Tag: mass surveillance

Facial, Fingerprint, & Iris Scans: WEF/Bill Gates’ Vision For Biometric Digital Wallet Quietly Gaining Momentum

The push for a tightly controlled payment and identity system took a quiet but alarming step forward with a little-noticed deal between credit card giant Visa and an obscure tech firm called TECH5. Their seven-year agreement aims to fast-track digital identity and payment systems under the deceptively tame “Digital Public Infrastructure” (DPI), Biometric Update reports.

The troubling partnership, signed last week in Dubai, merges Visa’s massive financial network with TECH5’s invasive biometric tech, which includes facial, fingerprint, and iris scans, setting the stage for a surveillance-friendly future, all packaged as “convenience.” The goal? Integrated platforms to store your verified credentials for so-called seamless access to services and transactions. The companies claim these systems will adapt to “local laws and markets,” but that’s a thin promise when privacy protections often lag. The “identity wallets” they’re touting? They’re not just for verifying who you are, but they will have payment features built in, powered by Visa’s global payment infrastructure and TECH5’s AI-driven biometric tools.

If you weren’t already uneasy, Reclaim The Net has previously reported on how the usual globalist cheerleaders are all-in on digital identities for financial transactions:

The initiative, formalized in Dubai, supports a vision promoted by organizations including the United Nations, the European Union, the World Economic Forum, and Bill Gates. DPI strategies are being pushed as part of a global roadmap to digitize identity and financial access by 2030.

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The move reflects a broader international push to integrate verified digital identity with financial services. This is often presented as a way to reduce friction in service delivery, expand inclusion, and prevent fraud. However, privacy advocates continue to raise alarms over the implications of centralizing both identification and payment systems.

Unsurprisingly, Visa’s leadership tried to soften the blow to civil liberties and privacy concerns.

“At Visa, we believe that secure, inclusive, and scalable digital identity is foundational to the future of payments,” said Dr. Svyatoslav Senyuta, Head of Visa Government Solutions in the CEMEA region.

“Our partnership with Tech5 reflects our commitment to advancing Digital Public Infrastructure globally. By combining Tech5’s biometric and identity innovations with Visa’s trusted payment technologies, we aim to empower governments and institutions to drive financial inclusion and digital trust at scale.”

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Bipartisan Push in Congress to Weaken Section 230, Expand Online Surveillance, and Increase Platform Liability

During this week’s testimony before both chambers of Congress, FBI Director Kash Patel and several lawmakers made a concerted push to weaken protections for online platforms, advance surveillance partnerships, and promote government intervention in digital speech spaces.

The hearings revealed a rare bipartisan consensus around dismantling Section 230 and tightening control over how people interact and communicate online.

In the Senate, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham opened his questioning by linking online platforms to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, then repeatedly pressed Patel on whether the internet was a breeding ground for radicalization and crime.

Throughout their exchange, Graham blurred the lines between criminal behavior, such as grooming or inciting violence, and broad categories like bullying.

“Is there any law that can shut down one of these sites? For bullying children or allowing sexual predators on the site,” Graham asked.

He repeatedly implied that websites hosting objectionable content should be held legally responsible, asking, “Would you advocate a sunsetting of Section 230 to bring more liability to the companies who send this stuff out?”

Patel replied, “I’ve advocated for that for years.”

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a legal provision that protects online platforms from being held liable for content posted by their users.

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California Bills on Social Media and AI Chatbots Fuel Privacy Fears

Two controversial tech-related bills have cleared the California legislature and now await decisions from Governor Gavin Newsom, setting the stage for a potentially significant change in how social media and AI chatbot platforms interact with their users.

Both proposals raise red flags among privacy advocates who warn they could normalize government-driven oversight of digital spaces.

The first, Assembly Bill 56, would require social media companies to display persistent mental health warnings to minors using their platforms.

Drawing from a 2023 US Surgeon General report, the legislation mandates that platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat show black-box warning labels about potential harm to youth mental health.

The alert would appear for ten seconds at login, again after three hours of use, and once every hour after that.

Supporters, including Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan and Attorney General Rob Bonta, claim the bill is necessary to respond to what they describe as a youth mental health emergency.

Critics of the bill argue it inserts state messaging into private platforms in a way that undermines user autonomy and treats teens as passive recipients of technology, rather than individuals capable of making informed choices.

