Tag: mass surveillance

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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CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US

Launched in 2016 in response to a Tel Aviv shooting and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, Gabriel offers a suite of surveillance products for “security and safety” incidents at “so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches.” The company makes the lofty promise that its products “stop mass shootings.” According to a 2018 report on Gabriel published in the Jerusalem Post, there were an estimated 475,000 such “soft targets” across the U.S., meaning that “the potential market for Gabriel is huge.”

Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by “an impressive group of leaders,” mainly “former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence agency], FBI and CIA.” In recent years, even more former leaders of Israeli and American intelligence agencies have found their way onto Gabriel’s advisory board and have promoted the company’s products.

While the adoption of its surveillance technology was slower than expected in the United States, that dramatically changed last year, when an “anonymous philanthropist” gave the company $1 million to begin installing its products throughout schools, houses of worship and community centers throughout the country. That same “philanthropist” has promised to recruit others to match his donation, with the ultimate goal of installing Gabriel’s system in “every single synagogue, school and campus community in the country.”

With this CIA, FBI and Mossad-backed system now being installed throughout the United States for “free,” it is worth taking a critical look at Gabriel and its products, particularly the company’s future vision for its surveillance system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the company’s future vision coincides with the vision of the intelligence agencies backing it – pre-crime, robotic policing and biometric surveillance.

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The Right to Be Left Alone

What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law and tramples the Fourth Amendment?

What if this mass surveillance has come about by the secret collusion of presidents and their spies in the National Security Agency and by the federal government forcing the major telephone and computer service providers to cooperate with it? What if the service providers were coerced into giving the feds continuous physical access to their computers and thus to all the data contained in and passing through those computers?

What if President George W. Bush told the NSA that since it is part of the Defense Department and he was the commander in chief of the military, NSA agents could spy on anyone, notwithstanding any court orders or statutes that prohibited it? What if Bush believed that his orders to the military were not constrained by the laws against computer hacking that Congress had written or the interpretations of those laws by federal courts or even by the Constitution?

What if Congress has written laws that all presidents have sworn to uphold and that require a warrant issued by a judge before the NSA can spy on anyone but Bush effectively told the NSA to go through the motions of getting a warrant while spying without warrants on everyone in the U.S. all the time? What if Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have taken the same position toward the NSA and ordered or permitted the same warrantless and lawless spying?

What if the Constitution requires warrants based on probable cause of criminal behavior before surveillance can be conducted but Congress has written laws reducing that standard to probable cause of communicating with a foreign national? What if a basic principle of constitutional law is that Congress is subject to the Constitution and therefore cannot change its terms or their meanings?

What if the Constitution requires that all warrants particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized? What if the warrants Congress permits the NSA to use violate that requirement by permitting a federal court — the FISA Court — to issue general warrants? What if general warrants do not particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized but rather authorize the bearer to search indiscriminately through service providers’ customer data?

What if the government has no moral, constitutional or legal right to personal information about and from all of us without a valid search warrant consistent with constitutional requirements?

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Sequins, feathers… and a groundbreaking arrest using facial recognition cameras: The Daily Mail sees police deploy slick new technology at Notting Hill Carnival

Even the harshest critics of the Metropolitan Police admit the force has its work cut out with the Notting Hill Carnival.

Describing Europe’s biggest street party as a policing challenge would be a bit like referring to the Second World War as an unfortunate diplomatic incident.

Of course, it is not just the crowds of more than two million that put a strain on police resources every year on the August bank holiday. In recent years, it has also been the criminality – drugs, violence, knife crime, sexual offences, even murder – that all too frequently overshadows the celebrations.

So even with around 7,000 officers on duty, it is perhaps unsurprising that Met chiefs have introduced the use of live facial recognition (LFR) – previously deployed at the King’s coronation as well as Premier League matches – for the 2025 carnival.

Festivities officially began yesterday morning with the Children’s Day Parade. Thousands of revellers – many wearing ornate costumes of sequins and feathers – danced through the west London streets as drummers pounded unrelenting rhythms. Elsewhere, more than 30 sound systems blared out Caribbean and electronic dance music.

Meanwhile, officers were putting in place the final touches to their LFR system, which records images of people via sophisticated cameras. It uses biometric software to assess head size and other facial features, then converts these details into digital data. According to experts, any individual whose image scores 0.64 or higher (on a scale of zero to one) is highly likely to be a match for someone whose photo is on file.

At 6.23am yesterday, several hours before the parade got underway, specialists at the Met finalised a ‘watchlist’ of 16,231 individuals of interest to them. They included people wanted by the courts or being sought for alleged criminal activity that would merit jail time of ‘a year or more’.

Others on the list included those who have been freed under certain restrictions – including former prisoners released on licence from life sentences – to ensure they are sticking to the conditions imposed on them by the authorities.

