Slashdot Mirror

You seem to have forgotten what the C in AC stands for. Not to pick on the person but most certainly their are crap corporations out there like Google who will absolutely fire you for expressing an opinion their corporate marketing team do not approve of ie https://theintercept.com/2017/... and http://www.smh.com.au/technolo... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?... and, well, enough is enough. Whilst I can write ESAD Google and the big shit at Alphabet, no it is not a joke, I mean it, many can not and will suffer consequences for doing so. Google as evil as they come not better or worse than M$ and in the most surprising fashion, consider their exploitative over priced based on marketing nature, much worse than Apple.

Next, the trolls will just be bots posting programmatically contrived garbage. As for who pays for these sorts of activities, Glen Greenwald's piece (through The Intercept) on paid trolling is solid https://theintercept.com/2014/...

I find that unlikely, but if he believed it was a good idea for even a half of a second, then he is too mentally unfit to be president.

I think this has already been established.

Putin may even be blackmailing trump and Trump is doing what he can to accomplish Putin's goals to avoid the blackmail being revealed.

Everything that Trump does is motivated by growing his and his family's wealth. Russian banks gave loans to Trump, and that's why he's being so friendly towards Russia. Qatar did not agree to a loan, and look what happened to them.

The problem is the automated side of a lot of the gov backed malware.
Visit a site get gov malware. Have wifi on at a location, get gov malware.
"A reachable known target can be implanted with a non-replicating tool."
That was seen with "The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco"
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
"The hack would remain undetected for two years, until the spring of 2013."
Re "This is also a double edged sword as putting in limitations to spreading also gives away the fact it's not a random infection."
The US is back to the sword and shield problem. Contractors want to sell the gov products and earn over time. The gov needs to go on missions, have good news to tell and request more budget growth. The US also has to be protected from all such efforts in the wild. AV brands must also not discover any tools in the wild.
AV brands must blame other nations thanks to code litter, lungs, servers, ip found, private sector experts talking to the media.
It all works if its just the mil, gov and special forces doing the work around the world. The UK showed what could be done in the 1950-90's with much less funding and less staff.
Too many contractors, too many new staff having to get results to keep funding. The politics, faith, interests, contacts of so many new staff.
Vetting slows or is just transferred from some past employment and interesting people get very interesting jobs.
Tools walk, are sold, get lost, given to other nations due to their need or to charm other govs and make friends, get found in use in the wild, kept for later and sold, tested from home.
So many well understood issues due to so many missions and rapid expansion. Security should have kept up.

Malware that flows around the internet and infects random nations?
No security service or nation would allow their own side, nation, interests to be at any risk from random malware.
Malware thats in the wild doing stuff to a lot of nations is not a national cyber event.
Its just malware and a slow news day.
Read up on how nations really consider and use their cyber assets. Nations take care to ensure the system, user or server is the only thing thats accessed.

Lets do some reading
The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco (December 13 2014)
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
Read down to the "The hack would remain undetected for two years, until the spring of 2013" part and consider the quality and effort a nation puts into its code.
To stay in a network, only that network and not get found. No AV or websites or social media talking about that effort in real time.
Notice the difference after discovery too? "" ... never got a chance to study the routers."" Nations don't comment much on the efforts of other nations, to experts or the media.

Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Equation Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Again stay hidden, works really well for the task, great effort to stay with interesting people and efforts not spreading back to creators own nation. Skills to try and avoid random AV detection too. Less AV chatter in real time in the wild.
Nations can try automated cyber efforts but again they are automated to respond to very interesting people and try not to get talked about in real time by AV and experts. The staging servers are not found in real time. Malware do random things to many nations is not a cyber effort.
Its just malware and a news story.
Look at list of how nations do their cyber.
Names and definitions of leaked CIA hacking tools (Mar 9, 2017)
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03...
Neat products by server, brand, target. No finding the servers, no finding the nations control GUI. Exploits that work and and can work around most consumer AV and their experts most of the time. Not malware that flows over anything, everything and anyone thats been talked about and studied in real time.
Discovering a Hive, or SparrowHawk would not be an option for a nation's cyber contractors or gov/mil staff.

Lets consider some real nation backed code found in the wild over the years and read about what the reaction was? By experts, the security services and AV vendors.
The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco (December 13 2014)
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
".. The hack would remain undetected for two years, until the spring of 2013."
When a nation does it the method works, stay in place and is undetected. Not an in the wild, random malware effort thats detected by AV.
What happens when something really interesting is detected? All over the news? Global experts?
Lets keep reading to find out what happened later. Same wide in public discussion like now?
" ... never got a chance to study the routers."
The story of Stuxnet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ?
The story of Equation Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
'been active since at least 2001, with more than 60 actors"
Some history of Longhorn https://www.symantec.com/conne...

