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Stopping Your “Smart TV” From Spying on you

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the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, during the holiday season, many individuals will be gifted a connected or Internet of Things (IoT) device – such as a smart TV, camera, home security system, gaming system, smartphone, tablet, or one of many household items that have become internet-capable in the last several years, such as doorbells, thermostats, coffee pots, refrigerators, toaster ovens, and even meat thermometers. Many of these devices lend a level of convenience to users by making controls available on the go via a smartphone app or website. While convenient, connected devices also transmit and store data and could be exploited by cyber threat actors to compromise networks, devices, or accounts. Compromised connected devices, combined with vulnerable home routers, increase the risk of cybercriminal activity and cyberattacks. Additionally, devices routinely connected to a home network can have further implications when subsequently connected to corporate networks and may introduce additional vulnerabilities and risks. Therefore, it is vital for users to employ cybersecurity best practices for the new gadgets they receive this holiday season and ensure devices and networks currently in use are properly secured.

Continue reading Stopping Your “Smart TV” From Spying on you

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Firefox 90 Browser adds Faster Speeds and SmartBlock 2.0

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the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, not a fan of internet tracking, Mozilla has launched Firefox 90. It features improved print-to-PDF functionality, individual exceptions to HTTPS-only mode, a page to help identify compatibility issues with third-party applications, and SmartBlock. SmartBlock can protect users from cross-site tracking while making sure that site logins still function. The new browser is significantly faster.

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Two Iranian Nationals Charged in Cyber Theft and Defacement Campaign Against Computer Systems in New Jersey

Hacked

 

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ,  Two Iranian nationals have been charged in connection with a coordinated cyber intrusion campaign – sometimes at the behest of the government of Iran – targeting computers in New Jersey and around the world, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito announced today.

Continue reading Two Iranian Nationals Charged in Cyber Theft and Defacement Campaign Against Computer Systems in New Jersey

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the fly Just when you thought politics in Ridgewood couldn’t any dirtier………….

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It seem today a resident of Walthrey Ave who is helping on Mike and Susan campaign spotted a truck outside their home with a male taking picture of his house and campaign signs. When approached the truck left the scene. The resident recorded the license plate and made a police report. The resident then spotted the truck with that license plate park in Ms. Alexandra Harwin driveway. The plate was traced back to Harwin’s husband Rabbi Noah Fabricant .

What is going on in this town? Are resident that support Mike and Susan being record on some list for some future action against them? This kind of tactic comes right out of Paul Aronsohn playbook.

The photos were taken in an attempt to embarrass the homeowner, who is a prominent member of the Bergen County Democratic Organization, because he has lawn signs up in support of Susan, who is a registered Republican.
Guess who was recently elected to serve on the Bergen County Democratic Committe, none other than Paul Aronsohn.

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Nunes claims some Trump transition messages were intercepted

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif

The move gave cover to the White House but was rebuked by top Democrats.

By AUSTIN WRIGHT

03/22/17 01:19 PM EDT
Updated 03/22/17 06:48 PM EDT

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.

The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/devin-nunes-donald-trump-surveillance-obama-236366

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‘THIS IS WATERGATE’

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Barack Obama denies ‘ever ordering surveillance on any US citizen’ following bombshell accusations he tapped Donald Trump’s phone during US presidential election

Trump claims ‘sick’ ex-president involved in surveillance during heated election campaign

By Brittany Vonow, Mark Hodge and Patrick Knox
4th March 2017, 8:06 pm

Updated: 4th March 2017, 10:44 pm

DONALD Trump’s allegation that his predecessor ordered his phone to be tapped is “simply false”, Barack Obama’s spokesman says.

In an astonishing salvo of early morning tweets, the firebrand President claimed his predecessor had bugged his phones during the “very sacred election process”, slamming the allegations as a “Nixon/Watergate” scandal.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3009405/donald-trump-barack-obama-wires-tapped-trump-tower-election/

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CIA admits to spying on Senate

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CIA admits to spying on Senate
By Julian Hattem – 07/31/14 12:32 PM EDT

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/213933-cia-admits-to-wrongly-hacking-into-senate-computers#ixzz399aEwd7A
Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook

CIA officials improperly hacked the Senate Intelligence Committee’s computers as staffers compiled a report on “enhanced interrogation” techniques, the spy agency’s inspector general has concluded.

