CIA Director William Burns says he has redoubled the agency's efforts to uncover the cause of Havana syndrome -- the mysterious set of ailments that has afflicted more than 200 U.S. officials and family members around the world. NPR reports: That includes the assignment of a senior officer who once led the hunt for Osama bin Laden to lead the investigation and tripling the size of a medical team involved in the probe, Burns told NPR on Thursday in his first sit-down interview since being confirmed as the agency's chief in March. "I am absolutely determined -- and I've spent a great deal of time and energy on this in the four months that I've been CIA director -- to get to the bottom of the question of what and who caused this," Burns said. "We're no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical block, especially with the rise of China. And as you know very well, there's a revolution in technology which is transforming the way we live, work, compete and fight. And so, CIA, like everyone else in the U.S. government, has to take that into account," he said.

Under Burns' direction, the CIA has tripled the number of full-time medical personnel at the agency who are focused on Havana syndrome and has shortened the waiting period for afflicted personnel to be admitted to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. "I'm certainly persuaded that what our officers and some family members, as well as other U.S. government employees, have experienced is real, and it's serious," Burns said. The director says he is seriously considering the "very strong possibility" that the syndrome is the result of intentional actions, adding that there are a limited number of "potential suspects" with the capability to carry out an action so widely across the globe. A report from last December by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that microwave radiation is the "most plausible" explanation for the symptoms.

To head the task force investigating the syndrome, Burns has appointed a veteran officer who helped lead the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The identity of that officer is still undercover, according to The Wall Street Journal. "We're throwing the very best we have at this issue, because it is not only a very serious issue for our colleagues, as it is for others across the U.S. government, but it's a profound obligation, I think, of any leader to take care of your people," Burns said. The syndrome first appeared in 2016 at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, where more than 40 diplomats complained of symptoms such as migraines, dizziness, and memory loss. Dozens more cases have been reported in the years since.

Last week, about two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials in Vienna have reported experiencing mysterious afflictions similar to the Havana Syndrome." The Biden administration is "vigorously investigating" the reports, but the causes of the syndrome still remain unclear.

The founder of UK software firm Autonomy can be extradited to the US to face charges of conspiracy and fraud, a London court has said. The BBC reports: Mike Lynch sold Autonomy to US computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) for $11 billion in 2011. He denies allegations that he fraudulently inflated the value of Autonomy before the sale. Dr Lynch has been facing civil charges at the High Court in London, where HP is suing him for damages over the deal. But separately, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) is pursuing criminal charges against him. Judge Michael Snow said he would deliver his ruling in that action without awaiting the civil verdict, saying it was "of limited significance in the case." Dr Lynch was released on bail by the judge in London.

Dr Lynch told BBC Radio 4's Today program that the decision was not unexpected, because of the terms of the extradition treaty the UK has with the US. "We have this imbalance and this default extradition treaty which can be used [in] any dispute that's going on with American companies and their interests." "The insanity of this extradition treaty [is that] it doesn't rely on any facts," he suggested. Dr Lynch added that he felt the extradition treaty was "imbalanced" and that the British public did not realize that the US justice system works entirely differently to the UK's. He said it was "particularly egregious" that the DoJ was not waiting to see the full judgement from the UK High Court, which will be due in nine weeks' time.

He claimed his former chief financial officer Sushovan Hussain, who was jailed for five years in 2019, did not receive a fair trial. Dr Lynch said no defense witnesses turned up to Mr Hussain's trial because they were told they would be arrested if they entered the US. His lawyer Mr Morvillo said:"At the request of the US Department of Justice, the court has ruled that a British citizen who ran a British company listed on the London Stock Exchange should be extradited to America over allegations about his conduct in the UK. "We say this case belongs in the UK. If the home secretary nonetheless decides to order extradition, Dr Lynch intends to appeal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The video game studio behind the hit franchises Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush is facing a civil lawsuit in California over allegations of gender discrimination, sexual harassment and potential violations of the state's equal pay law. A complaint, filed by the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing on Wednesday, alleges that Activision Blizzard Inc. "fostered a sexist culture" where women were paid less than men and subjected to ongoing sexual harassment including groping. (Activision and Blizzard Entertainment merged in 2008.)

Officials at the gaming company knew about the harassment and not only failed to stop it but retaliated against women who spoke up, the complaint also alleges. Years after the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate targeted women in the video game world, the California lawsuit depicts an industry that can still be unwelcoming and even hostile to female employees. "All employers should ensure that their employees are being paid equally and take all steps to prevent discrimination, harassment, and retaliation," said DFEH Director Kevin Kish. "This is especially important for employers in male-dominated industries, such as technology and gaming."