When nations do their cyber things, they do it to a good standard, the really code works and not many people get to read about it in the news in real time.
Nations also really, really try not to risk their own domestic systems.
Nations don't talk much about what they find or let their staff talk about results in real time.
Very different to the average gov reaction to malware that spreads randomly and does malware things. People talk, the news is told details. Sites talk about the news. AV vendors talk.

I personally believe that that's their aim - to cause a divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.

You don't have to just believe it, they've straight-up told us:

The attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.

Islamic State’s Goal: “Eliminating the Grayzone” of Coexistence Between Muslims and the West

So yeah, it turns out the islamofoes are actually terrorist collaborators.

Ummm..there is a LOT of misinformation. Problem is a lot of people are drinking the Kool-Aid. Trump is know for the very things he accuses anyone who speaks ill against him. It's true that we have a lot of misinformation or incomplete information but if you look CAREFULLY (like Fox News who constantly has to correct their headlines and are used by intelligent comedians for material), is the media with misinformation is often corrupted/coerced/bought out by the very people who accuse the media .Trump has been shown praising Fox news. Because they are basically mouthpieces of Republican party. Their official excuse is as a "balancing force" for the pro-Democrat news media outlets. All of that is basically government propaganda no better than the mainstream in China or Russia. So using Trump as an example of media abuse is a contradiction in terms (sorry but there is proven evidence). To be clear, I don't trust EITHER party (both have been shown corrupt at high levels) and I think we need a fresh 3rd party to keep them honest. But there ARE independent journalists and they are the ones primarily attacked. I'll give a few sources for you to examine:

https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/
http://theintercept.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/
http://independent.co.uk/

Hopefully there will be more. Folks, please feel free to add to this list. Of course these people need donations to pay for their work. BTW, The Guardian and The Intercept worked together to expose the unconstitutional behavior of the NSA provided by Snowden. Pretty ballsy. If we want "real news" we need to find it and support it. otherwise the media companies and/or political parties will mute anything we truly need to know to have a real democracy.

This pattern is repeated endlessly against anyone who has rocked any political boats or embarrassed anyone in power. There's been directed surveillance against the Standing Rock protestors, for example, and so on all across the world in any kind of political situations.

We need better opsec education. When protesters use Facebook to coordinate, they have to understand every single thing they say or do is under surveillance... so avoid Facebook and anything like it for coordination. We need people to understand how to avoid installing surveillance malware. We need people to know how to use strong end to end encryption, and avoid compromise of the systems running the encryption. They need to realize the huge attack surface exposed if they run javascripts in a web browser, given that's been how past protestors were infected.

If you rock any boats, you WILL be targeted (directly, not in the mass surveillance way we all are), and you have to act in a defensive way. Technical illiteracy and political engagement are not good bedfellows.

And how would anyone need to hack a system with no username and/or password:

"What UpGuard appears to have discovered, sitting on an Amazon cloud storage drive with no password or username required for access by anyone on the internet," https://theintercept.com/2017/...

I don't think anyone needs to hack that to get it.

Read between the lines. He means the data does not appear to have been ACCESSED prior to disclosure. He used the word "hacked" to control the narrative and keep the focus off how incompetent they were. Just like people who "hack" celebrity accounts by guessing easy passwords or security questions.

And how would anyone need to hack a system with no username and/or password:

"What UpGuard appears to have discovered, sitting on an Amazon cloud storage drive with no password or username required for access by anyone on the internet,"
https://theintercept.com/2017/...

I don't think anyone needs to hack that to get it.

It seems like you don't want to listen to any facts. Calling them "fake news" may make you feel better but doesn't change them.
Since you're too lazy to use Google here are some more references:
https://insideclimatenews.org/...
https://theintercept.com/2017/...
http://time.com/4709796/trump-...
https://thinkprogress.org/trum...

So a left wing organization says 'there's a growing threat of right wing extremist terrorism!

It's not a growing "threat". It's a growing list of actual terror attacks from the right.

There are three times as many right-wing terror incidents causing death since 9/11 than from any other group.

https://theintercept.com/2017/...

But overall, there are too many idiots on both sides that refuse to listen to the other sides ideas

Do not attempt to make a false equivalence here. The only reason it might seem that way is because one side has a massive persecution complex fed by an outrage machine dedicated to hyping that noise for profit and the other 'side' (described as the reality-based community by Karl Rove) treat such as cases as just another minor news event.

