LONDON - Britain’s Government on Thursday confirmed plans to log details about every email, phone call or text message in the country to help anti-terror services track suspects.

Police and security agencies will also be able to access records of activity on social network sites, webmail, Internet-based phone calls and online gaming.

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Britain’s Home Secretary, Theresa May, said the change – costing $2.7 billion public funds - was needed to keep up with how criminals were using new technology.

But many others, including lawmakers from May’s own Conservative Party such as David Davis, who described it as “incredibly intrusive”.

Under the proposed law, which has yet to be approved by parliament, telecoms companies would be obliged to gather a wealth of information on their customers and keep it for up to one year. 

Read more on the story at ITV News

Local councils would be barred from access to the data, but police, the security services, customs and tax officials would be able to use the information.

The Home Office said it would not need to read the body text of emails or eavesdrop on phone calls without a warrant.

The chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection told ITV News that he welcomed the government's new plans into tracking suspects through their use of emails and websites. Peter Davies said that data is needed "to protect the public" from serious offenders.

However, Nick Pickles, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said the proposals were "the very definition of Big Brother" and described the law as “dangerous”.

In an editorial article in Britain’s Murdoch-owned mass-market daily tabloid, The Sun, May defended her proposals as “sensible and limited," adding that worries that the Bill would stomp on free expression were "ridiculous" and dreamed up by "conspiracy theorists." 

The Home Office claimed the cost of the data-gathering would be covered by reductions in tax fraud and seizure of criminal assets.

ITV News is the UK partner of NBC News.

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TAIPEI - A young worker at a Chinese plant supplying tech giant Apple jumped from his apartment Wednesday, it was reported - the first suicide since the plant's owners agreed to improve work conditions. 

Foxconn Technology Group, the main supplier of Apple Inc, said on Thursday that the 23 year-old employee fell to his death from his apartment located outside the plant in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

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The worker had joined the company last month and police were investigating the death. 

"Foxconn is sparing no efforts in cooperating with the police and helping with the investigations," the statement said, according to a report on the website of news channel Focus Taiwan.

Apple and Foxconn reached an agreement in March to improve conditions for the 1.2 million workers assembling iPhones and iPads, a landmark decision that could change the way Western companies do business in China. 

iPhone game to benefit Foxconn employee who attempted suicide

According to the agreement, Foxconn would hire tens of thousands of new workers to reduce overtime work, improve safety protocols and upgrade housing and other amenities. 

The move comes after Apple, criticized over working conditions at its sprawling chain of suppliers in China, agreed to an investigation by the independent Fair Labor Association earlier this year to stem criticism that its products were built in sweatshop-like conditions. 
A series of suicides among young workers were reported at Foxconn in 2010, and three workers died in an explosion at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu last June. 

A report in The New York Times also documented the cramped living conditions of Foxconn employees, as well as excessive hours on the job and seven-day workweeks in which employees stand for hours without break

'This American Life' retracts damning report on Apple manufacturer Foxconn

Foxconn also announced in mid-February it had raised wages for workers by 16 to 25 percent. 

Hon Hai Precision Industry, which makes iPhones and iPads for Apple, is the main listed unit of the Foxconn group, while Foxconn International manufactures handsets for clients such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

About 100 workers from Foxconn's Chengdu plant went on the rampage earlier this month after a dispute in a restaurant turned violent. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Purportedly finding itself increasingly irrelevant in an age of 140-character Twitter speak and text abbreviations, the unofficial British guardian of proper English is calling it quits. OMG! #language

The Queen's English Society, which has caviled at writers', politicians' and entertainers' "misuse" of the language for 40 years, is disbanding at the end of the month, its chairwoman, Rhea Williams, announced in a message to members, The Independent reported Monday.

(Befitting the organization's traditionalist bent, Williams insists on being called "chairman.")

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Williams sent the notice after the society was able to muster only 22 people to attend its annual conference, which ended with no candidates' having stepped forward for chairman, vice chairman, administrator, webmaster or membership secretary.

The society — whose punctuation guide alone runs to more than 6,000 words — is famous for having taken on the language and speech of the most powerful and popular personalities. Those include BBC announcers, whom it has derided for speaking in their own local accents instead of the plummy English known among academics as Received Pronunciation.

Firmly taking sides in a disagreement that has helped to define modern linguistics studies, the society declares that "we prefer the prescriptive approach to the descriptive approach, as we do not want the language to lose its fine or major distinctions."

