Tag: mass surveillance

‘Full spectrum intelligence’ will unify all signals to detect people, objects: WEF inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders

With full spectrum intelligence, nothing will remain hidden; everyone and everything will be detectable anywhere: perspective

“Full spectrum intelligence” will one day unify all signals like WiFi, ultrasound, sonar, and X-rays and will be able to detect any person or object anywhere, according to a presentation at the World Economic Forum (WEF) inaugural Annual Meeting of Global Future Leaders in Dubai, UAE.

Giving a presentation at the WEF meeting on Wednesday called, “Sensing The Invisible,” the person who pioneered the technology that uses WiFi to see through walls, MIT Signal Kinetics Research Lab founding director and Cartesian Systems co-founder Dr. Fadel Adib explained how all signals will eventually come under one umbrella called “Full Spectrum Intelligence.”

With full spectrum intelligence, nothing will remain hidden. Everyone and everything will be detectable anywhere, from the deepest depths of the ocean to the far reaches of outerspace, and everywhere in between, including the biological signals beneath our skin.

“We think of WiFi as different than ultrasound. We think of sonar as different from cellular communication. But what research has shown over the past 15 years is that there’s a unifying theme under all of them, and it’s almost like a playbook that you could extract information from,” said Dr. Adib.

“So what is now happening is that the electromagnetic spectrum, which is like the wireless spectrum, is being populated […] What we’re going to start seeing is ‘full spectrum intelligence;’ intelligence that is able to extract meaning from all the signals that exist around you and be able to use them to deliver new capabilities.”

The applications for full spectrum intelligence are vast.

Wireless sensing can already aid in personalized healthcare by diving deep beneath the skin; it can help retail stores and warehouses find missing products; and it is being deployed to build “an internet of things to observe the underwater world” with the help of the “world’s first battery-free underwater camera.”

For law enforcement, full spectrum intelligence would be a godsend, especially when it’d come to vehicle searches and search warrants on private property.

Border patrols, port authorities, and customs and immigration agencies would love this.

And for the military, full spectrum intelligence would leave no person or installation, including what’s buried deep inside a facility, undetectable.

Going back 15 years, Dr. Adib’s research has been pivotal in making all of this possible.

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A Surveilled Country Is Not a Free Country

f you currently live in the United States, I regret to inform you that you no longer live in a free country. You are no longer a free person. Actually, you haven’t been for quite some time.

This may sound harsh with this being the year America celebrated her big Two-Five-Oh. But think about it. Think back to the last time you drove from your home to the grocery store. How many automatic license plate readers did you pass along the way? How many apps logged your route? What information did your car collect about you and anyone who may have accompanied you?

When you finally arrived at the store, surely there were cameras, but were they simply there to help catch and deter shoplifters — maybe help police investigate a more serious crime on the off chance one were to occur? Or were those cameras serving other purposes? Was the grocery store implementing facial recognition to deliver you targeted ads when you checked out? Did those cameras automatically link to some local real-time crime center, enabling law enforcement to track you from one location to the next, even if you traveled on foot?

Although your routine trip to pick up eggs and milk may not have been recorded for posterity by all of these technologies, it was by no means a private affair. Nor was your most recent trip to church, a political rally, a protest, or your doctor’s office. And this doesn’t even touch any of the many items in your home that have come to serve as data collection devices.

Now, reflect on this for a moment, then ask yourself: “How much of this did I really consent to?”

Yes, you chose to drive a car. You chose to have a cell phone. You chose to buy food. But did you choose to have countless government and corporate bodies monitor your every move? Do you really feel like you consented to an arrangement in which any entity with the financial and technological means to record and analyze every detail of your life, from the trivially mundane to the deeply intimate, holds the right to do so? If not, how much do you feel you could demand that they stop?

To return to the initial assertion, if the government and an endless number of corporations can treat the details of your life as some natural resource to be mined, assessed, and sold, and you have no meaningful way to opt out, can you really say you’re a free person? I mean, no, you’re not a slave or a prisoner. But you’re not exactly free either.