NYC: Linda Sarsour Faces Death Threats Ahead of Her CUNY Commencement Speech | Democracy Now!
Princeton professor who criticized Trump cancels events, saying she's received death threats
Shakespeare in the Park featured a Trump-like Julius Caesar, and right-wing media freaked out - Vox
Greg Gianforte Pleads Guilty To Assaulting A Journalist : The Two-Way : NPR
GOP pressured NPR into firing a journalist who reported on their bigotry / LGBTQ Nation
Lawmakers across the US are finding ways to turn protesting into a crime - Vox
Tom Price commends police who arrested journalist asking questions
GOP rep goes after activist by writing letter to employer | TheHill
Sinclair Requires TV Stations to Air Segments That Tilt to the Right - The New York Times
Oklahoma Governor Signs Anti-Protest Law Imposing Huge Fines on “Conspirator” Organizations
FDA Denies Ordering Employees to Switch Television Monitors to Fox News Channel
FCC to investigate, 'take appropriate action' on Colbert’s Trump rant | TheHill
Jury Convicts Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions During Senate Hearing | HuffPost
Fordham U. blocked formation of pro-Palestinian group: suit - NY Daily News

Seriously? What evidence? They haven't shown us any yet.

Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election

I read The Intercept piece, and it went to great pains to say that nothing in the leaked document indicated that there was ANY effect of the Russian activities on the integrity of the election. So I don't see how you can claim that Trump's election wasn't legitimate.

But perhaps you have some info that I'm not aware of. If so, let's see it.

Re 'had e-mail contact with the ..."
The NSA tracks all contact with the media.
The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports (May 17 2016)
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
"...press items daily for “cryptologic insecurities” and maintained a database called FIRSTFRUIT with “over 5,000 insecurity-related records” ranging from “espionage damage assessments” to “liaison exchanges.”"

Snowden was even more worried about detection, though I didn’t know it at the time. He expected to be quickly arrested and prevented from speaking for himself, and predicted that the government would use that silence to mischaracterize his intentions. To keep that from happening, Snowden decided to take a highly visible online stand against mass surveillance. Part of his plan included the petition website that he asked me to build.

Evidently, Winner should have first fled to... fuck, I dunno where.

Hopefully the next administration will be elected via actual democracy and can pardon her.

I think no news agency can be completely trusted. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes they are badly managed.

Also, see this Slashdot story, published today: DOJ Charges Federal Contractor With Leaking Classified Info To Media Quote: The Intercept published a top secret NSA report Monday that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company. (June 5, 2017)

The story to which you linked, WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived, criticizes the Washington Post for apparently incorrect stories about Russian destructiveness toward the United States. It seems that the full truth isn't known, because The Intercept discovered more about Russian involvement yesterday.

https://theintercept.com/2017/...

When informed that we intended to go ahead with this story, the NSA requested a number of redactions.
The Intercept agreed to some of the redaction requests after determining that the disclosure of that material was not clearly in the public interest.

I've been reading https://theintercept.com/2017/... for about a half an hour. There still is no "raw data". It's still, "Trust Us, We wouldn’t reach conclusions without real evidence!" I'm suspicious about the whole thing.

The Intercept (not Greenwald) did such a good job of protecting their source that she was busted _before_ the document was published? She is Reality Leigh Winner, 25. This idealistic kid wants to protect Hillary and the MSM? She works for Pluribus International Corporation in Georgia http://www.pluribusinternation... , yet she didn't cover her emails to the Intercept? She also didn't cover the act of "copying" the document? http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/05/...

This is nothing more than the swamp's latest salvo.

WaPo which cannot be trusted: https://theintercept.com/2017/...

Yes that https://theintercept.com/2017/... (March 8 2017)
Why just go for sound and vision. If a user is connecting a computer too, any nation could request to set up all the smart tv devices in their must trusted hotels.

https://www.desmogblog.com/201...
https://theintercept.com/2017/...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/1...
http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/0...

And Carl Icahn is just one of the many cronies that Trump put in positions of power. Only an imbecile (to borrow your own language) who never peeked out of his echo chamber could have missed all the stories that have been broken.

The fact that the agreement left it to individual nations to determine how much they were willing to do to reach that temperature target, allowing them to come to Paris with commitments that collectively put us on a disastrous course towards more than 3 degrees of warming, was lobbied for and won by the United States.

The fact that the agreement treats even these inadequate commitments as non-binding, which means governments apparently do not have anything to fear if they ignore their commitments, is something else that was lobbied for and won by the United States.

The fact that the agreement specifically prohibits poor countries from seeking damages for the costs of climate disasters was lobbied for and won by the United States.

The fact that it is an “agreement” or an “accord” and not a treaty — the very thing that makes it possible for Trump to stage his action-movie slow-mo walk away, world in flames behind him — was lobbied for and won by the United States.

I could go on. And on.

Naomi Klein

This is very smarmily worded: although DNC spent more, Hillary had to "build" the organization that did the spending. The smarmy part is to say the second part but not the first, making it sound like the DNC was "supposed" to spend more money on her and either didn't spend it or didn't have it, when neither is true. She also ignored data scientists' models in MI/WI/PA, just as she's currently ignoring criticism that she displays awful character by blaming others for her loss.