The lawsuit alleges that Activision Blizzard's female workers who spoke to investigators "almost universally confirmed" that their time at the company was "akin to working in a frat house." Male employees drank on the job and came to work hungover, the lawsuit said. The alleged sexual harassment ranged from comments about women's bodies and jokes about rape to the unwanted touching of female employees by their male peers. The complaint, which was the result of a two-year investigation by DFEH, claims that the unequal treatment of women went beyond company culture to the more formal parts of their jobs. Women were allegedly paid less than men, both when they were hired and during the course of their employment. They were also assigned to lower-level positions and passed over for promotions, despite doing more work than their male peers in some cases, according to the lawsuit. One woman said her manager told her she wouldn't be promoted because "she might get pregnant and like being a mom too much." The sex discrimination was even worse for women of color, the suit claims. At least two African-American women reported being singled out and micromanaged. Some of the women who came forward with complaints of discrimination or harassment faced involuntary transfers, were selected for layoffs or were denied certain opportunities, the suit said. In a statement, an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said the company had worked to improve its company culture in recent years and accused the DFEH of not adequately trying to resolve the claims against it before resorting to a lawsuit.

"The DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard's past," the statement read. "The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today."

In response to the company's rebuttal, former Blizzard Entertainment employee Cher Scarlett tweeted: "This is certainly LONG overdue. I would be hard-pressed to find someone that wasn't witness to sex in the game lounges, coke in the bathrooms during a cube crawl, or a woman who wasn't sexually harassed at least once. I am so proud of these women." Scarlett added: "Blizzard has claimed that the DFEH report is false/misleading/irresponsible. I can tell you that I knew what was going to be in this report before I read it because during my time there - for only a YEAR - I witnessed ALL OF THESE THINGS. AND NAME NAMES."

After years of warning from researchers, journalists, and even governments, someone used highly sensitive location data from a smartphone app to track and publicly harass a specific person. From a report: In this case, Catholic Substack publication The Pillar said it used location data ultimately tied to Grindr to trace the movements of a priest, and then outed him publicly as potentially gay without his consent. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the outing led to his resignation.

The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled, unscrupulous, or dangerous individual. A growing market of data brokers that collect and sell data from countless apps has made it so that anyone with a bit of cash and effort can figure out which phone in a so-called anonymized dataset belongs to a target, and abuse that information. "Experts have warned for years that data collected by advertising companies from Americans' phones could be used to track them and reveal the most personal details of their lives. Unfortunately, they were right," Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement, responding to the incident

The maker of powerful spy software allegedly used to hack the phones of innocent people says blaming the company is like "criticising a car manufacturer when a drunk driver crashes." From a report: NSO Group is facing international criticism, after reporters obtained a list of alleged potential targets for spyware, including activists, politicians and journalists. Investigations have begun as the list, of 50,000 phone numbers, contained a small number of hacked phones. Pegasus infects iPhones and Android devices, allowing operators to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones and cameras. NSO Group has said the software is intended for use against criminals and terrorists and made available to only military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human-rights records. But a consortium of news organisations, led by French media outlet Forbidden Stories, has published dozens of stories based around the list, including allegations French President Emmanuel Macron's number was on it and may have been targeted.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A federal judge forced a US Capitol rioter to unlock his laptop Wednesday after prosecutors argued that it likely contained footage of the January 6 insurrection from his helmet-worn camera. The judge granted the Justice Department's request to place Capitol riot defendant Guy Reffitt in front of his laptop so they could use facial recognition to unlock the device. The maneuver happened after the hearing ended and Reffitt's lawyer confirmed to CNN that the laptop was unlocked. Investigators seized the laptop and other devices earlier this year pursuant to a search warrant.

Reffitt has been in jail since his arrest in January. His case received national attention after his son spoke publicly about how Reffitt had threatened to kill family members if they turned him into the FBI. The case became an example of how former President Donald Trump's lies tore some families apart -- Reffitt's son and daughter testified against him in court or before the grand jury. He pleaded not guilty to five federal crimes, including bringing a handgun to the Capitol grounds during the insurrection and obstructing justice by allegedly threatening his family. The felony gun charge was added last month, and undercuts false claims from Trump and prominent Republican lawmakers that the rioters weren't armed and that they had "no guns whatsoever." The case raised intriguing constitutional questions about the right against self-incrimination, but Judge Dabney Friedrich agreed with prosecutors that the unlocking was within the law. "As the court here noted, requiring a defendant to expose his face to unlock a computer can be lawful, and is not far removed from other procedures that are now routinely approved by courts, with proper justification: standing in a lineup, submitting a handwriting or voice exemplar, or submitting a blood or DNA sample," CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said in an email.