There’s no great analogy, but, at best, maybe you’re like a wild animal, chipped by some field ethologists, looking to study your natural behavior, or a teenager, whose parents gave you a fair amount of freedom after school and on weekends but insist you have the family tracking app turned on. At worst, maybe you’re more like a citizen of some alternate version of the erstwhile DDR if the Stasi were a little more hands-off and had way better tech. But again, you’re not exactly free.

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France’s Senate Approves Bill Expanding Police Powers Over Online Speech

France’s Senate has approved a bill that was originally tabled as a means to make rioters pay for the damages they cause – but ended up with provisions that are meant to allow for faster removal of online content at the police’s behest, ban people from social media for committing protest-related offenses, allow the police to fly as many drones as they want equipped with cameras, and use AI to analyze footage from those drones, as well as from CCTV cameras.

All this was added to the “casseurs-payeurs” (rioters-pay) bill in the form of amendments, which senators approved on October 27 by 229 votes to 105. The bill was first submitted on September 16, and it had only five articles that made no mention of any of these issues.

The government’s use of the accelerated procedure means that after one reading in the National Assembly, the bill can go to a joint committee of both chambers.

All the quotes below are from the Senate’s record of the debate, translated from French.

“Social networks can contribute decisively to violence and damage, in particular through the dissemination of content calling for these offenses to be committed,” is how the government justified its amendment that was adopted with 219 votes to 115.

The amendment allows the administrative authority, rather than a judge, to order platforms and hosts to remove content that is seen as provoking crimes such as attacks on life, theft and destruction, where it is likely to cause a serious disturbance of public order.

If a host fails to remove such content within 24 hours, it will face six months in prison and a 150,000 euro fine, or up to two percent of its worldwide turnover for a company. The authority will also be able to have the site blocked and removed from search results.

The request goes to a designated reviewer, rather than a judge, before the content is removed.

The original filing of the amendment had a one-hour emergency procedure for content that calls for “an attack, for insurrection or for arming against the State” – but Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez pulled it in the chamber, saying, “I have just rectified my amendment so that we can secure the emergency procedure during the shuttle [between chambers], in view of risks regarding [EU-law] conformity and constitutionality.”

So this provision is expected to be back later in the legislative process.

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Ex-Officers Kept Access To Flock Cameras Long After Leaving The Police, Including A Former Georgia Investigator

A former investigator with the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office in Georgia kept using the Flock nationwide license plate camera system for five years after he left his job as an investigator, and used it to search for his wife’s plate, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Andrae Wright, a former investigator for the Effingham County Sheriff’s Office, left the office in 2021, but logged into the Flock system to search for a license plate bearing his wife’s middle name more than 60 times over a five-year span, according to Georgia Bureau of Investigation statements and audit records. Some of the searches were conducted while Wright was trying to gain permanent custody of the couple’s teenage daughter, the Post learned. Wright and his wife divorced this year. He was arrested in July and charged with stalking his wife, using information from Flock “for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her,” according to his warrant. Wright did not return a call for comment for the Post’s story. The sheriff’s office said it had not regularly reviewed account access and plans to begin audits.

The Post investigation identified 11 cases of unauthorized use of Flock license plate readers, a network of at least 120,000 cameras nationwide. In 4 of the cases, police officers continued to use the system after they left their jobs or while they were on suspension from their jobs. In 6 additional cases, logins or access were shared with officers from other police departments.

The Post also reported on a case out of Fulton County, where an investigation was launched into the actions of a former police officer over suspected Flock license plate searches after she had left her employment with the department. The department shared its Flock subscription with the sheriff’s office, and no one notified the sheriff’s office to revoke her access when she resigned from her job. “They didn’t remove the employee,” Police Chief Wade Yates told the paper. “I’ll take the heat for that.”

In Cobb County, the sheriff’s office cut its Flock accounts from some 200 users to about 50, and only those 50 are now considered to be authorized to use the system. The review found that a number of employees had been given login information to the system for no work-related purpose, and the review found no apparent misuse.

