Lebanon sentences 4 Israeli spies to death

presstv.ir
A Lebanese Military court has sentenced to death four people on charges of spying for Israel and conspiring with the regime to wage a war on the country.

Two of the defendants were tried in absentia because they had reportedly fled to Israel, the Lebanese media reported on Wednesday.

The other two were a staff sergeant in the Lebanese internal security services and his wife.

The four were found guilty of “conspiring with Israel, allowing it to launch an attack against Lebanon and to make contacts with its agents in Lebanon.”

Lebanon launched a counter espionage crackdown last spring through which it arrested at least 100 suspects.

According to senior Lebanese security officials the arrests have dealt a severe blow to Israel’s spy networks in the country.

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Note: “Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem”…JDL

Camera hidden in a tissue box is pretty unsettling

dvice.com

t’s official: you can never be sure someone isn’t watching you at all times. I mean, just take a look at this tissue box. It looks benign enough. But inside is a camera that takes color footage in the daytime and black and white footage at night, all at a resolution of 720×480 with a framerate of 30fps. It uses SD cards to store footage, and can be programmed to activate automatically at a particular time. In fact, there might be one somewhere in your home right now. Probably not, but there might be.

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Four Indicted In $9 Million RBS WorldPay Hack

informationweek.com
Four men were indicted on Tuesday for allegedly hacking into Atlanta, Ga.-based payment processor RBS WorldPay and stealing over $9 million from ATMs around the globe.

A federal grand jury returned indictments against Sergei Tsurikov, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; Viktor Pleshchuk, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia; Oleg Covelin, 28, of Chisinau, Moldova; and a person identified only as “Hacker 3.” A year ago, RBS WorldPay, owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, was hacked in what Acting U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates described as “perhaps the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attack ever conducted.”

On December 23, 2008, the company announced that on November 10 of that year, it had discovered “its computer system had been improperly accessed by an unauthorized party.”

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Government Will Pay $3 Million in Coffee Table Spying Suit

wired.com

The U.S. has agreed to pay $3 million to a former government worker who accused officials with the CIA and State Department of spying on him with a bugged coffee table.

Rather than comply with a court order to provide lawyers in the case with what the U.S. government says is classified information, the government has agreed to settle to end the 15-year-old suit.

A close review of the case suggests that the Justice Department may have also decided to pay off the plaintiff in order to quash the series of damaging legal rulings issued by the influential judge overseeing the case that would have forced them to disclose the classified information. Those decisions may have a bearing on the “state secrets privilege” that the Bush and Obama administrations have used to try and thwart a high-profile lawsuit in California over illegal wiretapping conducted in the war on terror.

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Warning: Industrial Espionage on the rise…

cphpost.dk

Spies of old with code names and secret handshakes have been replaced with hackers and patent copiers

Companies are being warned by both an industry organisation and the national intelligence agency that industrial spies are ever present.

Jakob Scharf, head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET), recently warned that industrial espionage has been growing steadily in the last number of years and Danish companies are not impervious to it.

‘The fall of the wall did not lead to a fall in espionage activities – almost the opposite. The activities have changed in nature but spies are still a real threat to Denmark’s safety and competitiveness,’ Scharf told Politiken newspaper.

PET has been working closely with the Confederation of Danish Industry (DI) to help companies protect themselves from the threat of domestic and international spies. Industrial espionage is traditionally handled by the national police. But if the case involves foreign states, then it comes under the control of the counter-espionage unit at PET.

According to Tom Togsverd, head of DI’s IT division, cyber-crime is becoming increasingly problematic.

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Every phone call, email and internet click stored by ’state spying’ databases

Note: Eavesdropping news from across the pond. Get ready, because it’s heading this way…in fact, it’s already here! JDL

telegraph.co.uk

Every phone call, text message, email and website visit will be stored for a year for monitoring by the state.

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they are contacting, when, where and which websites they are visiting.

Despite widespread opposition over Britain’s growing surveillance society, 653 public bodies will be given access to the confidential information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the Ambulance Service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

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App Listens and Records All, Waiting for Twitterable Moment

wired.com
Careful what you say — that iPhone over there could be a live microphone.

Which is to say there’s a new, free iPhone app called Soundbiter designed to monitor the world’s audio and upload it to Twitter and Facebook with the push of a button.

When running, the Soundbiter app is constantly recording, keeping an audio buffer of a minute or so. Then when you hear a good joke, a fine guitar riff or a politician’s slip-of-the-tongue, you hit the apps’s only button, which saves the last 60 seconds of sound. From there, it’s a cinch to edit, upload, title and publish the sonic snippet to Twitter or Facebook.

Think of it as a way to make an audio version of “Overheard in New York” using an iPhone application.

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Micro Digital Audio Recorder

ts-market.com
Just when you thought that your digital recorder was as small as possible, the folks at TS-Market Ltd release the A-31 model. This recorder is the smallest among there models. It is 12% smaller than its predecessor, which is the Guinness Book of Records winner!

Being extremely miniature, the recorder supports all the technical characteristics of the Tiny series. The built-in rechargeable battery provides rather big duration of the autonomic work – up to 25 hours (sampling rate -8 k Hz, 18 K bits/sec). Firm, but light, the recorder’s metal case is available in three colors: silver, golden and black.

Six series of the Edic-mini Miniature Professional Digital Audio Recorders: Edic-mini, Edic-mini Tiny, Edic-mini Tiny 16, Edic-mini LCD, Edic-mini Pro and Edic-mini Plus. The Edic-mini Tiny series is the Guinness Book of Records winner – the world’s smallest professional audio recorders.

Just think about the possible uses for this nifty little eavesdropping device! Coming soon to a boardroom near you….

Crooks set sights on bank ATMs

2.timesdispatch.com

Crooks set sights on bank ATMs Stop and look before inserting your card into an ATM machine.

Crooks have been tampering with automated teller machines around the world — and in Virginia, striking last summer in Hampton Roads and leaving behind 100 victims including those from Richmond and Chesterfield County.

The victims were robbed of about $500,000, according to the Secret Service in Richmond. An investigation is ongoing.

Globally, thieves walk off with billions of dollars of other people’s money after skimming ATM card information and then withdrawing cash or going on shopping sprees, law-enforcement agencies say.

Don’t let thieves walk away with your hard-earned dollars.

Here’s how the con artists operate and what to look for the next time you’re ready to use an ATM:

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U.S. Agrees to Pay $3 Million to Ex-DEA Agent in 15-Year-Old CIA Spying Case

allgov.com
It took former DEA agent Richard Horn 15 years to finally win his case against the CIA for spying on him, in part because intelligence officials lied about the covert status of one of their operatives. Horn, who was stationed in Burma in the early 1990s, claimed CIA officer and Rangoon station chief Arthur M. Brown conspired with diplomat Franklin Huddle Jr. to plant a listening device in Horn’s residence and relay information back to superiors in Washington. The case was held up in federal court until this week, when U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth approved a settlement that requires the U.S. government to pay Horn $3 million.

Previously, Lamberth ruled the CIA had committed a fraud on the court when it was discovered the agency had lied about Brown’s covert status, which intelligence officials had used to delay the case on grounds it would expose the agent’s identity. It turned out Brown’s secret identity was rolled back six years ago, a fact that was not revealed to the court by the CIA.

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