» All NSA Spying Posts

Litigation Documents

• Al Haramain v. Bush
  This case alleges targeting of the leaders of an Islamic charity and their lawyers by the admitted, targeted warrantless wiretapping by the NSA.
• NSA Spying - State Administrator Cases
  These six cases were brought by the federal government against various state administrators.
• Jewel v. NSA
  EFF's case against the NSA.
• Hepting v. AT&T
  EFF's class-action lawsuit against AT&T.
• Shubert v Bush
  A class action alleging wholesale dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans.
• CCR v Bush
  This case is brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of lawyers and others working with the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
• Verizon / MCI
  A complaint on behalf of customers against various Verizon and MCI entities.
• NSA Multi-District Litigation
  Documents relating to all cases.

Press Releases

• February 09, 2010 Appeals Court Backs EFF Push for Telecom Lobbying Documents Disclosure
• January 21, 2010 EFF Plans Appeal of Jewel v. NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Case
• November 12, 2009 EFF Obtains Records from Behind-the-Scenes Negotiations on Telecom Immunity

» All NSA Spying Press Releases

Other Resources

• Evidence One-Pager [PDF]
  Summarizing the technical evidence of AT&T's complicity.
• EFF NSA Graphics
• Archive of Documents Used by EFF to Lobby Against Telco Immunity in 2007, 2008
• American Civil Liberties Union's FISA Page[aclu.org]
• EPIC's FISA Archive[epic.org]
• Federation of America Scientists' FISA Page[fas.org]

Like Everything on Facebook with this JavaScript Bookmarklet

March 15th, 2011 | 1,434 views | 11 Comments » |

Do you want to like every post and comment that you see on Facebook all at once? Well, it’s your lucky day.

Drag the link below to your Bookmarks Bar, click it, and you will like all the posts and comments on the page you’re on.

I Like Everything

(drag this to your bookmarks bar!)

Why’d I do this? Some friends and I were playing around with Facebook’s new comment-on-enter feature and we got a large 70 comment thread going, then people began to like every comment in the thread, so the idea for this JavaScript bookmarklet was born. I whipped it up in 15 minutes.

Source Code:

If you are curious how this works, here is the source code:

var sad = document.getElementsByTagName('button');

var happy = [];

// Select only the Like buttons.

// Convert the sad NodeList to a happy Array.

for (var i = 0; i

if (sad[i] && (sad[i].title == 'Like this comment' || sad[i].title == 'Like this item')) {

happy.push(sad[i]);

}

}

function happyFn(happy) {

if (happy.length

return;

}

happy[0].click();

// Wait for each Like to be processed before trying the next.

// Facebook enforces this requirement.

window.setTimeout(function() {

happyFn(happy.splice(1));

}, 800);

}

happyFn(happy);

Bookmarklet Source:

And here is the source of the bookmarklet, perfect for copy-pasting into a convenient bookmark. Or just, drag this link to your bookmarks bar.

javascript:var s = document.getElementById('happyScript');

if (s) {

s.parentNode.removeChild(s);

}

s = document.createElement('script');

s.setAttribute('src', 'http://www.feross.org/hacks/like_everything/like_everything.js');

s.setAttribute('type', 'text/javascript');

s.setAttribute('id', 'someUniqueId');

document.body.appendChild(s);

Update:

I just updated the bookmarklet to show some UI about the progress of your “like bomb”, as well as a button to stop the liking if you suddenly have a change of heart.

You should share this with your friends:

11 Comments | Leave a comment » More posts about: Hacks

A great introduction video for the basis of what is GTD (getting things done) and how it can be used in your day to day life and business.

I have spoken to many clients lately about the GTD methodology and I think this is a great little tip of the iceberg quick intro.

At the Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin, Germany on Monday, researchers from the University of Regensburg delivered a new warning about the Tor anonymizer network, a system aimed at hiding details of a computer user’s online activity from spying eyes.