Is Trump's character even worse? Yes, and the people who can see that voted for Hillary. The rest voted for Trump. Even the voters, if unfrustrated by DNC primary-rigging (ex. registration purges in NYC), are able to pick a candidate better than Hillary. The biggest mistake the DNC made was sacrificing its credibility by using shenanigans to put a bad candidate into the race. They lost both their credibility and the election. I don't care what Hillary thinks. She's over. The problem is her cronies are still in charge of the DNC. The "crazy racist" zombie-messages from the Hillary campaign are still coming out of the DNC and poisoning discourse. Hillary has not lost thoroughly enough.

But Cook's company outsources all the manufacturing to China

*If only.

* Dow and DuPont are in the process of merging.

A person who not only bribes politicians, but publicly brags about it can not be the solution when he becomes a politician. https://theintercept.com/2015/08/07/donald-trump-buy/,

See subject: THIS is your proof as to exactly HOW & WHY https://theintercept.com/2017/05/11/nyu-accidentally-exposed-military-code-breaking-computer-project-to-entire-internet/ via "Windsor Green"... there's some SECURITY INFO for you.

* Plus, the stupid LIBS used for https? Always break backward compatibility EVERY SINGLE F'ING TIME so when old model's found to be breakable (ala TLS & SSL)? They don't keep the same return types (common way to bust API's by shithead rookies) so that legacy apps can't use them right in THEIR code!

APK

P.S.=> It's TOTAL horseshit so WE AGREE here & mere "lip service" security-theater that is EASILY broken (especially by the NSA)... apk

"it'd be a fireable offence for you or I"

Are you kidding? It would be a CRIMINAL OFFENCE!!!

And no, don't even consider trying to argue about this. There is almost nothing which offends me. The minimization of Hillary's crime which Democrats engaged in is one of the things which does.

I have to endure training about this topic very frequently. Everyone who works where I work knows without any doubt that they would be criminally charged if they even began to set up a computer system outside of the proper authorized manner, and attempted to put classified on it.

The record is clear on this: https://theintercept.com/2016/...

This isn't evidence or a lack of it, but this guy has the best explanation: Short of a three letter agency providing something definitive, there is nothing but speculation and a lot of circumstantial evidence. Much of it of questionable origin.
https://theintercept.com/2016/...

I'm still waiting to see anything concrete either way. Generally, where there is smoke there is fire, but in this case I'm starting to wonder. We might find out soon. We might not.

The NSA understands a lot of US party political groups keep data on computers that is not encrypted and is on networks that can be accessed by the internet.
With its domestic powers the NSA could see the vast amounts of US plain text party political data been moved along the US internet in real time.
Without such powers US data could move along US networks and no US clandestine service would ever know what party political US plain text data was moving around US networks or in the hands of US media.
US staff in a US political party could pass data to members of the US press and nobody in the US gov would be able to find the origin of the data until its published.
With the domestic spying powers that data could be tracked from US leaker to the US press. No more leaking by US whistelblowers to the US press.
The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports (May 17 2016)
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
".. scanned 350 press items daily for “cryptologic insecurities” and maintained a database called FIRSTFRUIT with “over 5,000 insecurity-related records” ranging from “espionage damage assessments” to “liaison exchanges.”"

I do see the violence on the right but I do make a distinction between actions v words and lone wolfs v groups.

Actually, what you do is try to embrace a false sanctimony as you fail to admit to the violent organizations on the right, from the Bundy Ranch militias, the Respect the Flag group, the Huttaree, and even the various Tea Party groups and others on the right-wing clamoring for a revolution. Which included Donald Trump, in 2012, with his infamous Tweetstorm.

If you want to admit to them, then fair enough, go ahead and condemn them. Say they're deplorable. Say they're repugnant. Say they're dangerous.

I don't blame the Chicago kidnapping on the left anymore than I blame the Charleston shooting on the right.

Yes, yes, you already made it clear that you want to ignore how Dylan Roof is merely one among many on the right espousing such views, but that won't make it not a fact that "they do exist in abundance.

Sorry, but Dylan Roof wasn't merely some lone isolated nut following the beat of a drum only he could hear, there's a whole marching band.

By their fruits we know them.

As for the rest of your diarrhea... try harder.

I will, you're not worth giving up on. You deserve to be informed. You deserve to have the strength of character you need to admit the truth. You can have the fortitude to boldly proclaim that the shit stinks all around. It's a dysentery that

The election was so close that even the tiniest factor could have influenced the outcome.

If that's true, then the interference or subversion of democracy or whatever was tiny.

Are you disasterizing or minimizing? Pick one. This is not even motte-and-bailey; it's plain old vacillation and talking in circles.

Personally, I'm going with "hypothetical disaster":
  - Russia could have hacked the voting results themselves, but probably didn't.
      In response, what we need is not McCarthyist Russia scapegoating. We need a voter-verifiable paper trail and laws that automatically trigger a statistically-sound audit

  - Democratic party is corrupt and collapsing on itself
        In response, what we need is not Bulverizing the hypothetical motives of whoever's involved in exposing them. We need a democratically accountable Democratic party.