Newsom has until October 13 to sign or veto the measure.

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What Is ICE Doing With This Israeli Spyware Firm?

The deployment of Paragon’s Graphite spyware was a major scandal in Italy. Earlier this year, the messaging app WhatsApp revealed that 90 journalists and civil society figures had been targeted by the military-grade surveillance tech, which gives “total access” to a victim’s messages. The Italian government admitted to spying on refugee rights activists, and Paragon cancelled its contract with the government almost immediately after the story broke.

Now the same software may be coming to America—and again with an immigration focus. Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security quietly lifted a stop-work order on a $2 million contract that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had with Paragon for a “fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training.”

The deal was first signed by the Biden administration, and it was frozen in October 2024, less than a week after Wired broke the news of the contract. An administration official later insisted to Wired that, rather than reacting to bad publicity, they were reviewing the contract to comply with President Joe Biden’s order to ensure that commercial spyware use by the U.S. government “does not undermine democracy, civil rights and civil liberties.”

The details of that review—or even the contract itself—were never publicly disclosed. But the results are clear: ICE now has a green light to use whatever software Paragon was offering. (Neither Paragon nor ICE responded to requests for comment from The Guardian.)

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, dedicated to researching electronic surveillance, found that Graphite targeted users through a “zero-click exploit.” By adding someone to a WhatsApp group in a certain way, Graphite can force their phones to read an infected PDF file without the user’s input. In other words, a cyberattack can be disguised as a spam text—and works even if victims ignore it.

After discovering the vulnerability with the Citizen Lab’s help, WhatsApp said in a statement that it was “constantly working to stay ahead of threats” and “build new layers of protection into WhatsApp.”

Paragon was co-founded by Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister and general in charge of military intelligence, and Ehud Schneorson, a former head of Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the National Security Agency. Last year, an American private equity firm bought Paragon for $500 million with the intention of merging it into RED Lattice, a firm connected to former U.S. intelligence officials. Paragon has positioned itself as a more ethical alternative to NSO Group, a spyware company similarly run by Unit 8200 veterans.

In 2021, NSO Group suffered a series of scandals after it was revealed that its Pegasus spyware was sold to police states around the world and was possibly used to spy on journalists who were murdered. NSO Group accused the media of running a “vicious and slanderous campaign” and promised to “thoroughly investigate any credible proof of misuse.” The Biden administration hit NSO Group with economic sanctions in response.

Around the time that the Pegasus scandal was breaking, a Paragon executive boasted to Forbes that their company would only deal with customers who “abide by international norms and respect fundamental rights and freedoms.”

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The Freedoms Lost Under the Patriot Act

The Patriot Act was drafted and pushed through with lightning speed, something that could not have been written overnight. This was the beginning of warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, and a wholesale reversal of constitutional rights. I have said many times: governments do not waste a good crisis. They wait for the right moment to impose measures that would never pass during normal times. Americans may be unaware of the freedoms that have been stripped away from them after October 26, 2001, when the Patriot Act was signed into law.

The Patriot Act, officially titled “the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” provided the government with unlimited surveillance powers. Terrorism became the premise to bypass the checks and balances of the legal system. Need a warrant? One could be obtained in any district or area where terrorism was suspected. Of course, warrantless searches were permitted under the guise of terrorism and deemed “sneak and peek” searches, where the government could enter a business or personal residence immediately and without warning to conduct an investigation.

Neither party has repealed the Patriot Act, and politicians on both sides of the aisle will NEVER relinquish these powers. The Patriot Act destroyed the Fourth Amendment and legally permitted the NSA to spy on all Americans. October 26, 2001, marked the day that the United States of America officially became a surveillance state. We The People were branded as potential terrorists, and “the land of the free” was permanently placed under the watchful eye of government. “The War on Terror” has no clear end or defined enemy. The real target was always domestic — the American people themselves. By creating an atmosphere of fear, Washington justified trillions in spending, the invasion of foreign countries, and the slow strangulation of the very liberties the terrorists supposedly hated.

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Cybersecurity Experts Warn EU Against Chat Control 2.0 Regulation Ahead of Key Votes

A group of more than 500 experts in cybersecurity, cryptography, and computer science from 34 countries has issued a clear warning against the European Union’s proposed Chat Control 2.0 regulation.

In a joint open letter, the signatories describe the plan as “technically infeasible” and caution that it would open the door to “unprecedented capabilities for surveillance, control, and censorship.”

