National Security Agency (NSA)

See the following -

NSA Surveillance Program Reaches ‘Into The Past’ To Retrieve, Replay Phone Calls

Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani | The Washington Post | March 18, 2014

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

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NSA Sweep Of Email Contact Lists Grabs Hundreds Of Millions Of Global Records

Brian Proffitt | ReadWrite | October 15, 2013

Another day, another discovery from the leaked Snowden documents that the U.S. National Security Agency has their hands in yet another privacy cookie jar. Read More »

NSA Veterans’ Start-Up Offers Secure Data Mining

Michael B. Farrell | The Boston Globe | November 4, 2013

The National Security Agency’s digital snooping may have inflamed a national debate over privacy, but it has been a godsend for a tiny start-up in Cambridge.  Read More »

NSA's Accumulo Data Store Has Strict Limits On Who Can See The Data

Joab Jackson | PCWorld | October 31, 2013

With its much-discussed enthusiasm for collecting large amounts of data, the NSA naturally found much interest in the idea of highly scalable NoSQL databases. Read More »

NSA's Accumulo NoSQL Store Offers Role-Based Data Access

Joab Jackson | InfoWorld | October 31, 2013

With its much-discussed enthusiasm for collecting large amounts of data, the NSA naturally found much interest in the idea of highly scalable NoSQL databases. Read More »

NSA's Big Data Platform Faces Enterprise Test

J. Nicholas Hoover | InformationWeek | October 11, 2012

Accumulo, the data storage software developed by the National Security Agency, has taken another step toward the enterprise market. Sqrrl, the startup launched by former NSA technologists to commercialize Accumulo, has teamed up with Apache Hadoop provider Hortonworks to combine their technologies. Read More »

NSA's Crypto Betrayal: Good News For Open Source?

Glyn Moody | Computerworld | September 10, 2013

Revelations from documents obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden that GCHQ essentially downloads the entire Internet as it enters and leaves the UK, and stores big chunks of it, was bad enough. But last week we learned that the NSA has intentionally weakened just about every aspect of online encryption [...]. Read More »

Obama Administration Cites 'National Security' More Than Ever To Censor, Deny Records

Jack Gillium and Ted Bridis | Huffington Post | March 17, 2014

The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.

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Obama Administration Decides NSA Spying Is ‘Essential,’ But Oversight Of NSA Is Not

Andrea Peterson | The Washington Post | October 7, 2013

While the National Security Agency (NSA) has largely escaped the government shutdown, the panel investigating NSA spying practices has effectively been frozen. Politico reports that as of Friday, the five-member Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies lost its staff to the furlough associated with the government shutdown. Read More »

Obama Lets NSA. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say

David E. Sanger | The New York Times | April 12, 2014

Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.  But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.

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Obama's Technology Guru On Opening The Data Vault: Todd Park On 6 Ways Non-Secret Government Data Has Been Put To Work

Jessica Yellin | CNN | July 9, 2013

Just back from a foreign trip and a holiday vacation, the president returned to work Monday by talking about government efficiency. Read More »

Obama’s Efforts to Control Media Are ‘Most Aggressive’ Since Nixon, Report Says

David Kravets | Wired | October 10, 2013

The President Barack Obama administration has “chilled the flow of information on issues of great public interest,” according to a Thursday report that amounts to an indictment of the president’s campaign pledge of a more open government. Read More »

Oh Look, Rep. Mike Rogers Wife Stands To Benefit Greatly From CISPA Passing...

Mike Masnick | Techdirt | April 18, 2013

It would appear that Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill. It would appear that Rogers' wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed... Read More »

Open Source By Default?

Clarice Africa | FutureGov | April 29, 2013

“Over the last ten years, Open Source has become unremarkable. I think that’s a great achievement. We no longer argue about whether it’s secure or not, or whether it’s safe to use. We focus now on how best to use Open Source to get the best value for every tax dollar,” said Gunnar Hellekson, Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector Group. Read More »

Open Source Tech Is Driving Big Changes In Government

Joseph Marks and Mark Micheli | Nextgov | April 26, 2013

Open source technology is now visible everywhere in government from the basic operating systems that federal computers run on to the blogs, websites and social media tools they use to communicate with the public. Red Hat, which helps companies manage, maintain and secure open source tools [...] has been at the forefront of much of this adoption. Read More »