Honig said judges try to strike a balance "between respecting a defendant's privacy and other rights on the one hand, and enabling prosecutors to obtain potentially crucial evidence with minimal intrusion on the defendant's rights, on the other." The "potentially crucial evidence" here may include footage of the handgun that Reffitt brought to the Capitol or comments he made about his intentions that day.

quonset writes: Wherever the president goes, so goes the nuclear football, a 45 pound case which allows the president to to confirm his identity and authorize a nuclear strike. The Football also provides the commander in chief with a simplified menu of nuclear strike options -- allowing him to decide, for example, whether to destroy all of America's enemies in one fell swoop or to limit himself to obliterating only Moscow or Pyongyang or Beijing.

During the attempted insurrection on January 6th, video from inside the capitol showed the mob coming within 100 feet of then-Vice President Mike Pence and his military aide who was carrying a second nuclear football. Had they lost control of the case, no nuclear weapons could have been launched, but the highly classified information within the case could have been leaked, or sold, to nation states.

As a result, members of Congress asked the Pentagon to review procedures for handling and security of the nuclear football. The Department of Defense Inspector General will evaluate the policies and procedures around the Presidential Emergency Satchel, also known as the "nuclear football," in the event that it is "lost, stolen, or compromised," according to an announcement from the DoD IG's office. This would not be the first time procedures for the case have been reviewed. Jimmy Carter, who qualified as a nuclear sub commander, was aware that he would have only a few minutes to decide how to respond to a nuclear strike against the United States. Carter ordered that the war plans be drastically simplified. A former military aide to President Bill Clinton, Col. Buzz Patterson, would later describe the resulting pared-down set of choices as akin to a "Denny's breakfast menu." "It's like picking one out of Column A and two out of Column B," he told the History Channel.

Following Carter, an incident during the Reagan administration led to another review. In the chaos after the attempted assassination, the aide carrying the case was separated from Reagan and did not accompany him to the hospital. When Reagan was stripped of his clothes prior to going into surgery, the biscuit, a card every president is given, which, if needed, can personally identify the president, was found abandoned in a hospital plastic bag. Bill Clinton had his review moment when it was discovered he had lost his biscuit for months, and never told anyone.

A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that lead to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today. Krebs on Security reports: Shane Sonderman, of Lauderdale County, Tenn. admitted to conspiring with a group of criminals that's been "swatting" and harassing people for months in a bid to coerce targets into giving up their valuable Twitter and Instagram usernames. At Sonderman's sentencing hearing today, prosecutors told the court the defendant and his co-conspirators would text and call targets and their families, posting their personal information online and sending them pizzas and other deliveries of food as a harassment technique.

Other victims of the group told prosecutors their tormentors further harassed them by making false reports of child abuse to social services local to the target's area, and false reports in the target's name to local suicide prevention hotlines. Eventually, when subjects of their harassment refused to sell or give up their Twitter and Instagram usernames, Sonderman and others would swat their targets -- or make a false report to authorities in the target's name with the intention of sending a heavily armed police response to that person's address. [...]

Sonderman might have been eligible to knock a few months off his sentence had he cooperated with investigators and refrained from committing further crimes while out on bond. But prosecutors said that shortly after his release, Sonderman went right back to doing what he was doing when he got caught. Investigators who subpoenaed his online communications found he'd logged into the Instagram account "FreeTheSoldiers," which was known to have been used by the group to harass people for their social media handles. Sonderman was promptly re-arrested for violating the terms of his release, and prosecutors played for the court today a recording of a phone call Sonderman made from jail in which he brags to a female acquaintance that he wiped his mobile phone two days before investigators served another search warrant on his home. "Although it may seem inadequate, the law is the law," said Judge Norris after giving Sonderman the maximum sentence allowed by law under the statute. "The harm it caused, the death and destruction... it's almost unspeakable. This is not like cases we frequently have that involve guns and carjacking and drugs. This is a whole different level of insidious criminal behavior here."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Federal Trade Commission unanimously voted Wednesday to pursue policies that will make it easier for people to repair their own things. In a vote of 5-0 during a Commission Meeting, the FTC agreed to adopt a policy paper outlining how it planned to enforce rules that keep manufacturers from restricting aftermarket repair. It plans to enforce existing warranty law, coordinate with state and local lawmakers to ensure open markets, and investigate the current repair monopolies for violations of antitrust law. The move comes just weeks after President Joe Biden signed an executive order directing the commission to create right-to-repair rules.

