NSA

Spy Games: the NSA and GCHQ Offer Their Software to the Open Source Community

Spies worth their salt are generally expected to be good at keeping secrets. With dead drops, encryption, cyanide pills and the like, openly sharing useful information isn’t supposed to be a part of the job description. So it caught more than a few of us off guard when a couple years ago, some of the top spy agencies began contributing code to GitHub, making it available to the masses by open-sourcing some of their software.

The Linux Journal NSA Reading List: Tails and Tor

Tails is a live media Linux distro designed to boot into a highly secure desktop environment. Tor is a browser that prevents somebody watching your internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Learn why anonymity matters and how you can protect yourself by reading the following archived Linux Journal articles:

Best of Hack and /

Secure Server Deployments in Hostile Territory; Preseeding Full Disk Encryption; Own Your Own DNS; Learn How-to Secure Desktops with Qubes; What's New In 3D Printing

Dolphins in the NSA Dragnet

There's an old quote from Jamie Zawinkski that goes: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I'll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems." Even people like me who like regular expressions laugh at the truth in that quote, because we've seen the consequences when someone doesn't think through the implications of a poorly written pattern. When some people write a bad pattern, they end up with extra lines in a log file. When the NSA does it, they capture and retain Internet traffic on untold numbers of innocent people.