But "things change, people change," The Guardian quoted Williams has having said about her decision to announce the society's death. "People care about different things. If you look at lots of societies, lots of them are having problems."

British reports blamed the speed of modern communications.

The Guardian concluded that the society had "finally conceded it cannot survive in the era of textspeak and Twitter." The Daily Mail also blamed Twitter, but it added "contracted spellings and Americanisms" to the list of culprits.

In fact, the Queen's English Society has ruffled many feathers over the years with its Olympian pronouncements on the proper way to speak and write. It has particularly annoyed educators, whom it blames for fostering "permissive" approaches to teaching English, whether it is because they "are not able to correct poor English" or "do not have the time to do so."

Such attacks attract opposition, which is exemplified by the existence of Anti-Queen's English Society, a group founded by English academics to counter claims that "English-which-isn't-the-Queen's is culturally and intellectually lower." As its name implies, the A-QES opposes everything the Queen's English Society stands for, calling its members "archaic perpetuators of linguistic prejudice" and dismissing its research as "laughable."

The Queen's English Society rejects such criticism, contending that it "encourages rich and imaginative English where appropriate, as in poetry, drama, fiction and some non-fiction."

Gyles Brandreth, a former Conservative member of Parliament and broadcaster who is a patron of the society, suggested that such disagreements prove that many people still passionately care about English.

"The Queen's English isn't under threat," Brandreth told The Independent. "Her Majesty can sleep easy. The language is still in the good hands of all the people who speak good English."

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LONDON - Rapidly increasing global ownership of smartphones and tablets will expose consumers and governments to much higher risks of Internet fraud and hacking, according to an expert.

Martin Sadler, director of the Cloud and Security Lab at HP in Bristol, England, said the expected rise in the number of electronic devices -- connecting billions more people to the Internet -- would make cyberattacks more likely.

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Speaking at the launch of the new Cyber Security Centre at Oxford University, he explained that about 35 billion devices will be in use worldwide by the end of this decade, and approximately 24 million smartphone applications.

“The vast majority of software we will be using [by 2020] will be riddled with malware,” he warned.

“If you talk about four billion people going online by 2020, a large number of those people are in third world countries where they are looking for easy access to wealth or money – what better source of wealth than online?” Sadler said.

He said Internet crime would become “de-skilled” and added, “What today might be a very sophisticated attack on a nation state could by 2020 be an attack on you as an individual made by people who really earn very little a day – that kind of dollar-a-day threshold.”

“There are whole groups of people who haven’t realized the Internet is an asset and disruption of the Internet is something they can choose to do. Today we have about 30 percent of the world’s population online, but by 2020 we will have reached about 50 percent -- about four billion people,” Sadler said. “Of those four billion, almost all of them… are going to be engaged on the Internet with absolutely no idea what online security means.”

Professor Sadie Creese, director of the new research center at Oxford University, said cybersecurity "is on everyone's radar at the moment."

"We're already highly dependent on cyberspace for our home lives, our work lives, as a nation state, and globally, and that's just going to increase. And as our dependency increases, so does the attractiveness to people who would do us wrong," she said. “Even if we're not witnessing great acts of terrorism in cyberspace at the moment, many people believe it's a natural progression, and it's only a matter of time.”

“In reality, the days of defining a cyberspace and physical space divide are probably over. The truth of living today is we all coexist in both; we're entangled in a sense," Creese said. "We should expect everything that we see in what was previously considered physical space, to manifest in some way in cyberspace.”

The launch took place on Monday at the university’s historic Ashmolean Museum.

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Rock Center

The students who became money mules for Eastern European hackers in the theft of $70 million from American bank accounts have remarkably similar stories.

The following account – Margarita Pakhomova’s story --  is based on multiple sources close to the investigation in the case the FBI calls Trident Breach:

In 2010, Margarita Pakhomova was a 20-year-old public relations student living in Pyatigorsk, a town in southern Russia.

In an effort to broaden her horizons, she, like many Russian students, applied to join a work/study program in the United States for four months.

To make a successful application, Russian students pay an agency $100 to get them a job offer in the United States. Some even pay $150 for a fake job offer to help land them a visa.

Margarita had heard horror stories about real offers turning out to be scams, so she opted for a fake offer and decided to wing it on arrival in the United States.

Bad idea.

In May 2010, after shelling out $3000 for plane tickets and paperwork, Margarita traveled with four Russian friends to New York.