In a statement shared with The Hill, CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said the internal watchdog determined “that some CIA employees acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding” between the agency and the committee about access to the network they used to share documents.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/213933-cia-admits-to-wrongly-hacking-into-senate-computers#ixzz399a3WJSL

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Don’t Come Crying to Us, NSA; You Guys Are the Ones Who Hired This Goofball.

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Don’t Come Crying to Us, NSA; You Guys Are the Ones Who Hired This Goofball.
June 11, 2013
Jim Geraghty
To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com

Everybody’s going to have an opinion on Edward Snowden, today the world’s most famous leaker.

In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of people talking past each other, conflating two issues: One, did he do the right thing by disclosing all these details of the vast NSA system to gather data on Americans? And two, should he be prosecuted for it?

Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.

John Yoo argues that the government has to pursue prosecution of Snowden, considering what they’ve done in response to much lesser leaks:

The NSA leak case will reveal if the Obama administration really means what it said about its foolish and unconstitutional pursuit of the AP and Fox News in other leak cases. Recall that the Obama Justice Department claimed that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a co-conspirator in the alleged leak of classified intelligence. If the Justice Department truly believed what it told the courts when seeking a wiretap on Rosen, then it should indict the reporters and editors for the Washington Post and the Guardian newspapers who published information on PRISM. They clearly “conspired” with Snowden to publish classified information, information that was much more harmful to the national security than in the Rosen case (on North Korea’s predictable response to sanctions). Personally, I think that the Post is protected by the First Amendment, but Holder’s Justice Department clearly doesn’t think so.

So either the Justice Department will indict not just Snowden, but also the Post and Guardian reporters, or it will have been shown to have been untruthful to the courts in the Rosen case (which I think has become clear) . . .

Yoo also points out that Snowden’s claim to noble motives is muddied quite a bit by his decision to run to Hong Kong. (By the way, the last guy to run to Hong Kong, certain that he was beyond the reach of American law enforcement and extradition treaties, was Mr. Lau, the money-keeper for the Gotham City mob. And we all remember how that turned out.) When Snowden declares, “Hong Kong has a reputation for freedom in spite of the People’s Republic of China. It has a strong tradition of free speech,” we have to wonder if A) he’s already working for the Chinese or B) he’s an imbecile.

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn’t recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he’s the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national-security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over — completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation — and concluding, “Yup, looks like a nice kid?”

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego — one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex)

Snowden feels he has an understanding of what’s going on well beyond most of his colleagues:

When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.

What’s more, he feels that no one listens to his concerns or takes them seriously:

And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you’re ignored. The more you’re told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”

My God, he must have been an insufferable co-worker.

“Look, you guys just don’t understand, okay? You just can’t grasp the moral complexities of what I’m being asked to do here! Nobody here really gets what’s going on, or can see the big picture when you ask me to do something like that!”

“Ed, I just asked if you could put a new bottle on the water cooler when you get a chance.”

Of course, all of this is presided over by a guy who thought that civil liberties were a useful cudgel against a Republican president back when he was outside the Oval Office. John Sexton turns the wayback machine to 2005, when then-senator Obama, from the floor of the Senate, sternly declared that the PATRIOT Act “didn’t just provide law enforcement the powers it needed to keep us safe, but powers it didn’t need to invade our privacy without cause or suspicion” and added:

If someone wants to know why their own government has decided to go on a fishing expedition through every personal record or private document — through library books they’ve read and phone calls they’ve made — this legislation gives people no rights to appeal the need for such a search in a court of law. No judge will hear their plea, no jury will hear their case. This is just plain wrong.

Ace of Spades: “James Rosen could not be reached for comment, but secret government surveillance into all of his phone calls and emails indicates he’s pretty pissed.”

Found this graphic on the site of Jeff Boss, one of the token Democrats running for governor in New Jersey this year:

Glenn Reynolds, in USA Today yesterday:

As for abuse, well, is it plausible to believe that a government that would abuse the powers of the IRS to attack political enemies, go after journalists who publish unflattering material or scapegoat a filmmaker in the hopes of providing political cover to an election-season claim that al-Qaeda was finished would have any qualms about misusing the massive power of government-run snooping and Big Data? What we’ve seen here is a pattern of abuse. There’s little reason to think that pattern will change, absent a change of administration — and, quite possibly, not even then. Sooner or later, power granted tends to become power abused. Then there’s the risk that information gathered might leak, of course, as recent events demonstrate.

Most Americans generally think that politicians are untrustworthy. So why trust them with so much power? The evidence to date strongly suggests that they aren’t worthy of it.

To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com