The NSA Posed as Facebook to Spy on You

[Capt Worley PE]

You’re probably already well aware that the National Security Agency is spying on you. A new report from The Intercept reveals yet another place they’re doing it.

The NSA pretended to be Facebook—you know, that 500-million person social network—so it could trick you into downloading invasive malware. Per the piece:

"In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive," Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald report. "In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam."

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/the-nsa-posed-as-facebook-to-better-spy-on-you-79363438970.html

 

[NJmike PE]

how is this even legal? I'm getting closer and closer to pulling the plug.

 

[Supe]

Don't you know that's how they really caught Bin Laden? They waited until he started posting a bunch of Facebook selfies and traced it back to his bunker.

 

[knight1fox3]

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the first name that comes to mind as a champion of privacy. But the seemingly endless revelations of NSA surveillance programs has inspired Facebook’s founder to call up no less than President Obama himself to defend his users from government intrusion.


On Thursday Zuckerberg posted a statement on Facebook calling on the U.S. government to take more measures to respect users’ privacy and security. “The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat,” reads his statement. “I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.”

Though Zuckerberg never explicitly names the NSA in his statement, his comments follow news of NSA programs that have potentially allowed spying on Facebook users for years–particularly the majority of those users outside the United States. The initial stories on the NSA’s PRISM program last July cited NSA slides that made Facebook appear to have given direct backdoor access to its servers, a notion Zuckerberg and others have vehemently denied. In October, more revelations pointed to NSA efforts to decrypt or surveil data as it traveled between the data centers of companies like Yahoo! and Google. Yet another program siphoned users’ entire contact lists from services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Facebook–NSA documents cited a single day when 82,857 contact lists were taken from Facebook users.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/03/13/zuckerberg-says-he-called-obama-to-express-frustration-over-nsa-surveillance/

 

[YMZ PE]

^ I read that as "Zuckerberg tries desperate bid to keep Facebook traffic from dropping even further into the abyss. Obama shrugs and says, 'Meh'."