The Post revealed the worst case of abuse of the system in a story about Indianapolis. A police recruit named Matthew Binford used a senior police officer’s account to enter the plate of his estranged wife on the Flock system over 1,000 times in one year, according to a court affidavit obtained by the paper. The senior officer had opened Flock on Binford’s laptop and left the session active, the affidavit stated, and Binford kept access for more than two years. Binford and four other current and former Indianapolis police officers were charged last month, after a Post inquiry prompted a department-wide audit. He declined to comment.

Three former Flock employees told the Post that the company has pushed back against additional security measures. Two of them said leadership had concerns that additional security would negatively impact sales to law enforcement agencies. While Flock’s contracts stipulate that accounts be created using official agency email addresses, the company acknowledged that it began to actively enforce this only recently. Multi-factor authentication was made the default setting in 2024, though agencies could opt out, and was made mandatory in August of this year. In the wake of the Post’s findings, Flock said it is working with customers to remove personal email addresses and other forms of shared login credentials from Flock accounts. As of next year, users will have to log back in every 12 hours. Company spokesman Paris Lewbel said Flock acts when it identifies security weaknesses or policy violations. The company declined to comment on individual cases, however.

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In Virginia, Racism and Redlining Are Fueling a Flock Camera Backlash

Local governments in Virginia are under mounting pressure to cancel contracts for surveillance cameras known as automated license plate readers (ALPRs). On October 6, the Henrico County Police Division announced that it would terminate its contract for such cameras after residents shared “legitimate concerns about Flock Safety.” In nearby Richmond, Mayor Danny Avula said on October 13 that the city would cancel its contract with Flock Safety, the most famous purveyor of the cameras, but did not rule out using ALPRs from a different company.

“It is a good first step, but we do need to keep the pressure on the city to not automatically switch to another ALPR vendor,” Richmond Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Victoria McCullough told Truthout.

DSA activists and residents in Richmond pushing police to ditch the contract have powerful research to point to from elsewhere in the state. In the neighboring Hampton Roads region of Virginia, race and class are the primary predictors of locations where police installed ALPRs, a groundbreaking study found earlier this year.

The study found police were more likely to install ALPRs in majority Black census tracts in each of the nine cities across the Hampton Roads region, an East Coast metroplex with 1.8 million residents and multiple cities, including Norfolk and Virginia Beach. About 80 percent of majority Black neighborhoods contain at least one camera compared to fewer than 40 percent of majority white tracts. ALPR surveillance is also more intense in majority Black neighborhoods, where on average there are four times as many cameras than in white neighborhoods when weighted for population share.

In Virginia Beach, police deployed ALPRs in only five of 76 majority white census tracts (6.6 percent), compared to one of two Black census tracts (50 percent). Black residents of the locality are 7.6 times more likely than white residents to live in a census tract with at least one ALPR. When weighted for the number of cameras deployed in each area, Black drivers in Virginia Beach were roughly eight times more likely than white drivers to be regularly surveilled by Flock-style cameras.

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Flock CEO Garrett Langley to Critics of His Cameras: ‘We Shouldn’t Pause Progress’

Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of license plate camera maker Flock Safety, defended his company’s surveillance technology onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco this week, even as Flock contends with canceled contracts and layoffs nationwide.

TechCrunch reports that speaking during a panel interview, Langley pushed back on critics who say Flock’s cameras amount to invasive surveillance. He argued that progress shouldn’t stop just because a technology is imperfect. “If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress,” he said.

To make his case, Langley reached for an analogy: driverless cars. “Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It’s not doing things perfect,” he said. A single crash, he argued, shouldn’t be grounds for pulling the technology entirely. “Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there’s one accident, I don’t think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.’”

Langley also addressed Flock’s relationship with the cities and police departments that deploy its cameras, saying the company tries not to dictate policy. “We don’t want to tell city leaders how to do their job,” he said. “We will provide recommendations, we’ll provide defaults, but we’re going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies.”

Asked about concerns that the technology could be abused, Langley said oversight is possible without hampering police work. “I think if the idea is to curb abuse, I think there’s a way to do that that doesn’t disrupt the legal system, that doesn’t disrupt the efficacy and flow of a police department,” he said.

