Privacy…who really needs it?
Tag: big tech
“I Hope That We Succeed,” Man Suing Massachusetts Health Department For Silently Installing Covid Tracking App On His Phone Speaks Out
A plaintiff in a lawsuit against government “spyware” has shed more light on the situation. In a potentially far-reaching legal dispute, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health is being accused of covertly partnering with tech behemoth Google to clandestinely install COVID-tracing software onto as many as a million unsuspecting smartphone users. This was the claim being presented in a class-action lawsuit filed by the Washington-based New Civil Liberties Alliance.
The legal challenge alleges an explicit violation of both US and Massachusetts constitutional law. It targets not just the perceived breach of privacy but also the audacity of the health department’s actions. “Such brazen disregard for civil liberties violates both the United States and Massachusetts Constitutions, and it must stop now,” the suit asserts.
The case, filed in 2021, was raised on behalf of Massachusetts native Robert Wright and Johnny Kula from New Hampshire, who commutes daily into Massachusetts. The duo vehemently objects to the installation of the COVID-tracing app on their phones sans their explicit consent. Kula, in particular, alleged that his attempt to delete the app proved futile as it surreptitiously resurfaced on his device.
“I hope that we succeed, and this sets a precedent, and that, in the future, no government even considers tracking Americans’ movements 24/7 without their knowledge or consent,” Wright said in a recent statement.
Originally conceived amidst the COVID pandemic’s height, Apple and Google jointly developed a contact tracing system. This system used a smartphone’s Bluetooth capabilities to alert users of potential proximity to an infected individual. An alert from an infected person’s phone could prompt nearby app users to take a COVID test.
The lawsuit asserts that the state’s health department colluded with Google to create a version to be forcefully installed on all Android phones, unbeknownst to the owners.
US Tech Giant Hired Apparent Chinese Spy and Gave Him Vast Access to Databases – Now He’s Disappeared
Spying is not always James Bond or cloak-and-dagger kinds of stuff.
Sometimes secrets can fall into the wrong hands through industrial espionage.
For instance, U.S. federal authorities say former Apple employee Weibao Wang took with him confidential Apple material regarding self-driving cars when he resigned from Apple and joined a startup owned by Baidu, a major Chinese technology company.
Wang, 35, indicted by a federal grand jury in May, joined Apple as a software engineer in March 2016, and worked with an Apple team “that designed and developed hardware and software for autonomous systems, which can have a variety of applications, such as self-driving cars,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of California.
Wang left Apple after about a month and in November 2017, took a full-time job as a staff engineer “with the U.S. subsidiary of a company headquartered in the People’s Republic of China…and was allegedly working to develop self-driving cars,” the news release said.
Although his current LinkedIn site still has Wang employed by Apple, the U.S. attorney’s office did not name the Chinese company for whom Wang allegedly stole secrets.
Reuters last year identified Wang as an executive of Jidu, the electric vehicle subsidiary of Baidu. Wang’s mention by Reuters was in a June 2022, story of Jidu developing a self-driving concept car.
When he left Apple on April 16, 2018, “Apple identified Wang as having accessed large amounts of sensitive proprietary and confidential information in the days leading up to his departure from Apple,” according to the U.S. attorney’s office news release.
Federal Judge Rules Biden Admin Acted Like “Orwellian Ministry of Truth” Using Big Tech To Censor Americans
A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Biden administration acted like an “Orwellian Ministry Of Truth” By working in conjunction with big tech platforms to censor opinions it didn’t like during the Covid pandemic.
US District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana noted that the administration most likely violated the First Amendment as Republican attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana “produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”
Not only was Covid related content suppressed, but also questions regarding the results of the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and several other topics.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, former AG of Missouri, headed up the prosecution, describing the Biden administration’s actions as a “federal censorship enterprise.”
New Docs Reveal Fed’s Attempt to Control Your Thoughts, Speech, and Life
Keeping up with the corruption of the Covid regime feels like drinking from a firehose. The volume of the fraud, the pace of new discoveries, and the breadth of the operations are overwhelming. This makes it imperative for groups like Brownstone Institute to digest the onslaught of information and communicate salient themes and dispositive facts, particularly given the dereliction of mainstream media.
On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) “colluded with Big Tech and ‘disinformation’ partners to censor Americans,” adding to the informational firehose we work to imbibe.
The 36-page report raises three familiar issues: first, government actors worked with third parties to overturn the First Amendment; second, censors prioritized political narratives over truthfulness; and third, an unaccountable bureaucracy hijacked American society.
Google Likes To Say Fact-Checkers It Uses Are “Independent.” But It Also Funds Them.
In a world where censorship dons the cloak of fact-checking, the recent allocation of grants by the Global Fact Check Fund raises brows. The fund, which is a joint effort of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) housed at the Poynter Institute and the technology behemoth Google, along with its subsidiary YouTube, has been touted as a guardian of truth. With $875,000 in grants divided among 35 organizations across 45 countries, it aims to arm them with modern websites, manpower, and training to identify misinformation. However, the initiative comes with its own set of problematic undertones.