The FTC policy paper outlined a five-pronged approach to the problem. First, it's asking for comments and complaints from the public about bad experiences it's had with repair issues and violated warranty. It's long been illegal under federal law for companies to void warranties based on aftermarket repairs. The problem is that those laws often aren't enforced, though the FTC did take some action on manufacturers who put warranty-void-if-removed stickers on their devices after Motherboard reported on the problem several years ago. "While current law does not provide for civil penalties or redress, the Commission will consider filing suit against violators of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act to seek appropriate injunctive relief," the policy paper said.

Next, the FTC said it will look over current repair restrictions for violations of existing antitrust and anti-competition laws. "Finally, the Commission will bring an interdisciplinary approach to this issue, using resources and expertise from throughout the agency to combat unlawful repair restrictions," the policy paper said. "The FTC will also closely coordinate with state law enforcement and policymakers to ensure compliance and to update existing law and regulation to advance the goal of open repair markets." "Manufacturers, be warned: It's time to clean up your act and let people fix their stuff," Nathan Proctor, U.S. PIRG Right to Repair Senior Campaign Director, told Motherboard in an email. "With unanimous support from commissioners, there's a new sheriff in town. The FTC is ready to act to stop many of the schemes used to undermine repair, while support is increasing for new legislation to further crack down."

Amid the varied cast of people whose numbers appear on a list of individuals selected by NSO Group's client governments, one name stands out as particularly ironic. Pavel Durov, the enigmatic Russian-born tech billionaire who has built his reputation on creating an unhackable messaging app, finds his own number on the list. From a report: Durov, 36, is the founder of Telegram, which claims to have more than half a billion users. Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted messaging and users can also set up "channels" to disseminate information quickly to followers. It has found popularity among those keen to evade the snooping eyes of governments, whether they be criminals, terrorists or protesters battling authoritarian regimes. In recent years, Durov has publicly rubbished the security standards of competitors, particularly WhatsApp, which he has claimed is "dangerous" to use. By contrast, he has positioned Telegram as a plucky upstart determined to safeguard the privacy of its users at all costs.

A 22-year-old UK national was arrested today in Spain for his role in hacking Twitter's internal network and hijacking high-profile accounts in July last year. From a report: Joseph O'Connor, 22, was arrested today in the city of Estepona, in southern Spain, by Spanish National Police pursuant to a US arrest warrant. O'Connor marks the fourth man linked to the Twitter 2020 hack, after three men were charged and detained on July 31, last year. O'Conner, who went online as "j0e," worked with the other three to gain access to one of Twitter's internal Slack channels. The group found credentials in the Slack workplaces that allowed them to gain access to Twitter's moderation panel.

Venmo announced it's removing its global social feed on Tuesday, the payment appâ(TM)s notorious feature that allows strangers to potentially view payments you make and receive on Venmo. From a report: Now Venmo's social elements will be limited to your actual friends on the app in the "friends feed" without you having to toggle any features in the app. The company buried the change in a blog post detailing an update to the Venmo app. [...] Until recently, Venmo also offered users no control over who saw their friends list within the app, which is potentially incriminating in an entirely separate way from seeing the content of a transaction. After Buzzfeed News discovered President Biden's Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle via the friends list, the company added additional privacy controls for the visibility of your Venmo contacts.

France is looking into a news report that the phone of French President Emmanuel Macron may have been tapped on behalf of Morocco using spyware developed by Israel's NSO group, his office said Tuesday. From a report: A Moroccan surveillance agency attempted to access his private conversations in 2019, according to an international investigation cited by France Info, which took part in the project. Other heads of state and government members -- including about 15 French ministers or ex-ministers were also targeted -- the probe showed. Morocco has denied responsibility, France Info reported. The Pegasus spyware was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, activists and business executives worldwide, according to the investigation led by the Paris-based not-for-profit Forbidden Stories, which relied on evidence extracted from the phones through forensic analysis by Amnesty International.