The attack doesn’t quite make a surfer’s activity an open book, but offers the ability for someone on the same local network—a Wi-Fi network provider, or an ISP working at law enforcement (or a regime’s) request, for example—to gain a potentially good idea of sites an anonymous surfer is viewing.

“Developers have to be aware of this kind of attack, and develop countermeasures,” said Dominik Herrmann, a Regensburg PhD student studying profiling and fingerprinting attacks. “But that proves to be very difficult.”

The research, performed by a variety of collaborators in Germany working on anonymity measures, represents a warning for privacy-conscious users wary of spying eyes, whether behind Net-unfriendly borders or simply corporate firewalls.

Tor is essentially an online mask, rather than a tool that hides the fact or content of communication itself. The project’s developers are addressing the problem of traffic analysis—essentially the threat that an attacker or observer might be able to tease out a person’s identity, location, profession, social network or other information about the message content by analyzing a message’s unencrypted headers.

To hide this information, the Tor system routes messages around a winding path of volunteer servers across the Net, with each relay point knowing only the address of the previous and next step in the pathway.

Once this circuit has been established, neither an eavesdropper nor a compromised relay will theoretically have the ability to determine both the source and destination of a given piece of communication. According to the Tor project’s latest metrics, the network has drawn between 100,000 and 300,000 users per day over the last several months.

Herrmann and his fellow researchers say there’s a partial flaw in this arrangement, however. A potential eavesdropper on the end user’s own network still has the ability to analyze the patterns of data being returned, and in many cases will be able to develop a reasonable guess about the source of the communication.

An attacker—perhaps an ISP instructed by law enforcement or a government to engage in such surveillance—would first have to develop a list of potential sites that the target might be visiting, or that it was interested in monitoring. It would then run the Tor system itself, testing the way these sites appeared when accessed through Tor, developing a database of “fingerprints” associated with the sites of interest.

Once the target of the surveillance went online, the eavesdropper would capture the packet stream as it crossed the local network and compare the source data with its fingerprint database with the help of pattern recognition software. Any match would be only statistical, giving somewhere between 55 percent and 60 percent certainty, Herrmann said—not enough to provide hard evidence in court, but likely more certainty than many people seeking privacy might be comfortable with.

Different online destinations will carry different susceptibility to fingerprinting, of course. Unusual sites, with characteristics such as very heavy or large graphic use, can be more easily identified, Herrmann said. By the same token, the easiest way for a website to fool such an eavesdropper would be to make its site look as closely as possible like another popular site—mimicking the look of the Google site, for example, one of the most commonly accessed pages on the Web.

Users themselves can guard against this type of fingerprint-based eavesdropping relatively easily, Herrmann noted. Downloading or requesting more than one site at a time through the network will muddy the pattern enough that certainty will be very difficult for the eavesdropper to establish.

The research many not dissuade many from using Tor, which remains one of the most promising approaches for individuals seeking to hide aspects of their identity or online activity. But it may well make them work harder.

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BitTorrent!

You can use the 's' and 'p' keys to add new seeds and peers to the swarm. Hitting 'r' will remove one of the seeds or peers at random, but it takes a few seconds before it activates, just like the original.

This visualization originally started off at aphid.org but that site doesn't seem to be up anymore. Jeff Atwood updated it to work with more recent versions of Processing (notably the 1.0 release which is theoretically API-stable and compatible with future versions). Once I saw processing.js, I knew that I had to get this working in it.

Works in pretty much any modern browser except IE (because IE doesn't have support for the <canvas> tag).

Changes, if you're curious:

• processing.js was missing ArrayList.contains() so I implemented it
• processing.js didn't implement screenX() or screenY() so I had to calculate things manually with cos() and sin()

What a feeling! Even better indexing of SWF content

Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 5:20 PM

Webmaster Level: All

We often get questions from webmasters about how we index content designed for Flash Player, so we wanted to take a moment to update you on some of our latest progress.