The email hacks revealed a little bit of dirt in the form of taking money from finance companies for speaking appearances,

The aggregate dirt was not "a little". Only the marginal dirt revealed by the hacks was "a little."

People already knew Hillary was giving talks to bankers and using noisemakers to stop the press from hearing what she was saying to them. People already despised her for being two-faced. It was such a joke her supporters had to turn "nasty woman" into a positive thing.

Some of the things exposed in the leaks, like leaking debate questions to the campaign ahead of the debate, help democracy instead of hurting it. Just imagine if the target of the leaks had been reversed, allegedly Russian hackers had exposed leaks of debate questions from Fox News to the Trump campaign, and Hillary had won. You would simply thank the hackers and move on. If someone challenged "foreign interference" you'd relativise everything and bleat "but mah democracy, they doin' us a service, and also 'white men,' " and move on.

narrow victory for Clinton into a narrow victory for Trump. Remember that Clinton actually got more votes.

does not mean the election was close. Based on the rules under which it was conducted, was it actually close, or was the pre-election polling just shit?

a lot of people view him as having won on a technicality, by arcane rules established for a time long past.

He is a total incompetent clown and "bizarrely terrible," but he is 100% right on this: he won based on the rules we agreed on. If we'd had different rules, he'd run a different campaign and likely win it, but in any case:

  - you aren't entitled to retroactive rule shopping. That's how cheaters play.

  - it's unclear the system you advocate is better for your own side, much less for democracy long-term, and you clearly haven't thought it through: you're just knee-jerking to this one outcome.

It's getting so bad I'm as afraid to "share common cause" with liberals as I am with Internet trolls and "white supremacists." They're petty, selfish, smug, partisan, and have no respect for their neighbor and sense of fair process as a part of public responsibility.

The understanding that some member of the press will take the document back to work or networked home desktop computer and double click on the icon.
As they read the document the network makes a connection.
Its about the idea of the average reader in an average network location given the origin of the documents and their daily habits and the expectation of software they are provided with.

If a document is ever found the in the wild, it looks like malware with a good cover story to read while the code reports the user.
Add in OS X, Windows and Linux OS detection, complex ip reporting that works and a lot of different security researchers get interested and that adds interest to the document.
A "CIA" document with MS malware, thats just malware with better than average bait to get the user to open it.
A CIA document with unique phone home code that spans different OS's in very interesting ways would add to the CIA part.
Sometimes simple is better given the tools the reader is expected to use daily. The reader could be expected to us MS software to see all the document and uncover other details in the document.
A member of the press will want to look for any details in the document. Dates, notes, draft, corrections, history. Names, locations, officials that can be tracked to their job descriptions. If such simple facts hold, it can be passed on to document experts for further consideration.
A member of the press does not know who else has the document and could be expected to want to read and understand and then get published.
A security consultant looking over the document first could see rivals publishing first or finding details in the hours the security consultant was working.
A person who understood security issues could take the document to a special computer and fake network and see how the document responds in a MS Windows and MS application setting.
Does it phone home, what and how much data does it risk when it phones home.
Same document, very different first approaches. The understanding of set time to publish and the need to publish will push back decades of expected document security advice.
The US press does not care if they are tracked to their office as they have freedom to publish and freedom after publication. Read first, have the document looked over, get the story out.

A CIA version of FIRSTFRUIT. "The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports" (2016-05-16) https://theintercept.com/2016/...
"scanned 350 press items daily for “cryptologic insecurities” and maintained a database called FIRSTFRUIT with “over 5,000 insecurity-related records” ranging from “espionage damage assessments” to “liaison exchanges.”"

"nothing in the hacked Hillary emails depicted illegal behavior"

It is illegal for a political campaign to coordinate strategy with a PAC. The Hillary e-mails certainly seem to depict a blatant disregard for this law.

https://theintercept.com/2016/...

The political left. They're always the ones trying to limit what people (except the political left...) can express.

Oops.

https://theintercept.com/2017/...

Could be ex and former staff selling mi/gov grade product to their cult, faith, embassy, other parts of the US gov, the private sector.
Once the devices got handed out to NATO nations, the different EU nation police forces all their ex and former staff can sell the US product to the private sector.
The US is now been flooded with its own products as once very secret tech finds its way into every embassy and the private sector.
Other nations front companies, US dual citizens helping their real nations.
The UK had the same issues. Some ore gov, mil other are just random efforts by different groups.
What the UK did can often show what could be in the USA.
Fake Mobile Phone Towers Operating In The UK (09 June 2015)
http://news.sky.com/story/fake...
UK Cops Using Fake Mobile Phone Tower to Intercept Calls, Shut Off Phones (10.31.11)
https://www.wired.com/2011/10/...
Fake mobile phone towers discovered in London: Stingrays come to the UK (6/11/2015)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...

