spying

What if the FBI could force Samsung to covertly turn on the video camera in your smart TV? Or force Google to deliver a malicious security update to your web browser which actually spied on you and transmitted your passwords and other sensitive information back to the FBI?

The leak was embarrassingly timed for French lawmakers, who were expected to approve sweeping new powers to spy on citizens later on Wednesday.

Relations soured between the two countries late last month after Peru claimed Chile paid three members of the Peruvian navy to spy on their own nation.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Costa Rica 16th out of 180 countries surveyed in its annual press freedom index. The ranking is Costa Rica’s best showing since 2002, when the country was listed at 15th, despite police intercepting phone records from a journalist at the daily Diario Extra.

In recent weeks, a research consortium has detected Axiom malicious software on at least 43,000 computers around the world belonging to law enforcement and other government agencies, journalists, telecommunication and energy firms, as well as human rights and pro-democracy groups.

The Associated Press revealed more details Monday morning about Costa Rican involvement in United States Agency for International Development’s covert anti-Cuba operations, including the use of HIV-prevention workshops as fronts for recruiting pro-democracy activists.

Libertarian Movement Party lawmaker and former presidential hopeful Otto Guevara has presented a bill to abolish Costa Rica's Department of Intelligence and Security, and President Luis Guillermo Solís' pick to head the agency has drawn criticism.

On Thursday, the United States Agency for International Development confirmed the broad outlines of an Associated Press report exposing the clandestine creation of a phony "Cuban Twitter" network that was meant to undermine the Castro government.

The White House has proposed to halt the National Security Agency's controversial bulk telephone data collection of U.S. .citizens, a program which sparked a vast public outcry.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The United States National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording "100 percent" of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.