We obtained a copy of the open letter for you here.

Their statement arrives just days ahead of a critical European Council meeting on September 12, with a final vote set for October 14 that will determine whether the regulation moves forward.

The proposed law would compel messaging apps, email platforms, cloud services, and even providers of end-to-end encrypted communication to scan all user content automatically. This would apply to texts, images, and videos, whether or not there is any suspicion of wrongdoing.

According to the researchers, such detection systems cannot coexist with secure communication. “On‑device detection, regardless of its technical implementation, inherently undermines the protections that end‑to‑end encryption is designed to guarantee.”

By forcing companies to monitor encrypted content, the regulation would introduce security weaknesses that could be exploited by malicious actors and hostile governments.

The scientists also emphasize the inaccuracy of the proposed approach. They argue that large-scale scanning systems produce unacceptable error rates and could generate enormous numbers of false reports.

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The Surveillance Net Is Closing, But the Smart Ones Can See the Writing on the Wall

The privacy coin Zano just rallied nearly 70 percent in the last 30 days, lifting its market cap toward a quarter billion dollars and pushing daily trading volume close to three million. The spike isn’t about speculation alone. It reflects a shift underway as people begin to hedge against a tightening surveillance state.

The latest proof of financial control came just last month, when Tether froze $49.6 million in USDT at regulators’ request during a coordinated international crackdown. Regardless of the guilt or innocence of the targets, the lesson is obvious. These assets can be frozen in an instant, with no trial and no process, making them less a hedge against the state and more a compliant extension of it. 

Congress reinforced this fact with the GENIUS Act, a law that hard-wires surveillance into stablecoins by forcing issuers to operate under bank-style oversight, AML regimes, and reserve mandates. The fact that Democrats and Republicans both lined up behind it should tell you everything. In Washington, true bipartisan consensus only happens when war, debt, or control are on the line.

That same logic now extends to the streets. National Guard units are being deployed into American cities to “fight crime,” but the justification is always the same: safety over freedom. Deployments like this normalize militarization at home and make clear that the tools built for foreign wars are now being pointed inward. 

The grid doesn’t stop at the barrel of a gun either. It runs through data. Federal agencies have been caught buying location data from brokers like Venntel to track millions of Americans without warrants. The AT&T Hemisphere program continues to funnel call records to law enforcement, building a quiet dragnet with virtually no oversight. License plate readers vacuum up hundreds of millions of scans, with databases shared across jurisdictions and tapped for immigration enforcement. Flock Safety’s license-plate readers generated 1,400+ immigration-related searches in Denver and 113 million scans in a year in Austin, triggering local backlash over data-sharing and policy violations. This is mass movement tracking, normalized street by street. All of this happens without a vote, without consent, and in most cases without warrants.

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The Battle Brewing: Mass Surveillance Vs The People

Behind the scenes of breaking news, culture wars, and moral division, a significant battle is brewing: mass surveillance vs. the people.

One surveillance technology in particular is rising to the surface of the national conversation: automated license plate readers (ALPR).

Flock Safety, a leader in ALPR technology, is one of the companies in the eye of the storm. Last week, Flock’s CEO and co-founder Garrett Langley made headlines when he released a statement announcing the company was going to “pause” its pilot programs with the U.S. government.

The company said that while it has no current contracts with any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agencies, it did engage in “limited pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), to assist those agencies in combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution.”

So why would a company decide not to aid their own government in the fight against human trafficking and fentanyl distribution? Who are the voices that swayed them?

The company’s statement likely stems from criticism (or demonization) of Flock Safety for developing technology that has been adapted for use by ICE agents.

In a July interview with 9News Denver, Flock Safety CEO Langley was asked about the Denver city council voting against extending the city’s Flock contract “out of concerns the system would be exploited for immigration matters.”

Langley straddled the fence:

“Every city needs to make a decision what’s right for them. Some cities work really closely with federal authorities … Now in the case of Denver, if there’s no desire to work with ICE, that’s great. We need to create a safer city while still upholding the values we have.”

Ultimately, however, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, extended the contract through October 2025 after the dollar amount was reset to a figure that didn’t need council approval.

A spokesman for the mayor said the cameras are “an important tool for fighting crime.”

