NSA

Symantec: a Chinese state-sponsored hacker group co-opted and repurposed NSA hacking tools to attack US allies and private companies in Europe and Asia in 2016 (New York Times)

The Census Bureau will soon start hiring temporary workers for the 2020 Census. Temporary hiring will really increase in March, April and May of 2020, and then the jobs will finish in a few months. These are real jobs - frequently second jobs, or taken by sen…

The United States will send an aircraft carrier and a bomber task force to the Middle East in response to “troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” from Iran, national security advisor John Bolton announced on Sunday. NEW: US is deploying an aircra…

From the Association of American Railroads (AAR) Rail Time Indicators. Graphs and excerpts reprinted with permission. Volumes for U.S. railroads in April 2019 were far from ideal, but they were much better than in March. Total carloads in April were down 0.9%…

from the some-bad-news,-worse-news,-and-indecipherable-news dept The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released the 2018 Transparency Report . In it, the ODNI covers the government's multiple surveillance programs, detailing (bu…

American server supplier Super Micro is dropping Chinese chips from its products, despite zero evidence ever emerging to support claims of spy chips installed in Apple and Amazon servers and a great deal of evidence to suggest that Bloomberg’s report was wron…

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration has signaled in recent weeks that it may seek the permanent renewal of a surveillance law that has, among other things, enabled the National Security Agency to gather and analyze Americans' phone records as part of terror…

All inmates being held in New York City jails will no longer have to pay a fee to make a phone call, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday. The Democratic mayor said waiving the fee for the citys more than 8,000 inmates will keep them better connected to famil…

Starbucks Corp. is voluntarily recalling a coffee press it sold for more than two years after receiving reports about it breaking during use, causing cuts and puncture wounds. The Seattle-based coffee chain is recalling about 263,200 of the presses in the U.…

[Matt Polotsky's new book, The National Security Sublime, is a tour through the look-and-feel of mass surveillance, as practiced by the most unlikely of aesthetes: big data authoritarian snoops and the grifter military contractors who wax fat on them. This is…