Tag: mass surveillance

ICE Agents Have List of 20 Million People on Their iPhones Thanks to Palantir

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of Palantir systems now means agency officials effectively have a list of 20 million people readily accessible on their iPhones, increasing the speed at which ICE can find houses to raid and people to arrest, according to comments made by a senior ICE official last week during a border security conference.

While ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) generally won’t answer questions from journalists about how the agency is using Palantir’s technology, senior officials were much more talkative during the Border Security Expo which took place in Phoenix, Arizona, last week. 404 Media spoke to four people who attended the conference. Here companies looking to sell their technology to ICE or other agencies gathered for two days of speeches, Q&As, and product pitches.

The officials’ comments may need to be taken with a pinch of salt, but still reflect ICE’s position that Palantir is allowing the agency to identify people to arrest and locations to raid faster. Although the Trump administration has attempted to step back from its mass deportation rhetoric and city wide raids, especially in the wake of killing multiple people, ICE continues to violently and wrongfully detain people. Data from April showed that 70.8 percent, or 42,722, of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction.

The four people who attended the Border Security Expo saw Matthew Elliston, assistant director of Law Enforcement Systems & Analysis at ICE, and other DHS officials speak.

At one point, Elliston made the comment about ICE agents having 20 million targets, or potential people to detain, on their iPhones. This list can lead ICE agents to an individual and a house; they can then see if another target might be next door. This target may be a lower priority, but ICE can now use that information to arrest more people.

At another point, Elliston said that Palantir’s technology has increased ICE’s rate of successfully locating a target from around 27 percent to just under 80 percent.

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Fox News Crew Snared by China’s Massive Surveillance System While Covering Trump Visit: ‘They See Everything’

George Orwell’s “Big Brother” is alive and well in Communist China, and Fox News host Bret Baier’s crew got an up-close experience with it on Wednesday during President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing.

“Big Brother is watching. There are literally cameras everywhere … I can count at least 20 on this corner. In fact, in Beijing, they’ve added 1,500 cameras just this year alone. They see everything,” Baier said during a segment about China’s surveillance system.

“There’s nobody jaywalking here, because they could get a ticket right away,” he continued.

“In fact, our driver parked illegally for two minutes, and he got a message on his phone that he got a ticket for about $40 US, because they saw it,” the Fox News anchor recounted.

Baier concluded, “Now, there are real questions what the CCP’s goal is about citizen tracking and social scoring. They say it’s to make everybody feel safe. These cameras are watching every minute. They’re everywhere.”

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Amid UK Turmoil, Push For Digital ID and Cellphone Surveillance Continues

The floundering left-wing Labour Party government in Britain appears intent on imposing as much authoritarianism as possible on the public while it still remains in power, with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer using the King’s Speech on Wednesday to confirm plans to introduce a Digital ID system while plans for deep surveillance of private digital devices are revealed.

When in doubt, break glass for more Blairism appears to be the order of the day. Fighting for his political life following a disastrous performance in last week’s local elections, Prime Minister Starmer has not only turned to major figures from the previous Labour government, tapping Blairite veterans former PM Gordon Brown and Deputy leader Harriet Harman to come on board as advisors, he now seems intent on fulfilling his predecessor’s unfulfilled aims, introducing a Digital ID.

Although the Brown government began to introduce such a system, it was eventually scrapped following the 2010 general election, which the Conservative Party made a referendum on the idea. While long classified as fundamentally un-British — with the UK abandoning national identity cards following the Second World War in contrast to many other European nations — the project of a Digital ID has remained a key goal of the scheme’s architect, Former PM Tony Blair, who remains a key power broker in the background of the Labour Party.

On Wednesday, amid ongoing rumours of potential leadership challenges, Starmer’s government outlined its plans for the upcoming parliament in the King’s Speech, in which the Monarch reads a list of priorities written for him by Downing Street.

“My Ministers will also proceed with the introduction of Digital ID that will modernise how citizens interact with public services [Digital Access to Services Bill],” King Charles III told the State Opening of Parliament.

The government has previously pitched the concept as a cure-all for illegal immigration, saying it could be used to ensure that anyone seeking a job or renting a flat has their citizenship or immigration status instantly verified. Other potential uses put forward include accessing government services and collecting health records.

However, opponents have long raised concerns about Digital IDs, particularly regarding privacy and creeping state intervention. The British government has not showered itself in glory in recent years in terms of keeping digital secrets safe, with it recently accidentally leaking a list of thousands of spies, soldiers, and allies on the ground in Afghanistan to the Taliban, undercutting the notion that it would protect the much less sensitive data of average Britons.