Meanwhile, Denver city leaders formed a special task force to discuss the technology’s privacy concerns. The policy director for the ACLU of Colorado said he would like the cameras turned off entirely—”until there are policies in place to regulate the use of them …”

Reason magazine claims that that “Flock Safety’s 40,000 cameras present in over 5,000 communities across the U.S. are being used to detain undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no criminal history.”

To be clear, it’s not a matter of Homeland Security or ICE agents directly accessing the Denver system—or any ALPR system. It’s a complex issue of state and local law enforcement agencies sharing information or granting access to other agencies. As Denver7 reported, “Flock Safety’s cameras capture billions of photos of license plates each month. However, it doesn’t own that data. The local agencies in whose jurisdictions the cameras are located do, and they’re the ones who receive inquiries from other law enforcement agencies.”

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ICE Reactivates Contract With Israeli-linked Spyware Firm Paragon

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reactivated a $2 million spyware contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded firm now owned by a U.S. private equity group. The move lifts a Biden-era freeze and signals a deeper embrace of invasive surveillance tools in domestic immigration enforcement.

It is also only the latest sign of how far the federal government’s surveillance apparatus has grown under the banner of “immigration enforcement.” ICE has become one of its most powerful nodes — a conduit through which cutting-edge spyware, data analytics, and AI-driven tools are deployed inside U.S. borders.

Contract Reborn

On September 1, journalist Jack Poulson, citing the official procurement note, reported that ICE quietly lifted a stop-work order on the Paragon contract. The order had been in place since October 2024, after the Biden administration paused the deal under Executive Order 14093. That order barred agencies from buying foreign spyware tied to human rights abuses.

Paragon

Paragon is an Israeli spyware company founded in 2019 by veterans of Israel’s cyberwarfare Unit 8200, the equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Among the early backers is Prime Minister Ehud Barak, a longtime political heavyweight and known associate of Jeffrey Epstein. From the start, it marketed itself as the “ethical” alternative to Pegasus, another notorious Israeli spyware.

Citizen Lab reports that by 2021 Paragon had launched a U.S. subsidiary and staffed it with former CIA, Air Force, and defense contractor officials. That gave it a foothold in Washington. Within two years, ICE had signed a $2 million contract for its spyware; U.S. Special Operations Command disclosed more than $11 million in related purchases.

In late 2024, ownership shifted. All shares in Paragon Israel were transferred to Paragon Parent Inc., a new Delaware corporation. The deal, reportedly led by Florida-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, was valued at $500 million up front, with another $400 million tied to performance goals. Soon after, Paragon was folded into REDLattice, a Virginia contractor already known for offensive cyber tools. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings show REDLattice’s parent company then added ex-CIA and U.S. Army chiefs to its board.

Once Paragon became “American-owned,” ICE lifted the freeze on its spyware contract. In effect, the U.S. government blocked the deal when the company was Israeli but allowed it once Americans — many with intelligence and military ties — took control. The spyware itself did not change, only the ownership structure, and it is far from clear how much influence Israeli intelligence veterans still wield inside the company.

Graphite

Graphite is Paragon’s flagship spyware. Unlike Pegasus, which can take full control of a phone, Graphite focuses on breaking in to encrypted messaging apps. It can pull data from WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage without seizing the entire device.

Investigators have shown that Graphite often relies on “zero-click” exploits. These attacks require no action from the target. Once inside, the spyware extracts texts, call logs, photos, videos, and even microphone input. All of it is sent to remote servers controlled by the operator. Citizen Lab’s forensic report from this June confirmed the tool had been deployed against journalists in Europe. Their devices were fully updated yet still compromised until Apple patched the flaw in iOS 18.3.1.

This technical profile explains why Graphite is so attractive to governments. It is stealthy, precise, and hard to detect. But its use has raised alarms well beyond Israel and the United States.

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Trump gives green light for $2m ICE deal with notorious Israeli spyware company

The Trump administration appears to have unfrozen a stalled $2 million Biden-era contract with Paragon Solutions (US) Inc., a spyware company founded in Israel whose products have been accused of facilitating the surveillance of journalists and activists.

On Saturday, a public procurement database showed that a stop work order on the September 2024 deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been lifted, technology journalist Jack Poulson reported on his All-Source Intelligence Substack.

The deal does not specify what ICE will be getting as part of the deal, beyond describing an agreement for a “fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training.”

An individual who answered a phone number listed for Paragon on the contract declined to comment.

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