The broad strokes painted by the fund’s mission statement include terms such as “increasing quality, volume, frequency, scale, and impact of fact-checking abilities” – a seemingly lofty aim. The IFCN’s director, Angie Drobnic Holan, frames it as a crusade against misinformation, stating, “Misinformation is on the march in many parts of the world. This important funding will enable fact-checking organizations to become better at their work, stronger in their capabilities and wider in their reach.”
Homeland agency expanded authority to wage ‘domestic surveillance and censorship,’ House report says
Secret documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that a Department of Homeland Security agency “expanded its mission to surveil Americans’ speech on social media, colluded with Big Tech and government-funded third parties to censor by proxy, and tried to hide its plainly unconstitutional activities from the public,” according to an interim staff report released Monday night.
The findings add details to reporting by Just the News about the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its work with private entities to remove, throttle and label purported misinformation on elections, Hunter Biden and COVID-19 — efforts that might even constitute election meddling and sometimes target true content.
The “severe public outcry” in spring 2022 against DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board, shuttered a few months later, so alarmed CISA and its advisors that they “tried to cover their tracks” on censorship and surveillance, which “included scrubbing CISA’s website of references to domestic ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,'” the report says.
By outsourcing its “censorship operation” to a CISA-funded nonprofit in the wake of First Amendment litigation by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, CISA was “implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional,” House Judiciary Republicans said.
FACEBOOK HIRES EX-CIA AGENT ‘MISINFORMATION’ CHIEF TO LEAD ‘ELECTIONS POLICIES’
Meta has promoted a former CIA agent from a senior role on Facebook’s “misinformation” team to “Head of Elections Policies” at the social media giant.
Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA, served as Facebook’s “misinformation” chief during the 2020 election.
In the run-up to the 2020 election Facebook and other Big Tech companies buried information, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, that was damaging to Democrats.
Those same “misinformation” teams allowed social media to be flooded with false claims that helped Biden and the Democrats, such as the Russia Hoax or the fabricated Jan. 6 “insurrection” narrative.
Nevertheless, Berman, who played a key role in Facebook’s failed censorship efforts, will now lead the company’s “elections policies” in the run-up to the critical 2024 race.
Berman served at the CIA between March 2002 and July 2019.
During that time, he wrote for and edited the President’s Daily Brief, an influential top-secret document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community given to the president each morning, according to Breitbart.
According to Berman’s Linkedin, he enjoyed positions of considerable influence at the agency, including “supervising teams of dozens of analysts and with multi-million-dollar budgets,” and leading briefings for members of Congress and National Security Council members.
In 2019, he left the agency and joined Facebook (now known as Meta), where he became a senior product policy manager for “misinformation.”
According to Berman, he “built the misinformation policy team’s US workforce and put policies into practice during critical events.”
While Berman does not say what these “critical events” were, his time in Facebook’s “misinformation” department coincides with the run-up to the 2020 election.
WHO Member Says Agency Needs To “Nullify The Conspiracies” About Covid Vaccines
In 2020, as people challenged the “expert guidance” on Covid during the first few months of the pandemic, the use of the term “misinformation” in news articles almost doubled. This rapid increase in the use of the term by legacy media outlets was followed by an equally rapid rollout of new Big Tech misinformation rules which targeted content that questioned the Covid guidance being pushed by authorities.
Fast forward to 2023 and the first signs of this censorship pattern are starting to play out again.
The WHO, an unelected global health agency, is less than a year away from finalizing an international pandemic treaty/accord and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005). These two instruments will collectively give the World Health Organization vast new powers to target misinformation and increase its surveillance powers.
And as this WHO power grab faces mounting criticism and pushback, several representatives of this unelected global health agency decided to use the recent seventy-sixth World Health Assembly (WHA) (the annual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body) to claim that dissent is misinformation and call for more action against dissenting voices.
During a WHA committee meeting, the WHO representative for the Bahamas said “dissenting voices can clutter the airwaves and derail the public health good with disinformation and misinformation.” She added that “more is needed to nullify the conspiracies.”
Instagram Connects Vast Pedophile Network
Instagram, the popular social-media site owned by Meta Platforms, helps connect and promote a vast network of accounts openly devoted to the commission and purchase of underage-sex content, according to investigations by The Wall Street Journal and researchers at Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike the forums and file-transfer services that cater to people who have interest in illicit content, Instagram doesn’t merely host these activities. Its algorithms promote them. Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.
Though out of sight for most on the platform, the sexualized accounts on Instagram are brazen about their interest. The researchers found that Instagram enabled people to search explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex and connected them to accounts that used the terms to advertise child-sex material for sale. Such accounts often claim to be run by the children themselves and use overtly sexual handles incorporating words such as “little slut for you.”
Instagram accounts offering to sell illicit sex material generally don’t publish it openly, instead posting “menus” of content. Certain accounts invite buyers to commission specific acts. Some menus include prices for videos of children harming themselves and “imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals,” researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found. At the right price, children are available for in-person “meet ups.”
The promotion of underage-sex content violates rules established by Meta as well as federal law.
In response to questions from the Journal, Meta acknowledged problems within its enforcement operations and said it has set up an internal task force to address the issues raised. “Child exploitation is a horrific crime,” the company said, adding, “We’re continuously investigating ways to actively defend against this behavior.”
Hellbound and Down 
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