surveillance

Now that we have cameras tiny enough to wend their way through the human body, it's not entirely surprising that there's a camcorder the size of a pack of gum. (In fact, we're more surprised that people are still chewing Wrigley's Doublemint.)

Nevertheless, SpyGadgets says its "Micro-Camcorder" is the "smallest high-resolution, real-time digital camcorder ever produced." (Couldn't they cram any more qualifiers into that claim?) Marketing-speak aside, this $295 surveillance gadget is supposed to record both audio and up to 33 hours of video on a 1GB micro-SD card--but, as Gizmodo … Read more

President Bush this week ventured by helicopter to the National Security Agency's Maryland headquarters, where he made a public, photographed, 6-minute plea to Congress: Make expanded Internet and phone surveillance powers permanent.

Without an extension of the "tools" provided by the Protect America Act, which is set to expire February 1, "our country will be much more vulnerable to attack," Bush said Wednesday, according to the White House's transcript of his remarks.

The president said Congress must heed the repeated statements by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell about the importance of the temporary … Read more

President Bush's nominee to replace departing Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has a history of sticking up for the electronic-surveillance powers expanded by the controversial USA Patriot Act.

That's one of the tidbits about retired federal judge Michael Mukasey that the White House is playing up--in boldface type, no less--as part of a fact sheet distributed as the president announced his pick Monday.

Mukasey, a Reagan appointee with 18 years of experience as a district judge in New York, aired an apparently pro-Patriot Act position in a 2004 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, suggesting that the law gave … Read more

Earlier this week, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate committee that a recent expansion of electronic snooping law helped lead to a recent trio of terror arrests in Germany.

Now he's publicly admitting that he was wrong, which may complicate the Bush administration's efforts to renew and further expand the controversial new law.

"The Protect America Act was urgently needed by our intelligence professionals to close critical gaps in our capabilities and permit them to more readily follow terrorist threats, such as the plot uncovered in Germany," he said in a statement issued … Read more

Spying on other people's PCs can be such a hassle. For one thing, you've got to find a way to surreptitiously install key-logging software or other surveillance hardware. But the clever blokes at U.K.-based Spy Warehouse have come up with a practical alternative: Why not give the subject a new keyboard already equipped for espioniage?

Its "Covert Keylogger Keyboard" is a Microsoft board outfitted with a 2MB storage device that SCI FI Tech says can track up to 2 million keystrokes. There are just two problems: Only one of them has been made--for 215 … Read more

WASHINGTON--A recent expansion of U.S. eavesdropping law helped lead to the high-profile arrest of three terrorism suspects in Germany last week, the nation's intelligence director told senators on Monday.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell credited Congress's much-criticized update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last month with making "significant contributions" that ultimately allowed the U.S. government to aid German investigators. The apprehensions targeted what were described as Islamic militants plotting attacks against sites regularly visited by Americans.

McConnell spoke at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing here, which was … Read more

Top Democrats on a congressional Homeland Security Committee have formally asked the Bush administration to place a "moratorium" on new plans to make detailed satellite images available to a wider range of government agencies.

The move, in the form of letter released Thursday evening, arrived after a lengthy hearing about the topic on earlier that day.

In the letter, House of Representatives' Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and subcommittee chairpeople Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Christopher Carney (D-Pa.) said the day's testimony from Department of Homeland Security officials and the planned program's head, Charles Allen, &… Read more

In the name of nabbing terrorists, the German government is floating a plan that would permit authorities to plant spyware on suspects' hard drives through e-mail messages appearing to stem from official sources, according to various news reports out of Berlin this week.

The proposal, which has not yet been made public but was leaked in part to some German news outlets, is reportedly the brainchild of Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble. He's pushing for its inclusion in a broader security law under consideration by Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government. The spyware provision is a response to a federal … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Opponents of a controversial surveillance program told a federal judge on Thursday that the government has admitted to eavesdropping on private communications of American citizens--with the help of several telecoms--and must not be allowed to hide behind executive privilege.

Attorneys representing now consolidated class-action lawsuits against Verizon Communications and the government for allegedly violating federal privacy laws faced off with lawyers from the carriers and the Department of Justice here Thursday.

The government wants the case thrown out and told U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker that the other side doesn't know whether federal laws were broken because … Read more