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(Updated: January 7, 2017) Shortly before the recent US presidential election, a dedicated cybersecurity hotline with Moscow was used by president Obama to warn the Russian government not to interfere with the election process through hacking operations. Press reports compared the cybersecurity with the "Red Phone", which many people believe is used on the Hotline between Washington and Moscow. That's not true, and also Obama's message seems not to have been transmitted by phone, but through an e-mail channel which is maintained by the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC). The Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) at the US State Department, which also maintains the cybersecurity communications link between US and Russian Computer Emergency Readiness Teams (screenshot from a State Department video) Obama's message The fact that on October 31, US president Obama sent the Russians a direct message through the cyber channel was first reported on December 16. Three d

( Updated : March 24, 2018) Since the Snowden-revelations, several countries adopted new laws governing their (signals) intelligence agencies, but instead of restricting the collection capabilities, they rather expand them. Previously we examined the new laws that have recently been implemented in France . This time we will take a look at the Netherlands, where a new law for its two secret services is now being discussed by the parliament. The situation in the Netherlands is different in at least two major aspects from many other countries. First, there is no institutional separation between domestic security and foreign intelligence as the two secret services combine both tasks. Second, the current law restricts bulk or untargeted collection to wireless communications only, so cable access is only allowed for targeted and individualized interception. - Secret services - Oversight bodies - Towards a new law - - Bulk cable access - Cyber security - Third party hacking - - Update

(UPDATED: May 15, 2017) On December 1, Wikileaks published 90 gigabytes of classified documents from the German parliamentary commission that investigates NSA spying and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign intelligence service BND. The documents include 125 files from BND, 33 from the security service BfV and 72 from the information security agency BSI. It should be noted though that all documents are from the lowest classification level and lots of them are just formal letters, copies of press reports and duplications within e-mail threads. Nonetheless, the files also provide interesting new details, for example about the German classification system, BND's internal structure, the way they handled the Snowden-revelations and the use of XKEYSCORE. - BND classifications - BND organization - XKEYSCORE - - PRISM - BOUNDLESSINFORMANT - Cooperation in Afghanistan - - Intelligence Sharing - Cyber security - Index - These topics will be updated or topics will be a