After getting lost on the New York subway, Margarita and her college friends found a place to stay in Brooklyn. It was a $400-a-month grimy basement.  They started looking for work.  Since they spoke little English, they bought Russian newspapers every day, turning straight to the job sections. Most of the ads seemed to ask for “dancers” or workers for questionable credit card businesses.

Some friends of friends told Margarita that if she and her friends get really stuck, they could call a special phone number.  

Two months into her big New York adventure, Margarita was broke with no money for food and rent.

She had already heard of people who were receiving cash and wiring it overseas. They were making good money and it didn’t seem illegal to her.

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Out of desperation, she called that special phone number and two young Russian men appeared. They invited Margarita and her friends to restaurants and clubs, took them around the city and became their friends.

The two Russian men started telling Margarita about all the money she could make, the places she could see, the things she could do. At the time she was down to her last $20, so she opted in. She emailed the two men some passport photos and waited.

Margarita received multiple new, shiny fake passports, Greek and British with fake names.  They were so professionally made she couldn’t tell them apart from real ones.

Her handler told her she could open four bank accounts under one passport and so she opened accounts in Manhattan with Chase, Bank of America and Wachovia. 

Once the illegal deposits showed up in her accounts, her handler would call and tell her they were going to work. He would pick her up, drive her to the bank and tell her to withdraw the cash and then wire it to Russia or Ukraine by Western Union. While the maximum withdrawal Margarita made was $15,000, she knows other mules who took out up to $50,000 a day. Some made enough on their commission that they were able to buy cars within a week. Margarita made about $4000. 

On the day she was supposed to leave New York and head back to Russia, Margarita was tipped off that some of the money mules were being rounded up. In a panic, she headed for the airport.

But something was wrong. Airport security was a nightmare. First, Margarita was told her bag was too heavy. Then she had her purse searched by TSA officers, who claimed they were looking for a computer or cellphone. Margarita later learned these were stalling tactics as, at the time, she had no idea the FBI was bearing down on her.

At the boarding gate, six FBI officers dressed in sporting clothes rushed toward her and arrested her.

At her Federal trial, Margarita was charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud and false use of passports. She was convicted and sentenced to pay more than $42,000 to the victims of her crimes, along with three years of supervised release, which never happened, because Margarita was deported to Russia.

Editor's Note: Click here to watch Richard Engel's full report, Easy Money. The report aired Wednesday, Mar. 21 on Rock Center with Brian Williams.

Rock Center

It was a crime of staggering sophistication by computer hackers who figured out a new way to get rich. 

In a case that became known as Trident Breach, the hackers stole $70 million from the payroll accounts of some 400 American companies and organizations – all from the safety of their homes in Eastern Europe.

“I think it’s the perfect definition of organized crime,” said FBI Executive Assistant Director Shawn Henry.  “It’s very well organized.  It’s very well-structured.  It requires many people operating in unison, in a collaborative way.”

At the beginning of 2008, the group of hackers compromised hundreds of thousands of Americans computers using a malicious computer “Trojan” bug called ZeuS. When computer users clicked on certain attachments and e-mail links, ZeuS infected their computers.

ZeuS is designed to zero in on users’ bank information. For example, when a user visits a bank website, ZeuS knows; and since it is a key logger program, it records the user's keystrokes as he or she enters usernames and passwords. It then sends that information by instant text message to waiting hackers, who then have access to the compromised accounts. 

Henry is one of the country’s top cybercrime fighters. He says Americans are increasingly prone to “virtual gangs” prying on people’s personal data stored on their computers.

“We have organized groups that have developed internationally where groups of people have come together, each with a very specific capability and skill, who have never met each other in the physical world, but they meet online in a collaborative way,” he said. 

Henry says that the security breaches have the potential to be more than just criminal acts. They could pose a national security risk.

“There are foreign intelligence services that are aggressively pursuing American technology.  They’re aggressively pursuing American strategy.  They’re looking at the American military, the American consumer, the American corporations, research and development organizations, laboratories, educational facilities,” Henry said.  “The amount and value of data that is on the network is at an unprecedented level.  Our adversaries know that that data is there.  It’s information and information is valuable."

Money Mules Help Hackers Get $70 Million

In the Trident Breach case, the hackers were able to get their hands on the cash by turning people into money mules.  

Beginning in late 2008, they created some 3000 money mules, many of them unwitting Americans, by luring them into work-at-home jobs requiring "employees" to open bank accounts. 