When pressed on expectations that Flock’s technology should be flawless, Langley invoked a comment he attributed to an unnamed community leader. “He was describing that, too often as a society we judge technology not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect. And Flock is far from perfect; I’m far from perfect, I’ve made plenty of mistakes,” Langley said.

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NET Zero, AI and Technocracy: What Happens to Freedom in a Surveillance Society?

Agent Zero: zero limit, zero manners, zero conscience, zero morals, zero values except for treachery, treason and money, like the rogue government double agents involved in racketeering, breaches of trust and other things that only happen in other countries and fictional planets, never in Canada, right?

Why Does the Prime Minister Like NET Zero?

Why does the prime minister like NET Zero? That is why: zero evidence of evidence in zeros, lots and lots of zeros, billions and trillions….

Oh yes, of course there are 1 and 0, ones and zeros, yeah. Computer on, off, yes, now, if, then, in or out. Got it….

Paradise for algorithm codes and AI candy, lots of ones and zeros. It does not get any better, faster or easier than that….

However, you will notice there are no robots playing blackjack or rolling dice. That is the realm of psychic and telekinesis, mind over matter, a non-starter for robots and open season for the avatars of cards and dice, and many, contrary to popular belief, do not count cards; they simply know….

And no contest for everyone else.

NET Zero, AI and Technocracy

Now, with the global warming climate change hoax of the century and related war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as the magnitude of financial and government fraud, racketeering, breach of trust and related Criminal Code violations, we have even more rampant, diabolical technocratic surveillance and potential for spying and crime, and more arbitrary decrees from hell itself.

Maybe not Dante’s Inferno, nevertheless an infernal machine that represents the capacity for havoc and hell, destruction and ruin of life, freedom, sovereignty, prosperity and fundamental rights to privacy, speech, opinion, conscience, association, religion and so on….

This raises the broader issue of NET Zero and individual freedom and where one ends when the other is imposed through increasingly sophisticated technology.

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The Law Can’t Keep Up with Flock’s AI Surveillance

It’s a windy day on the shore of Lake Michigan, and Maria is headed downtown from her home in Dolton, Illinois. As she has done several times this year, Maria plans to attend a peaceful protest at Grant Park against federal immigration policies. She has never been arrested and has even chatted cordially with police officers and federal agents stationed at previous events.

Agents working this protest have been instructed by their supervisors to be on the lookout for possible illegal immigrants and anti-government agitators. The agents activate a surveillance plan. Maria first encounters it shortly after pulling out of her driveway. As her red Honda Accord passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), it captures an image of one of her bumper stickers with a pro-immigration slogan: “No human being is illegal.” The ALPR has been trained to recognize text such as bumper stickers, sending an automatic alert to a central computer. In turn, the computer sends signals to nearby artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced “smart” street cameras to monitor the car’s movements.

A camera hanging from the W 71st St. overpass zooms in and captures an image of Maria’s face. The camera sends another ping to the computer, which identifies the driver as Maria (with, say, 91 percent confidence) based on her driver’s license photo and recordings of her at past rallies from officers’ body-worn cameras. The computer collects other data known about Maria from public records, including her registered nursing license. From the license, it pulls Maria’s home address. Next, the computer connects that information with recent police reports from the area. Nothing serious, but the report includes several mentions of pro-immigration graffiti on an abandoned building three blocks from where Maria lives. Possibly more significantly, the computer uncovers court records from 20 years ago, referring to a family dispute after Maria’s father was deported from the United States.

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DOJ Says Flock Camera Data Is Not Protected By Fourth Amendment

The US government has told a federal appeals court that data collected by Flock Safety cameras is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, because being watched on the road is “a reality of modern life” – and therefore, nobody can expect privacy there.

The argument was made by Justice Department attorney Michael Weisbuch during oral argument in the Fifth Circuit in the case US v. Brownlee. The panel of judges – Chief Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, and Judge Priscilla Richman – heard the case on October 5.