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Jess Phillips Resigns, Pushes Phone Scanning Law in UK

Stuffed inside a resignation letter about the UK’s Labour Party’s leadership crisis is a proposal that should alarm anyone who owns a phone.

Jess Phillips, who stepped down as Safeguarding Minister today, spent a significant portion of her parting shot to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, complaining that the government failed to mandate technology on every phone and device in the country that would prevent children from taking explicit images.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

Phillips framed this as child protection but what she described is device-level surveillance deployed at national scale.

Her letter stated that “91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse,” and that she presented solutions to Starmer “over a year ago” that would “end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves.”

She wanted this installed on every device in the country.

The government dragged its feet for twelve months before agreeing to “even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten.” Phillips called this “the definition of incremental change.”

An announcement planned for March got pushed to June. She’d “given up believing it” would happen.

The resignation falls during a brutal stretch for Starmer. More than 90 Labour MPs have called for him to go after disastrous local elections.

Phillips told Starmer he is “a good man fundamentally, who cares about the right things” but that she’d “seen first-hand how that is not enough.” His instinct to avoid confrontation, she argued, had paralyzed the government. “The desire not to have an argument means we rarely make an argument, leaving opportunities for progress stalled and delayed.”

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Europol Ran Secret Data Platforms on Millions of Innocents

Europol built and operated secret data analysis platforms stuffed with passport photos, phone records, financial transactions, and geolocation data belonging to people never suspected of any crime.
The systems ran for years without the security or data protection safeguards EU law requires, and the agency concealed parts of them from its own privacy regulator.

A joint investigation by CORRECTIV, Solomon, and Computer Weekly, based on leaked emails, internal documents, and whistleblower testimony, reveals that these parallel platforms became the backbone of Europol’s analytical work. “They protect the law while breaking it,” one former senior official said.

The main system, called the Computer Forensic Network (CFN), was set up in 2012 to handle digital evidence. After the 2015 Paris attacks, Europol’s cybercrime unit EC3 repurposed it into a mass analysis platform operating outside IT controls.

By 2019 it held two petabytes of data, roughly 420 times larger than Europol’s official databases. The agency’s own data protection officer found that 99 percent of operational data sat in this unregulated environment, with no adequate logging of who accessed or modified anything.

Alongside the CFN, a second covert system called the “Pressure Cooker” let staff store and analyze operational data without the constraints of EU law. A leaked 2022 email marked “Importance: High” warned that the regulator might discover the “irregular situation with the Pressure Cooker.” Europol claims it was just an internal nickname for a lawful system. Former officials say it was a separate platform hidden from the EU’s data protection watchdog for years.

The EU’s privacy regulator, the EDPS, spent nearly a decade trying to bring Europol into compliance, then closed its monitoring in February 2026 with 15 out of 150 recommendations still unimplemented, including core security safeguards.

British Conservative MP David Davis said the findings, “if true, point to serious failures of oversight, legality and data protection.”

He demanded the UK Home Office explain “whether any personal data of entirely innocent British citizens is being stored in Europol’s systems and, if so, why it is being stored and why the UK government is allowing it to be stored.”

The European Commission is now preparing legislation to double Europol’s budget and expand its mandate. It wants to hand broader surveillance powers to an agency that ran an unaccountable data warehouse for the better part of a decade and still can’t guarantee the personal data of innocent people inside its systems hasn’t been tampered with.

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France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging

France’s intelligence delegation in parliament has formally backed breaking the encryption that protects WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram conversations, recommending that magistrates and intelligence agents be granted what lawmakers describe as targeted access to messages that platforms currently cannot read even themselves.

The delegation, an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.

The technology end-to-end encryption uses is precisely the thing the delegation wants weakened. Decryption keys live on user devices, not on company servers, which means the platforms holding your messages genuinely cannot read them. That’s the design and the point. Strip that property away and the protection collapses because a system that lets investigators read messages on demand is also a system that can be abused, leaked, subpoenaed, or hacked.

French police and intelligence services have spent years complaining about this tech. They can still intercept old-fashioned phone calls and SMS messages with a judge’s warrant but encrypted platforms route around that capability entirely.

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Globalism Is Totalitarianism

Consider these recent news stories from Europe and North America:

(1) Germany’s government is considering a new law that would allow its spy agency to investigate and block citizens from buying homes if the would-be owners hold political views that conflict with the government’s official policies.  In effect, political dissent would disqualify a person from owning a home.

(2) London Mayor Sadiq Khan is pushing for a government-run “disinformation unit” to investigate and silence online criticism of the mayor’s policies.

(3) British police are doing more to crack down on citizens’ “politically incorrect” speech than they are to prevent Islamic rape gangs from targeting women and girls.

