It’s likely that you’ve got details of your whole life stored on your phone—the people you know, the banks you’ve used, the videos you’ve wasted hours watching—and you don’t necessarily want that info getting out into the wider world. If you’re keen to lock down your handset against unwelcome visitors, you need to…

We've all felt the urge to snoop through our loved ones' phones before—and sometimes that itch is just too strong to resist. For some people, though, that gentle itch is more like a knife wound. And the lengths they'll go to for a peek are astounding in the creepiest possible ways.

After last week's uproar over Microsoft's 2012 snooping in a blogger's Hotmail account, the company says it will no longer perform its own email snooping in criminal cases. In an official blog post today, Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith said that, effective immediately, when investigations occur, "we…

We already knew that Obama was set to announce some major NSA reforms today, and now Reuters is reporting ahead of the event that he will prevent the Agency from looking at phone records without a legal reason.

The report from the President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies on the U.S. government's mass spying—domestically and around the globe— has much that's good in it. As the folks handling the only ongoing case where National Security Letters have been declared unconstitutional, we also…

The Central Intelligence Agency has been busy aggregating a huge database of international money transfers, according to the Wall Street Journal—and it includes millions of Americans' financial and personal data.

German newspaper Spiegel Online reports that the NSA has its own financial database to track money flows through a "tailored access operations" division.

It's come to light that the NSA has impersonated Google—and possibly other big websites—in order to intercept, store, and read supposedly secure online communications.

The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) just today released hundreds of pages of documents related to the government's secret interpretation of Patriot Act Section 215 and the NSA's (mis)use of its massive database of every American's phone records. The documents were released as a result of EFF's ongoing Freedom…

The Wall Street Journal published an important investigation last week, reporting that the National Security Agency (NSA) has direct access to many key telecommunications switches around the country and “has the capacity to reach roughly 75% of all U.S. Internet traffic in the hunt for foreign intelligence, including…

It’s been two months since President Barack Obama first said that he welcomes a debate about NSA surveillance, which he once again reiterated last week at his press conference. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to have a real debate about a subject when the administration constantly and intentionally misleads Americans…

An important New York Times investigation from today reporting that the NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country," coupled with leaked documents published by the Guardian, seriously calls into question the accuracy of crucial statements…

If there is one thing we can all agree on, it's that being at work is different than from being at home. Well, unless you work at home or live at work, which, um, maybe we can't agree on anything. But! The things you do on the computer at work should probably be different from your Internetting at home. But sometimes…

Skype has long claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted", an architectural category that suggests conversations over the service would be difficult or impossible to eavesdrop upon, even given control of users' Internet connections. But Skype's 2005 independent security review admits a caveat to this protection: "defeat of…

Bloomberg is reporting that the recent NSA Prism scandal is just a tiny scratch on the privacy surface. Citing "four people familiar with the process", the agency claims that in fact thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies work with US national security agencies.

Everyone knows the IRS is our nation's tax collector, but it is also a law enforcement organization tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax laws. New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS…

This new web app mashes together insecure feeds from Trendnet home security cameras with Google Maps to let you spy on people all over the world. It's horrible, dreadful, disgusting—and utterly compelling.

Bitdefender's Clueful, once an iOS app in its own right that Apple apparently took offence to, is now back as a webapp. Use it to find out if your apps are spying on you, storing your personal information, and sending it anywhere you might not want them to. Essential for the paranoid; interesting for the curious. […

As if Instagram wasn't already an amazing way to snoop on what people are doing around the entire planet, a new website called The Beat lets you see exactly where the photographs were taken, too.