The other US side would be to track US police, city workers to ensure they did not have a task force on any emerging private sector products or services.
Once a map of every phone in a wide city area was tracked, tracking undercover officials would be easy given a lack of digital counter surveillance training.
New "staff" or users reporting back into a government building every few days or weeks for a set time would be very easy to map.
Another aspect would be to counter any journalist trying undercover work. Their origin and return to their place of work would be detected if they ever had two working phones with them. Their undercover story phone and their journalist phone.
Other tracking could counter bloggers and web 2.0 attempts by citizen journalism to enter political parties or party political fund raising.
They might make an error with two phones in use. One they used for undercover work in the past, one they use for their blog.
Lack of cash could see device reuse and very easy tracking.
Also the meeting of any gov worker, federal official, contractor, mil, political staff with any journalist would be tracked by the mil, gov, party, contractor. A vast database of journalist. A political and private sector version of the NSA's FIRSTFRUIT.
The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports (May 17 2016)
https://theintercept.com/2016/...
“.. over 5,000 insecurity-related records” ranging from “espionage damage assessments” to “liaison exchanges.”
Someone is not tracking the fake networks for some reason. Political over, mil, police or gov use? Gov workers detect the fake cell products and nothing is done?

I don't see why we should give into your definition of what's on par with Trump's claim of bugged phones, nor is it controversial that Trump was tapped before he was POTUS. This whole reaction is more about manufactured outrage and distraction from real issues.

But Obama certainly did lie (plenty of variations of "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." despite millions of Americans seeing their plans terminated which were lies of commission), and commit extrajudicial murder (the so-called 'Terror Tuesday' meetings, as the New York Times tells us, had former President Obama personally selecting targets for assassination. Some of the people killed in these drone attacks include Americans Anwar Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Others killed in drone attacks are overwhelmingly completely unsuspected innocents who happen to be in the vicinity of the kill zone where the bomb goes). Obama lied by omission about these drone war consequences, but he made time to crack wise about death-by-drone at one of his Correspondent's dinners wherein he quipped about threatening a boy band his daughters enjoyed with death-by-drone ("You'll never see it coming..."). Pres. Obama called the Iraq war a "dumb war" and then kept it going for his entire term (this choice helped make his the first US President to be at war his entire term in office). Oh, don't worry: Pres. Trump is down with all of these policies. Trump apparently plans to keep HMOs intact and in charge of American healthcare with his own spin away from universalizing Medicare (we're learning about the details of this now but the broad strokes are clear) despite what he told "60 Minutes" about universal healthcare. Universalizing Medicare ala HR676 would be useful, is widely approved by Americans, is something real progressives should champion (particularly now) instead of knuckling under to more HMO rule, and would (by design) make it illegal for HMOs to cover the same care covered by Medicare (America's extant single-payer system). But passing HR676 into law would also ensure these HMOs wouldn't fund Democratic and Republican Party campaigns. And on war, Pres. Trump recently had Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter killed in a drone-led campaign in which the Navy SEAL Team 6 shot her in the throat and let her bleed to death. And there's no sign the US is ever leaving Iraq. Not only are these issue far more important than someone's manufactured outrage over Trump's tweet about spying on his calls, they point out how the similarities across administrations on significant issues far outnumber and outweigh the differences between administrations. And this is no accident.

Getting back to pointing out how much manufactured outrage works to obscure more important issues: The NSA's slogan "Sniff It All, Collect It All, Know It All, Process It All, Exploit It All" covers the situation quite well. That slogan is not "Collect some of it, Process most of it, Exploit things here or there but certainly not Trump Tower-related data". So it's perfectly reasonable Trump's communications were tapped. As RT's "The Resident" pointed out (using slightly different words than the next quote) and Ted Rall astutely point out "Of course Obama tapped Trump. Snowden told us. Obama tapped everyone!". German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn't like it when it was revealed her conversations were also being spied upon. The controversy is that the US taps so much regardless of whether they're abiding by US law. That's a far more important point.

Any outrage over Trump's reaction is a pointer to how much that person wasn't paying attention during the Snowden revelations and its consequences (which are ongoing to this day).

Apparently people forget CALEA pretty much gave the government the ability to tap whatever and whenever they wanted with little to no tracking. I say this having implemented it and seeing just how open to abuse it is.

And, of course, just before leaving office, Obama ordered that the NSA provide all their collected intelligence information, in the raw, to the entire IC community, making it "widely disseminated."

Having just read through these comments, my forehead hurts from banging it against the wall and I better flush this explanation out a bit more...

First of all, I'm amazed NO ONE mentioned the classic xkcd comic on memorized random password security: https://xkcd.com/936/

Second, forget about it all you people with your **genius** schemes for generating unique 8-11 character passwords. Congratulations, you've just been hacked. Look up rainbow tables, people!