(4) Under the guise of “protecting the children,” unelected queen (some say European Commission President) Ursula von der Leyen has announced the rollout of Europe’s mandatory digital IDs which will eliminate online privacy, anonymity, and, eventually, all public dissent to official government policies.

(5) North American and European intelligence agencies continue to downplay the threats from Islamic terrorism and overstate any threats from “white supremacy” and “right-wing extremism.” 

(6) For the nineteenth time, Ukrainian hold-over president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has submitted legislation to Ukraine’s hold-over parliament to extend a decree of martial law, which suspends elections, bans opposition parties, prohibits media organizations from criticizing government policy, and empowers the government to conscript men into military service and confiscate civilian resources for the war effort.

(7) In support of secret “gender transitions” at taxpayer-funded schools and taxpayer-funded “gender reassignment” surgeries, Nova Scotia Education Minister Brendan Maguire lambasted Canadian parents who believe that they “deserve rights over” their children.  Maguire made it clear that Canadian citizens have no parental rights.

(8) In France, 60% of voters believe that “a replacement of the French population by non-European populations” is occurring right now.  66% see this as bad for France.

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European Commission Official Touts 17 Investigations as Proof the Digital Services Act “Delivers”

The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a censorship and surveillance law dressed in the language of safety. It gives unelected officials in Brussels the power to decide what hundreds of millions of people are allowed to say online and it is building the infrastructure to verify their identities before they’re permitted to say it.

But at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week summit in Brussels this month, Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General at DG CONNECT, celebrated the law’s growing enforcement record. Seventeen ongoing investigations and one non-compliance decision, she told the audience, prove the DSA “delivers.”

What the DSA delivers is pressure. Pressure on platforms to censor more speech, faster, with fewer questions asked. Pressure to open their algorithms and internal systems to government inspection without a court order. And, increasingly, pressure on individual users to prove who they are before they’re allowed to participate in public discourse online.

Nikolay presented these enforcement numbers as proof of success. They are proof of something but not what she thinks.

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Canada House of Commons Tracks Online Posts About MPs

The House of Commons in Canada is keeping a database of what Canadians say about their elected representatives online and officials are sorting those comments by category, including the tone and identity-based content of social media posts about MPs.

That admission came from Deputy Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Mellon at a parliamentary committee, where he described the operation as a “very robust records management system.”

According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the system catalogues incidents involving MPs and allows staff to sort and analyze posts, including those deemed “misogynistic” or otherwise “abusive.”

Mellon told MPs the database tracks “every single incident” and can break complaints down by category, including gender-based harassment.

What the records contain, why they are kept, and who has access to them, none of that was explained. Mellon offered few details. A spokesperson for the Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms said files may include both criminal and non-criminal complaints, but declined to disclose specifics, citing security reasons.

So the Commons is logging non-criminal speech about politicians. Citizens posting opinions about their representatives are being filed away in a government system, sorted by category, and held for purposes the government will not describe. The line between a threat and a sharp comment is being drawn by people who answer to the institution being commented on.

The testimony came as MPs pushed for the system to track speech in more granular ways.

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The FCC Wants Your ID Before You Get a Phone Number

The era of the anonymous phone number could be ending. On April 30, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously approved a proposal requiring telecom providers to verify customers’ identities before activating service.

Government-issued ID, physical address, legal name, and existing phone numbers would all be included. The stated goal is stopping robocalls. The result would be an identity-verification regime covering one of the last semi-anonymous communication tools available to ordinary Americans.

The proposal applies to nearly every voice provider in the country, from traditional carriers and mobile operators to VoIP services. The FCC is seeking public comment on specifics, but the direction is clear.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr framed it around negligent carriers. “As we have continued to investigate the problem of illegal robocalls over the last year, it has become clear that some originating providers are not doing enough to vet their customers, allowing bad actors to infiltrate our U.S. phone networks,” he said. Some providers, he added, “do the bare minimum (or worse) and have become complicit in illegal robocalling schemes.”

That language targets telecom companies and the surveillance targets everyone else.

The framework borrows from banking’s anti-money-laundering rules. The FCC is also asking whether carriers should retain identity documentation for at least four years after a customer leaves and whether they should check customers against law enforcement watchlists. Penalties would shift to a per-call basis, meaning fines of $1,000 to $15,000 for every illegal call a poorly verified customer places.

The real privacy stakes sit in the proposal’s section on prepaid service. Right now, you can pay cash for a prepaid phone and SIM card without showing identification. Journalists use prepaid phones to protect sources, domestic violence survivors use them to avoid being traced, and whistleblowers, activists, or anyone with a reason to separate phone activity from legal identity relies on this.

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