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“The first money mule activity we started seeing was people who would receive an email saying, ‘You can get a work-at-home job’ and the work-at-home job would be something like transaction manager for an international company,” said Prof. Gary Warner of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who teaches a program that combines computer forensics and justice studies. 

Warner is also a member of the little-known FBI-affiliated group called InfraGard, comprising some 50,000 members across the United States who keep an eagle eye on U.S . critical infrastructure: power plants, water supply, security and financial services…and the internet. Warner said the hackers transferred cash from business payroll-type "ACH" (Automated Clearing House) accounts to the mule accounts and the mules sent the cash by Western Union or MoneyGram to Eastern Europe, taking eight or 10 percent commission.

Warner said that when the banks started to get wise to the hackers’ work-at-home schemes, and set up roadblocks, the hackers then recruited dozens of students, mainly from southern Russia, to be a new breed of money mule. 

“It’s still a little gray whether the students who were recruited knew that they were being recruited for crime,” Warner said.

The hackers obtained fake passports for the students, U.S. J1 work/study visas, and packed their new mules off to the United States. The students opened multiple bank accounts, mainly in the New York area, where they received stolen cash. Then, just as the mules before them had, they wired the cash back to their bosses. 

University Professor Helps FBI Crack Cybercrime Case

So stealthy was their ZeuS operation, neither the hackers nor the mules had counted on getting caught. But, using complex data mining techniques, Prof. Warner established links between ZeuS-infected computers and traced the origins of the mass infection to Ukraine; and many of the hackers and their mules were caught.

But 18 mules remained at large in the United States. And after the FBI published a wanted poster of the students, Warner’s students began using what they’d learned in class to track the criminals.

“So the students used the techniques we had taught them during investigating online crime [class] and began crawling Facebook pages and VKontakte, which is a Russian version similar to Facebook and were able to quickly identify profile pages of almost all of them, at-large mules,” Warner said.

Warner’s students discovered one of the students-turned-mules had brazenly posted pictures of herself with a wad of hundred-dollar bills. Another had posted a picture of himself dressed in an “I ❤ New York” top, arms aloft, celebrating in a bar with his friends – some of whom turned out to be other money mules. And another was pictured standing next to the new car he has presumably just bought.  

Though all the mules – except one – were arrested, that does not necessarily mean the end of the money mules, says Gary Warner.

“ZeuS infections are rampant still today.  There are probably millions of computers in the United States that have active Zeus on their machines right now,” Warner said.

Editor’s Note: Click here to watch Richard Engel’s full report, 'Easy Money,' from NBC's Rock Center with Brian Williams.

With parliamentary elections scheduled for next week, Iran has begun blocking Internet services, Web security experts say, adding to concerns that government leaders hope to shut off Iranians from the rest of the online world.

The Tor Network, which provides free software for anonymous use of the Internet, reported that on Feb. 9, Tehran began filtering keywords and throttling or shutting down access to sites that use a form of security called Secure Socket Layers, or SSL. The protocol, which encrypts data being sent back and forth between servers and users, is used by such popular sites as Gmail and Facebook. Web addresses protected by SSL begin "https," instead of "http."

Activists in repressive countries often use Tor services to get around such restrictions, and before Feb. 9, Iranians were the second-largest users of Tor. But because Iran targeted the core SSL protocol, "Tor stopped working too," the organization said.

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The action is blocking email and some Web access for as many as 30 million Iranians who use SSL-protected sites, reported CBR Systems & Network Security, a European technology organization.

Iran, which will hold parliamentary elections on March 2, has referred to Google and other search engines as "spying tools," and it has throttled access to foreign web servers previously at politically sensitive times. The free-expression activist group Reporters Without Borders has branded Iran as an "enemy of the Internet." (.pdf)

Online journalists censored, attacked: report

Iran's Communications and Technology Minister Reza Taghipour said Monday that a firewalled "national Internet," which Tehran has been promising since as early as 2006, would be launched in the spring. Internet security analysts and open-Internet activists say the "national Internet" would act as a closed intranet sealing Iranians off from large chunks of the web. Similar systems are known to be in use in China and North Korea. 

The Iranian news agency Mehr quoted Taghipour as saying at a cyberdefense forum in Tehran that "the first phase of this network will become operational in the month of Khordad," which straddles May and June. 

The Tor network said it was continuing "to research and investigate solutions with the assumption that SSL will eventually be blocked nationwide inside Iran." 

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