how the FBI is watching the net

some details of the FBI's net surveilance technique have been made public last Friday at the Search & Seizure in the Digital Age symposium held at Stanford University's law school.
basically, this is what they are doing:

- if there is a badguy they want to watch, they get a court order and if the Internet Service Provider can tell which IP address the badguy is on, they watch a whole block of IP's.

every time you sign on the internet, you get an IP address. this comes from your ISP, and with always-on connections, rarely changes. but if someone with the same ISP is being bad, the FBI will watch a whole set of IP's to make sure they get 'em. and by watch, i mean record all net activity. email, web requests, etc.

source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6154457.html

the NSA in your ASS

this is fairly old news (1999), but new to me and most likely you.
however:

The National Security Agency (NSA), the official codebreakers / digital information gatherers / cryptography department of the United States, might have had access to any Microsoft Windows computer since Windows95.

yea, that's right:
see, there are high-encryption keys in your computer. i would think of these as wicked-good passwords, big-ass passwords that you unlock data with. these basically allow Windows to encrypt information, to an extent. in reality, there is a federal limit on encryption that can be used in or exported by the United States. what that means is that if you encrypt some information, a file, a message, whatever, you can only make it as unbreakable as the NSA said you can.

anywayz...

what i didn't know is that in Microsoft Windows, there is a key that microsoft put in, as well as one that is for use by the NSA. supposedly, these keys could allow the NSA, or maybe even microsoft, to gain full control of your computer.

not that it matters, and as if you care.

source: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5263/1.html

What's in your wallet?

Reports are just coming in about canadian coins that were embedded with tracking devices. These coins were found on high-security US contractors working in canada. The canadian government is denying any knowledge of them.

Such small transmitters should only be detectable from a few feet away. Who knows tho.

So that's cool.

Source: http://wap.usatoday.com/news.jsp?key=533869