UPDATE 20 Dec 2016: Hytera buys Sepura. After months of losses, a failed attempt at entering the fast-growing digital mobile radio (DMR) market and an embarrassing inability to meet bank covenants, the story of Sepura, the star of Europe’s terrestrial trunked radio (TETRA) niche, has ended on a bright note: The company was acquired yesterday, 19 December 2016, by China's Hytera … [Read more...]
Fake News Fallout: Can NORSI-TRANS and Russian Spyware Vendors Be Trusted?
With recent evidence of Russia’s role in influencing the outcome of the U.S Presidential election, now might not be the most opportune moment for Russian Spyware vendors to be hawking their wares at Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) conferences organized and hosted by an American enterprise. Yet such is the case with NORSI-TRANS, a featured exhibitor at the upcoming ISS World … [Read more...]
Beyond the Law? Extraordinary Cyber Power of the FBI
The following item is re-published from an earlier analysis where it was buried in review of a major U.S. cyber vendor. We are re-posting and updating that section of the analysis here as a standalone piece -- all about the extraordinary cyber power of the FBI -- to make it easier for I.S. members to find and reference. No, we are not referencing the old Steven Siegal … [Read more...]
UK Investigatory Powers Bill: Latest Bonfire in EU’s Pro-Privacy Conflagration?
Late last week Britain’s Parliament approved the Investigatory Powers Bill (IP Bill), triggering wails of protest from critics who immediately labeled the law “a privacy disaster” and “the most extreme surveillance law in the history of Western Democracy.” High on the list of complaints are the British law’s authorization of bulk metadata collection from any/all Internet … [Read more...]
Natural Language Processing: The Power Behind Social Media Monitoring
2016 has seen a flurry of analysis on social media monitoring (SMM) for ISS purposes. Much of it focuses on well-known brands such as In-Q-Tel-backed Geofeedia, used by law enforcement agencies to fathom potential threats and locate their source. Most is only surface deep and overlooks a key driver behind advanced SMM: natural language processing. Too often, analysts proceed … [Read more...]