from ft.com

France is boosting its fight against corporate espionage after belatedly realising that some of its largest trading partners have been extensively spying on its companies, according to the country’s corporate intelligence chief.

Jean-Baptiste Carpentier, head of the newly created Strategic Intelligence and Economic Security unit, said Paris realised how vulnerable it was three years ago. Edward Snowden, the former US government contractor, alleged then that the US National Security Agency had engaged in corporate espionage for decades — and that France was one of its main targets in Europe.

By contrast, after the fall of the Berlin wall, the French government has rarely considered national interests when looking at the activities of private companies, Mr Carpentier said.

“Laissez-faire […]

The following is from the Chicago Tribune:

Long before iPhones, cops battled phone use in fight against gambling

It’s probably safe to assume that shortly after man first harnessed the power of fire, someone committed the first act of arson. And so it has gone with every great innovation in history. Great leaps of technology usher in new crimes, which require new laws that unleash new struggles over enforcement.

The invention of the telephone in 1876 marked a new telecommunications era that eventually changed virtually everything, from business transactions to warfare and romance. And, of course, crime. In 1904, Chicago got an early taste of how the competing interests of security and privacy would start to play out for law enforcement and the telecom industry — in an episode with echoes of today’s dispute between Apple and theFBI, over information that might be gleaned about the attack in San […]

Your 3D printer is telling people what it’s making

From: cnet.com: In research demonstrating that industrial espionage may be as simple as opening a recording app on your smartphone, a team led by Professor Mohammad Al Faruque at the University of California at Irvine has shown that it is possible to reconstruct a 3D model based solely on audio of the printer in action.

According to the team’s research, the sounds made by a 3D printer can be used to ascertain the position and movements of its extruder. A recording of these sounds can then be used to reverse engineer these positions and use them to recreate a model of the object being printed.

Advanced parts made by 3D printing could be at risk.

Encryption can be used to protect a file. But once the design gets to the printer, the sounds of the motors give […]

from NL Times

Intelligence and security service AIVD unjustly spied on communications between lawyers and clients 13 times between February 2014 and March 2015, according to the annual report by the CTIVD, the committee responsible for supervising the Dutch intelligence and security services, RTL Nieuws reports.

In July last year a court in The Hague ruled that the AIVD must stop eavesdropping on confidential conversations between lawyers and their clients if there is no direct danger to national security. The AIVD did not meet these requirements in 13 of its eavesdropping cases.

AIVD office in Zoetermeer

The AIVD also spied on detailed discussions related to an individuals sex life in one investigation. In another investigation the security service eavesdropped on a non-target in order to approach the person with foreknowledge. The CTIVD found both incidents unjustified and unlawful.

Due to an “intensification of […]

The Daily Beast reports:

VATICAN CITY — For many inside the Vatican, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui was trouble from the start. The willowy 32-year-old brunette raised eyebrows almost immediately in 2013 when, at 30, she was handpicked by Pope Francis as the only laywoman on an eight-memberadvisory panel called the Commission for Reference on the Organization of the Economic-Administrative Structure of the Holy See.

On Monday, the Vatican confirmed that Chaouqui, along with a Spanish monsignor named Lucio Vallejo Balda, who was the secretary of COSEA, had been arrested for leaking documents to journalists.

Sound familiar? It should. In 2012, Pope Benedict’s butler Paolo Gabriele was arrested for just the same crime, and the butler was charged with leaking to just the same journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi, who has a new book coming out this week.

His previous book, His Holiness, is widely believed to be the last straw that led to the eventual resignation of […]

New York Times reports:

Seen a Spy? With New Hotline, China Invites You to Call It In

To the tangle of emergency phone numbers in China — 110 for the police, 119 for fire, 120 for ambulance — add another: dial 12339 to report a spy.

The spy hotline made its debut in the northeastern province of Jilin on Sunday, according to a report in the state-controlled newspaper Jilin Daily, one year after the Chinese authorities introduced a new counterespionage law.

The hotline, run by the Jilin state security bureau, was set up to help citizens who encounter behavior that would harm China’s national security to report the matter immediately to state security organs, the Jilin Daily article said.

It warned of individuals or groups who “steal, pry out, buy or otherwise illegally obtain state secrets or intelligence, or […]

Interesting article from ArsTechnica.com discusses the sophisticated bugging efforts made by the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. The information was revealed in 2012, with the original document published by the NSA available here, from the Center Cryptologic History.

A National Security Agency memo that recently resurfaced a few years after it was first published contains a detailed analysis of what very possibly was the world’s first keylogger—a 1970s bug that Soviet spies implanted in US diplomats’ IBM Selectric typewriters to monitor classified letters and memos.

IBM Selectric Typewriter

The electromechanical implants were nothing short of an engineering marvel. The highly miniaturized series of circuits were stuffed into a metal bar that ran the length of the typewriter, making them invisible to the naked eye. The implant, which could only be seen using X-ray equipment, recorded the precise location of the […]

Times of Israel reports artificial rock containing camera, four batteries found in town near border; device said to date from before Israel’s withdrawal in 2001.

A device concealed in an artificial rock in the southern Lebanese town of Bani Hayyan. According to the Lebanese Army, the device is an Israeli surveillance camera. (screen capture: Lebanese Armed Forces Facebook page)

Soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces claimed Wednesday to have found a rock concealing an Israeli spying device in the south of the country.

The army said it found the device in the town of Bani Hayyan, around four kilometers from the border with Israel.

According to a report in al-Manar, a Hezbollah-affiliated website, the device included a camera and four batteries.

In a short video clip released by the Lebanese Army, a shiny surface appearing to be the lens of a camera can be seen through an […]

Italian chess player allegedly uses a spy pendant containing a hidden camera to cheat during Italian tournament (www.telegraph.co.uk)