The United States Customs and Border Protection agency confirmed on Wednesday that it uses at least one communication app made by the service TeleMessage, which creates clones of popular apps like Signal and WhatsApp with the addition of an archiving mechanism for compliance of records-retention rules. “Following the detection of …
Read More »Tulsi Gabbard Reused the Same Weak Password on Multiple Accounts for Years
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, used the same easily cracked password for different online accounts over a period of years, according to leaked records reviewed by WIRED. Following her participation in a Signal group chat in which sensitive details of a military operation were unwittingly shared with a …
Read More »US Border Agents Are Asking for Help Taking Photos of Everyone Entering the Country by Car
United States Customs and Border Protection is asking tech companies to send pitches for a real-time facial recognition tool that would take photos of every single person in a vehicle at a border crossing, including anyone in the back seats, and match them to travel documents, according to a document …
Read More »Security Researchers Warn a Widely Used Open Source Tool Poses a ‘Persistent’ Risk to the US
“Nation states take on a strategic positioning,” says George Barnes, a former deputy director at the National Security Agency, who spent 36 years at the NSA and now acts as a senior advisor and investor in Hunted Labs. Barnes says that hackers within Russia’s intelligence agencies could see easyjson as …
Read More »Pete Hegseth’s Signal Scandal Spirals Out of Control
As the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policy ramps up, people have started to seriously consider their privacy and security when crossing into the United States. That’s especially true when it comes to searches of travelers’ phones and other devices, which US Customs and Border Protection agents have broad authority to …
Read More »Protecting Your Phone—and Your Privacy—at the US Border
Lauren Goode: I think Katie should go first. She’s the boss. Katie Drummond: So as you all know, because I can’t stop talking about it, I recently returned from France, and one thing in particular that I am now pathologically fixated on, that I am recommending to all of you, …
Read More »How to Protect Yourself From Phone Searches at the US Border
Privacy and digital rights advocates largely prefer the approach of building a travel device from scratch, but they caution that a phone that is too squeaky clean, too much like a burner phone, can arouse suspicion. “You have to ‘seed’ the device. Use the phone for a day or even …
Read More »Florida Man Enters the Encryption Wars
Just three months into the Trump administration’s promised crackdown on immigration to the United States, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement now has a $30 million contract with Palantir to build a “near-real time” surveillance platform called ImmigrationOS that would track information about people self-deporting (electing to leave the US). Meanwhile, the …
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