Facebook Messenger wages war on Privacy, but does it the wrong way

After the Snowden Revelations in 2013 and multiple high-profile breaches in 2015, companies are ramping up support for better security protocols, and agencies like the NSA, which have for long been spying on people across the world without any roadblocks are waking up to see end to end encryption being enabled on apps like Whatsapp, which is used by millions of users across the globe.

The NSA may be secretly helping make Tor more Secure

In an age where we are being spied upon by our own leaders; Our calls, Messages, Emails being Monitored, it is odd to find something that has the capability to circumvent this surveillance, to allow us to do things anonymously.

The NSA is spying on ALL calls in the Bahamas

Recently, NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden had revealed the ghastly truth that the NSA had the necessary technology to spy and store an entire country’s phone calls for upto 30 minutes. But then, it hadn’t exactly been known which countries the NSA had targeted. This program was called SOMALGET and was more advanced than the MYSTIC program which merely stored stuff such as metadata.

Google ups it’s game: All Gmail messages will now be encrypted

The NSA revelations revealed that the NSA obtains company’s data by hook or by crook. By hacking into their systems or directly pressuring them to give up their data.

Snowden Documents reveal that NSA was spying on Huawei

Huawei and the United States have a strained relationship. For long, the US claimed that China was spying on the US through Huawei. This caused Huawei to withdraw from business in the US last year.

In 2012, the US House Intelligence Committee released a report which stated that Huawei’s network equipment were a threat to national security .

New Edward Snowden documents show that it was in fact the US Government which was spying on Huawei.

Your Phone’s metadata can give away much about you

Privacy is a shared concern. We all want our lives to be private and not at arm’s reach of everyone and especially not governments. Privacy concerns were amplified when the NSA revelations came in.

But a recent study showed that your phone’s metadata can be used to construct your life and is basically a breach to your privacy.

The US Goverment is surrendering over control of the internet

The United States of America controls a large part of the internet. Or atleast it did. The US announced it is loosening it’s iron hand over the Internet. The US created the internet and had since then controlled a large part of it. To refresh, your memory, the Internet started as ARPANET in the labs of the US Defence.

Leaked Snowden Documents reveal the NSA’s grand plan to hack and steal data from millions of computers

Yeah, you must have done a double take after seeing the headline. But it is true. Recently leaked Snowden documents reveal details about it. It was leaked by The Intercept. Read their article here.

Since the June of 2013, the public has been tense after Edward Snowden decided it was too much and risked his life to reveal the large scale spying programs of the NSA. They had been spying under our very nose. When they accused China of hacking their computers, they themselves were stealing information from countries worldwide and at times from their own citizens in the name of security.

At this year’s MWC , we saw the release of the privacy focused Blackphone and also the Freedom Pop ‘Snowden’ Privacy Phone as a tribute to the whistleblower and spread awareness about privacy.

Recently leaked documents by the Intercept show that the NSA was in the progress of automating the hacking process so that they can focus more on imminent threats.

The operation was codenamed TURBINE and it will dramatically improve the NSA’s hacking prowess and will allow it to steal data on a much larger scale (Read: millions) .

In 2013, it was revealed that the NSA had backdoors in many commmercial software and standards like encryption. This combined with fake Facebook webpages, spam mails with malicious links and and man-in-the-middle attacks that would “shoot” bogus data at a target’s computer when the NSA detected it was visiting a Web site the NSA could spoof (Last line from CNET) along with many others came together to form one single program which streamlined the work.

FreedomPop unveils the Snowden phone: For those who want privacy

Secure phones have almost become a fad. In the last month, we saw the Blackphone and the Boeing Black, both of which promised privacy. Even Blackberry announced at MWC 2014, it is trying to make everything more secure. In this day and age, privacy is scarce and is almost non-existent with govermental organizations spying on others and sometimes even their citizens. One such spying experiment was revealed in the summer of 2013, yes the NSA revelations. Dire times call for dire needs and this year, 2014, seems to be the year of privacy with manufacturers upping their security.

Say goodbye to NSA spying (Sort of)! Tor is developing anonymous instant messaging service.

With privacy being a valuable commodity after the NSA revelations, your most secure option for web browsing was a program called Tor. It is rumoured that Tor is something that even the behemoth NSA cannot crack. The sheer simplicity of Tor is what makes it so secure. Tor just routes your connection through many computers, so that you cannot be traced. All anyone knows is that you made a request to a server, not what it was.

Now, you can also be secure while instant messaging, as the same Tor is developing a secure IM client. It will route your IM messages through the Tor network, through many computers, so that your identity is not known. The Tor Internet Bundle, for secure web browsing was built upon,, i.e was a modified version of Mozilla’s open Firefox. Similarly, the aptly named Tor Instant Message Bundle is built upon the open source messaging service: InstantBird.