You are all reinventing square and pentagonal wheels here. It's not working against the threat profile you face, and it's a pain in the ass for you compared to the painless solution that is already out there and explained if you just knew about it...

OK, so here is the true situation you face if you actually want to be secure:
1) You have hundreds of passwords to store.
2) Each one better be 25+ characters of RANDOM data. Otherwise, you face a very realistic threat from brute force / rainbow tables cracking you in trivial amounts of time now or in the near future.
3) You better not be reusing any of them anywhere, cause, you know, hacking.
      3a) If you use a standard root and "permute" it, you are relatively safer until one of your sites storing it in cleartext gets revealed, and then guess what, literally *everyone* uses the first character or two of the site name, or one or two letters more than the first characters to permute. So if you are ever an actual individual target as opposed to a mass script kiddie attack, you're toast. I know, and you thought you were so clever!

AND, even if you managed to memorize all this, it's a goddam PAIN IN THE ASS to type these passwords in, especially on phones.

Here is a solution that is 1) easier to remember, 2) faster to access your websites and login, and 3) order of orders of magnitude more secure:

Stesps:
1) Generate a SINGLE 6-7 word diceware PASSPHRASE. https://theintercept.com/2015/...
2) Memorize it. This should take you all of two minutes.
3) Download passwordsafe or keepass or another trusted OFFLINE password manager. I'm not going to press my personal preferences here. But it should have an automatic password generator feature.
4) Lock the password manager with your diceware passphrase and start generating 30+ character random, unique passwords for each site you use.

If you have a good tool (I use passwordsafe), you can store the URL, username, and password and with a combination of 3 hotkeys open any website, and login in under 2 seconds for any of the hundreds of TRULY SECURE passwords you store.

You can sync the encrypted pwd manager file to your mobile and other devices and access from there with equal security.

And a passphrase with all lower case letters to unlock your pwd manager is even faster to type on a computer or phone than a single one of these insecure, short, alpha-symbol-numeric jokes people are advocating the genius of here.

OK. Now you know. So spread the word and forget all this elaborate security theater nonsense.

The NSA and GCHQ can do what they want as granted by a gov or what ever section of a gov they work for or got established by.
Different US law enforcement agencies working in the US have to respond to Congress as that is who has oversight and can demand all paperwork over any policy, funding or staffing issue. Government lawyers redacting internal documents that go to Congress is not the best policy to hide issues.

So the way around Congress for equipment interference is usually from third party staging servers and is made to look like any other normal company doing 'ads' or tracking or some expected packet flow.
The US gov get their ip lists, users just see another third party script, ad, tracker on a site. The other method is to turn the entire admin team and replace them with gov workers to keep a site/service running for a while.
No need for equipment interference as the server is 100% gov.
What the NSA or US police would like to do domestically but don't want to show in open court as the origin of an investigation, some trusted nation like Australia, the UK, NZ or Canada will report to provide a tip to the USA about. So domestic collect it all spying stays hidden from any US legal team in open US court.

The really bad news is NATO, the wider EU and what the NSA and other US contractors shared with such nations.
The US gave its very best tools and hardware to a lot of different EU nations, not just their top police forces or foreign intelligence services. Random gov/mil staff all over NATO and the EU got to work on projects. Smaller EU nations are now operating within the USA with NSA like methods for their own governments domestic politics.
So what might seem like the NSA in the USA using a very complex staging server could be some random NATO or EU nation now doing their own covert work to collect it all in the USA. The results of such NATO or smaller EU nations can then enter the press for very party political reasons.
The US has lost its keys to global crypto thanks to trusting new EU nations beyond 5 eye nations who had kept US secrets for decades.
The NSA cant get its older network tools back as too many nations mil/police and contractors got/made/found/shared copies.
So anyone of 20 nations could be looking out for their own domestic self interest and try some very advanced equipment interference.
The CIA also has its own vast global collect it all network thats very different from the NSA so never to have to ask the NSA for help.
Different US federal agencies have also given or offered very advanced US hardware to their friends in the EU to track crime. Hearts and minds. Such staff in other nations are very supportive of helping the US with any and all later requests thanks to that trust with advance software or hardware.
The US is never informed that such methods are passed around and used globally beyond the original case or taskforce.
Contractors who worked for work with a mil/gov get to see such methods and then work for the private sector walking out with advance US software, hardware needed to ensure they can attract clients in the private sector years later.
So a lot of teams, nations, contractors move around networks with a lot of different advanced US only methods.
All the enduser will see is a perfect supported site or server or a staging server selling ads from some front company.
Or old malware that AV can detect that reports back to a staging server that could be anyone.
"OPERATION SOCIALIST The Inside Story of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco" (December 13 2014)
https://theintercept.com/2014/...
"Under the conditions of a non-disclosure agreement, they could not speak about what they had found, nor could they publicly warn against the malware. Moreover, they were not allowed to remove the malware."
Such changes to US laws will only encounter many different nations and their contractors in the wild that are totally protected by their own nations.