President Joe Biden plans to nominate Jonathan Kanter as head of the Justice Department's antitrust division, Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter, the latest sign that the administration is preparing a broad crackdown on large technology companies. From the report: Kanter, who left one of the country's biggest law firms last year to start his own firm, is a long-time foe of Alphabet's Google, representing companies that have pushed antitrust enforcers to sue the search giant.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has called out apps made by Amazon, NetEase and Tiktok-owner ByteDance, as well as 142 other apps, for violating users' rights. From a report: Amazon's China app and NetEase's Dashen, an online community for gamers, have illegally collected user information, the ministry said in its latest list of problematic apps released on Monday. In addition, Douyin Lite, a version of TikTok's Chinese app made for lower-end phones, did not clearly display app information on the app store while Huya, a major live-streaming platform backed by Tencent Holdings, was found to have deceived, misled or forced users to turn on certain permissions, according to the ministry. Amazon said in an emailed statement that it will "continue to coordinate closely with the ministry to ensure we are meeting its requirements." Other app operators did not immediately reply to requests for comment. As part of the regular naming and shaming of Chinese apps by the central government, the MIIT has exerted its authority since 2019 with a total of 15 lists of problematic apps, including 6 so far this year.

DuckDuckGo is launching a new email privacy service meant to stop ad companies from spying on your inbox. From a report: The company's new Email Protection feature gives users a free "@duck.com" email address, which will forward emails to your regular inbox after analyzing their contents for trackers and stripping any away. DuckDuckGo is also extending this feature with unique, disposable forwarding addresses, which can be generated easily in DuckDuckGo's mobile browser or through desktop browser extensions.

The personal DuckDuckGo email is meant to be given out to friends and contacts you know, while the disposable addresses are better served when signing up for free trials, newsletters, or anywhere you suspect might sell your email address. If the email address is compromised, you can easily deactivate it. These tools are similar to anti-tracking features implemented by Apple in iOS 14 and iOS 15, but DuckDuckGo's approach integrates into iOS, Android, and all major web browsers. DuckDuckGo will also make it easier to spin up disposable email addresses on the fly, for newsletters or anywhere you might share your email.

Governments must impose a global moratorium on the international spyware trade or face a world in which no mobile phone is safe from state-sponsored hackers, Edward Snowden has warned in the wake of revelations about the clients of NSO Group. The Guardian reports: Snowden, who in 2013 blew the whistle on the secret mass surveillance programs of the US National Security Agency, described for-profit malware developers as "an industry that should not exist." He made the comments in an interview with the Guardian after the first revelations from the Pegasus project, a journalistic investigation by a consortium of international media organizations into the NSO Group and its clients. [...] Snowden said the consortium's findings illustrated how commercial malware had made it possible for repressive regimes to place vastly more people under the most invasive types of surveillance. For traditional police operations to plant bugs or wiretap a suspect's phone, law enforcement would need to "break into somebody's house, or go to their car, or go to their office, and we'd like to think they'll probably get a warrant," he said. But commercial spyware made it cost-efficient for targeted surveillance against vastly more people. "If they can do the same thing from a distance, with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time, against everyone who's even marginally of interest," he said. "If you don't do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it's not just going to be 50,000 targets. It's going to be 50 million targets, and it's going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect."

Part of the problem arose from the fact that different people's mobile phones were functionally identical to one another, he said. "When we're talking about something like an iPhone, they're all running the same software around the world. So if they find a way to hack one iPhone, they've found a way to hack all of them." He compared companies commercializing vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models to an industry of "infectioneers" deliberately trying to develop new strains of disease. "It's like an industry where the only thing they did was create custom variants of Covid to dodge vaccines," he said. "Their only products are infection vectors. They're not security products. They're not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic. They don't make vaccines -- the only thing they sell is the virus."

Snowden said commercial malware such as Pegasus was so powerful that ordinary people could in effect do nothing to stop it. Asked how people could protect themselves, he said: "What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons? "There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection, and that's why we try to limit the proliferation of these technologies. We don't allow a commercial market in nuclear weapons." He said the only viable solution to the threat of commercial malware was an international moratorium on its sale. "What the Pegasus project reveals is the NSO Group is really representative of a new malware market, where this is a for-profit business," he said. "The only reason NSO is doing this is not to save the world, it's to make money." He said a global ban on the trade in infection vectors would prevent commercial abuse of vulnerabilities in mobile phones, while still allowing researchers to identify and fix them. "The solution here for ordinary people is to work collectively. This is not a problem that we want to try and solve individually, because it's you versus a billion dollar company," he said. "If you want to protect yourself you have to change the game, and the way we do that is by ending this trade."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China's tech tycoons are discovering their charitable side as they come under mounting regulatory scrutiny from Beijing. In the latest example, Xiaomi co-founder Lei Jun handed over $2.2 billion of shares in the smartphone maker to two foundations, according to filings to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. That came after Meituan's Wang Xing and ByteDance's Zhang Yiming gave away parts of their fortune to charitable causes last month. The moves come as a crackdown on technology companies has intensified since November, when Jack Ma's Ant Group was forced to pull its giant initial public offering. It's a new era for the country's billionaires as China tightens regulations in areas from financial services and internet platforms to data security and overseas listings.