Weisbuch said there is a “general rule that publicly observable movements are not protected” – and that Flock cameras only enable “episodic” monitoring of cars as they pass by, as opposed to tracking them continuously.

Chief Judge Elrod asked if that rule still makes sense today, when there are cameras everywhere, and the data they collect can be easily analyzed. “Is that really the right rule in this day and age where everything is observed and it all can be analyzed instantaneously?” she asked.

Weisbuch maintained that “it’s the pervasive regulation of cars when they’re in plain view on public thoroughfares that diminishes any expectation of privacy.”

He sought to differentiate between that and tracking people’s phones, saying, “We all expect to be subject to intermittent surveillance when we’re driving around. It’s a reality of modern life. We don’t necessarily expect our phone, which is essentially part of our body, to be tracked as we move in both public and private places.”

Elrod kept asking if the rule that allows this type of surveillance is still valid when it becomes so pervasive. “What if it becomes not spread out and it’s on every corner, which it’s soon to be?” she asked. “Is it really episodic when it so permeates everything?” she also asked, and noted that finding in the defendant’s favor would be “a big ask.”

The defendant, Charles Brownlee, was convicted of a series of armed robberies of cash stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and his lawyers are now trying to get his conviction overturned, arguing that police used Flock and another company, Vigilant Solutions, to track him down without a warrant.

Brownlee’s lawyers argue that this is unconstitutional, while Weisbuch said that the technology is not “capable of following people into constitutionally protected areas” and that is why it is different from phones, which are tracked as people move “in both public and private places.”

Weisbuch also dismissed the idea that the government could use the data collected by Flock and other companies to track people all the time, saying, “The political process is a serious check on that [hypothetical] ever coming to fruition, and I think a better check than an erroneous extension of Fourth Amendment.”

Assistant Federal Public Defender Matthew Wright, who represents Brownlee, argued that the way the police used the databases in this case constitutes a search and that the data collected by Flock and Vigilant is “stunningly comprehensive.”

He said that the initial collection of data is indiscriminate, and that it is collected from everybody, and that it can be used to “reconstruct your pattern of life.”

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Federal Judge Calls License Plate Readers a Form of Mass Surveillance

The lower instance federal courts are making their rulings regarding license plate readers (LPRs) – and they are so far coming in contradictory.

The latest is from a federal judge in Oklahoma who has no doubt that the technology is “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” that is approaching a “dragnet type law enforcement practice” – and that the system is “constitutionally problematic” because it lets the police “indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”

US District Judge Sara E. Hill of the Northern District of Oklahoma made this and other points in her ruling in United States v. Kyle, where she said that a Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy violated the Fourth Amendment when he searched LPR systems without a warrant.

The case started with the traffic stop of a Mazda SUV with a California license plate that passed the deputy’s camera as he was parked by the highway. The judge said the deputy followed the car “for no apparent reason other than the fact that it had a California license plate.”

The vehicle was driven by Melisa Kyle, and the stop was justified as the deputy said she had changed lanes without signaling and was following another car too closely. But before he pulled her over, the deputy ran the plate through two LPR databases, Flock and VehicleManager.

The judge said this gave him access to “more than 50 individual records of Kyle’s whereabouts across the country for an entire month,” and that he had access to at least 30 days of the vehicle’s location information in many states.

The deputy used this information to help justify searching her car.

That search produced about 91 pounds of methamphetamine, and Kyle, 46, of Crane, Missouri, is now charged with possessing methamphetamine with intent to distribute. But the judge has ruled that the evidence was obtained illegally and suppressed it.

The ruling said the search “was not supported by probable cause, and it was done without a warrant in violation of Kyle’s Fourth Amendment rights.” The judge also suppressed “all evidence obtained after Alaniz initiated the ALPR search.”

The judge accepted that the technology has “remarkable benefits” but also asked, “why is it the government’s business where everyone goes all the time? The government cannot go snooping through our personal lives and business without an adequate basis to do so.”

In her ruling, Judge Hill also said that people “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on a public roadway” – but that the LPR technology “becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”

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