"New FOIA Documents Confirm FBI Used Dirtboxes on Planes Without Any Policies or Legal Guidance"
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
"New Senate Bill Would Require Warrants for Federal Aerial Surveillance"
https://theintercept.com/2015/...
Lots of data is been sorted :)
".. fake cell phone tower devices that can pull a suspect’s cell phone data and thereby determine ... location within 10 feet."

Hello GCHQ/NSA employee, how is work today?

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

And their 600 million contract. That's his political career. WaPo is the fake news part of it.

Did the 30 anchors that lied for Hillary during the election resign? Nope they wagged the dog and got everyone to believe it was nothing but russian hacking.

https://theintercept.com/2016/...

"The government's taking "extreme action"? Who's been shot? "with total disregard for the law"? Really?"

at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed
https://theintercept.com/2017/...

Her father had been killed years ago. This was uncalled for by any stretch of the imagination. She , as well as her father were both American citizens. While I'm not saying he didn't need to be dealt with, (which should have been through a court of law) this was just uncalled for.

And before you call me a bleeding heart liberal, I'm retired usmc with 23 years and 3 combat deployments.

It really depends on how interesting the person the security services find.
If you did not or are not working for the US gov/mil or as a US contractor or mercenary and are not talking to the media a person is not that interesting.
If your not a member of the press looking for gov/mil contacts or showing former gov/mil workers documents that are still secret via whistleblowers.
Most of the main US systems are looking for financial, political, legal, technical terms or terms that should not be out in public.
Other projects like Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group do show another side to information ops.
https://theintercept.com/2014/... (February 25 2014).
The main part will always be the classic COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... as it moved from collection to disruption.
All the press and media can do is take a few basic steps. Never have a cell phone when meeting a contact. Make sure the contact does not have a cell phone.
If material is passed, use paper and a typewriter, pen to make notes later. Do not enter any terms, numbers, dates, names into any computer even if its not networked or at home hours after getting new material.
CCTV is kept for many, many months thanks to well funded public private partnerships. Terms entered will find the origin of the searches and then daily moments can be recreated locally until a meeting is discovered.
Expect any work and home computer, cell phone to be accessed and tracked by default just for been a member of the press.
Note the use of honey traps or fake stories too. The photocopied documents that prove some wonderful story thats all fake. Document experts can help with that as a story is been worked on. The other interesting part is now that city and state governments can look for local issues with new much lower cost federal tracking systems.
Even a member of the press focused on state and city topics, expect the same nation state methods when looking into local issues.

Think back to "Superspy in the sky could soon be patrolling over British cities to search for hidden terror cells"(April 2010)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
"The aircraft are able to identify suspects using 'voice-prints' "
e.g. telephone traffic today can be matched to any voice on a TV interview many years ago.
Quality is never an issue, just that the voice was captured and is in use again.
The raw collection cost is low given well understood cell phone encryption.
Speech Recognition is NSA’s Best-Kept Open Secret (May 11 2015)
https://theintercept.com/2015/...
The spoken words get transcribed, any interesting terms found. A voice print is kept to find the same person again on any voice network globally and all their connected friends of friends (3 hops).
The only change is the new low cost contractor/private sector support. A city or state (with federal funding) can now add that voice print collection to their cell tower collection systems.
The real key is getting the voice print of the person the journalist talked to. Live mic from the journalist own phone or their contact had a phone on them they used later.

In the past the NSA, NRO, CIA collected everything but did not want anyone knowing methods and ability.
But the raw material had to get to the DEA, FBI and other agencies. The GCHQ could help too, Project MINARET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
In the 1970's anti-war and civil rights groups started to notice the COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... collection methods.
Factions got created in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.
Finally internal FBI documents made it out the wider public and US political leaders in 1971.
Around that time the the US had the Pike Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and Church Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
The result was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to keep US citizens safe from collect it all agencies.

If US agencies wanted to fill in that loss of power and ability after the 1970's US agencies had to get very legally creative under color of law.
Working with US tech brands in the USA, US brands helping with decryption, direct gov/law enforcement/agency networks into US brands data.
Thats what the secret is about. The decryption, domestic collection, the US brands that help, the lax junk big brand crypto.
Collect it all, what was seen with PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
A US journalists' phone is a collection method thanks to the US brand of phone the US journalists trusted or was told had domestic legal protections.

Finally the US is back to its 1960-70's glory with "Obama Opens NSA's Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community.. " (January 14 2017)
https://theintercept.com/2017/...
The minimization protections of US domestic data is gone. Many agencies now gets raw data "collect it all" data again.
The secret rules tried to cover parallel construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for a few decades but thats all gone now.