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The National Security Agency has designed an Android-based phone for secure conversations between US government staff members. The phones meet the agency's strict information security rules, but are also built with commercially available components. About 100 of the phones are currently in use.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed a partial win in trying to combat warrantless wiretapping. While it had lost one appeal for carrier immunity, its representative Caroline Jewel and others were cleared by a Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals to sue the NSA, former President George W. Bush, much of the top Bush administration, and President Obama for allegedly violating the US Constitution's rights to association and reasonable search and seizure. The court had decided that there was enough specific detail about the program to go ahead with a complaint directly against the government.
The National Security Agency may have been given the authority to track movements of American citizens within the country, despite the agency's focus on foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. NSA general counsel Matthew Olsen told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the agency may have the authority to track Americans in certain situations, though he declined to elaborate.
Apple has quietly hired David Rice as its Global Director of Security, multiple insiders said on Saturday. The now former Monterey Group executive director built most of his experience as a cryptology officer in the US Navy and was also a Global Network Vulnerability analyst for the NSA. AllThingsD noted that he might be best known in public for Geekonomics, a 2007 book that argued computer security vulnerabilities represented genuine threats to US infrastructure and that companies should be liable for the damage done by unpatched exploits.