At the same time, the Chinese public is becoming increasingly concerned about inequality. In a speech in October, President Xi Jinping said the country's development was "unbalanced" and "common prosperity" should be the ultimate goal. "It's likely much more than coincidence that China's tech billionaires have begun to evince a strong charitable urge," said Brock Silvers, chief investment officer at Hong Kong-based private equity firm Kaiyuan Capital. "It could stem from deep patriotic feelings or Buddhist inclinations, but it appears to be strongly correlated to Beijing's recent regulatory crackdowns."

In June, Meituan founder Wang donated a $2.3 billion stake in the food delivery giant to his own philanthropic foundation. That came after China's antitrust watchdog announced an investigation into the company, and the billionaire posted a classical poem online that some saw as a veiled criticism of Beijing. That same month, ByteDance founder Zhang, China's fourth-richest person with a net worth of $44.5 billion, gave about $77 million of his own wealth to an education fund in his hometown. And in April, Tencent's Pony Ma, the second-richest with $56.7 billion, pledged to set aside $7.7 billion of the company's money toward curing societal ills and lifting China's countryside out of poverty.

The man behind last month's scraping of LinkedIn data, which exposed the location, phone numbers, and inferred salaries of 700 million users, says that he did it "for fun" -- though he is also selling the data. 9to5Mac reports: BBC News spoke with the man who took the data, under the name Tom Liner: "How would you feel if all your information was catalogued by a hacker and put into a monster spreadsheet with millions of entries, to be sold online to the highest paying cyber-criminal? That's what a hacker calling himself Tom Liner did last month 'for fun' when he compiled a database of 700 million LinkedIn users from all over the world, which he is selling for around $5,000 [...]. In the case of Mr Liner, his latest exploit was announced at 08:57 BST in a post on a notorious hacking forum [...] 'Hi, I have 700 million 2021 LinkedIn records,' he wrote. Included in the post was a link to a sample of a million records and an invite for other hackers to contact him privately and make him offers for his database."

Liner says he was also behind the scraping of 533 million Facebook profiles back in April (you can check whether your data was grabbed): "Tom told me he created the 700 million LinkedIn database using 'almost the exact same technique' that he used to create the Facebook list. He said: 'It took me several months to do. It was very complex. I had to hack the API of LinkedIn. If you do too many requests for user data in one time then the system will permanently ban you.'"

Cellphones "can be transformed into surveillance devices," writes the Guardian, reporting startling new details about which innocent people are still being surveilled (as part of a collaborative reporting project with 16 other media outlets led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories).

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen shared the newspaper's critique of a "privatised government surveillance industry" that's made NSO a billion-dollar company, thanks to its phone-penetrating spy software Pegaus: [NSO] insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of "legitimate criminal or terror group targets". Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data... The presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools. Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state. Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO's technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware.

But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups [which track the general locations of cellphone users] can be exploited in this environment.

It is not possible to know without forensic analysis whether the phone of someone whose number appears in the data was actually targeted by a government or whether it was successfully hacked with NSO's spyware. But when our technical partner, Amnesty International's Security Lab, conducted forensic analysis on dozens of iPhones that belonged to potential targets at the time they were selected, they found evidence of Pegasus activity in more than half.
The investigators say that potential targets included nearly 200 journalists around the world, including numerous reporters from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, and even the editor of the Financial Times.

In addition, the investigators say they found evidence the Pegasus software had been installed on the phone of the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. NSO denies this to the Washington Post. But they also insist that they're simply licensing their software to clients, and their company "has no insight" into those clients' specific intelligence activities.

The Washington Post reports that Amnesty's Security Lab found evidence of Pegasus attacks on 37 of 67 smartphones from the list which they tested. But beyond that "for the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty's detective work."

Familiar privacy measures like strong passwords and encryption offer little help against Pegasus, which can attack phones without any warning to users. It can read anything on a device that a user can, while also stealing photos, recordings, location records, communications, passwords, call logs and social media posts. Spyware also can activate cameras and microphones for real-time surveillance.