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Meet Trump’s CDC Director: Susan Monarez

As the Trump administration has spent its first few months in The White House constructing the physical and digital infrastructure required for a pre-crime, technocratic police state, little attention has been paid to the ways in which the institutions ostensibly dedicated to “public health” are helping build out this digital control grid. As Unlimited Hangout has been reporting for many years now, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a prominent subgroup of the surveillance state has emerged at the intersection of Big Tech, Big Pharma and the military industrial complex — one that is laying the groundwork to implement the final frontier of mass surveillance: the bio-surveillance apparatus. 

During his first term, Trump implemented the notorious Operation Warp Speed, the Pentagon-ran COVID-19 response plan which issued emergency deregulatory measures and massive funding for the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Now, his second administration has successfully managed to become associated with COVID-era dissidence. This was primarily accomplished through Trump successfully securing the endorsements of figures who were skeptical of the official line on COVID-19, most prominently comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan and longtime environmental litigator and founder of Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Since taking office, however, the second Trump administration has consistently contradicted this unofficial commitment to the spirit of COVID-era dissent and public health institutional overhaul. Just last week, the President touted Operation Warp Speed as one of the “most incredible things ever done in this country.” The week before, he announced an initiative to enable the vast sharing of individuals’ health data across a myriad of “health systems and apps,” in partnership with Pentagon-contracting Big Tech companies. More quietly, however, Trump nominated a seasoned official of the biosecurity apparatus named Susan Monarez to be the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Monarez, whose background is perfectly in line with this technocratic approach to healthcare that the administration has embarked on, was “handpicked” by Kennedy after the previous nominee, Dave Weldon, withdrew his nomination in March. Monarez had been acting director of the CDC for several months and was confirmed at the end of July with little fanfare.

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The New Normal Of US Domestic Spying

What if the federal government captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message and all the fiber-optic data generated by every person and entity in the United States 24/7? What if this mass surveillance was never authorized by any federal law and tramples the Fourth Amendment?

What if this mass surveillance has come about by the secret collusion of presidents and their spies in the National Security Agency and by the federal government forcing the major telephone and computer service providers to cooperate with it? What if the service providers were coerced into giving the feds continuous physical access to their computers and thus to all the data contained in and passing through those computers?

What if President George W. Bush told the NSA that since it is part of the Defense Department and he was the commander in chief of the military, NSA agents could spy on anyone, notwithstanding any court orders or statutes that prohibited it? What if Bush believed that his orders to the military were not constrained by the laws against computer hacking that Congress had written or the interpretations of those laws by federal courts or even by the Constitution?

What if Congress has written laws that all presidents have sworn to uphold and that require a warrant issued by a judge before the NSA can spy on anyone but Bush effectively told the NSA to go through the motions of getting a warrant while spying without warrants on everyone in the U.S. all the time? What if Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have taken the same position toward the NSA and ordered or permitted the same warrantless and lawless spying?

What if the Constitution requires warrants based on probable cause of criminal behavior before surveillance can be conducted but Congress has written laws reducing that standard to probable cause of communicating with a foreign national? What if a basic principle of constitutional law is that Congress is subject to the Constitution and therefore cannot change its terms or their meanings?

What if the Constitution requires that all warrants particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized? What if the warrants Congress permits the NSA to use violate that requirement by permitting a federal court — the FISA Court — to issue general warrants? What if general warrants do not particularly describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized but rather authorize the bearer to search indiscriminately through service providers’ customer data?

What if the government has no moral, constitutional or legal right to personal information about and from all of us without a valid search warrant consistent with constitutional requirements?

What if raw intelligence data comes to the government without any proper names on it? What if in order to find those proper names, the government goes through a procedure called unmasking? What if lawful unmasking can only occur when the government knows that a national security problem is afoot and it needs to know the identity of the person whose communications it has in hand? What if the Constitution requires a search warrant to engage in unmasking?

What if the Obama administration made it easier for political appointees to unmask members of Congress and other government officials without demonstrating a national security need as a reason for doing so? What if unmasking for political purposes is a felony? What if it is common today?

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Civil liberties group opposes Garda access to messages

Plans to force encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal to give Gardaí access to private conversations would “profoundly undermine” digital security, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has said.

In a statement issued this week, the group said cybersecurity experts were unanimous that so-called “backdoors” for law enforcement could not be created without also leaving users vulnerable to hackers and malicious actors.

“It is impossible to create ‘backdoor’ access pathways for law enforcement that can’t also be exploited,” the organisation said.

The ICCL added that encryption protects not only personal conversations but also online banking, shopping and wider digital activity.

“We all rely on encryption to safeguard our sensitive personal data when browsing, communicating or doing business online,” it said.

“Forcing companies to break their own encryption would profoundly undermine our digital security, as well as our fundamental rights to privacy and data protection.”

The council cited the position of the United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights in opposing laws that compromise encryption. It also highlighted the recent example of the UK government withdrawing a demand for Apple to install a backdoor into its cloud services, after the company refused.

“Apple stated it had never built – and never would build – backdoor access into any of its encrypted products,” the ICCL noted.

“Instead, Apple disabled its advanced data protection service in the UK and challenged the order in court.”

The group urged Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan to reconsider his planned legislation, describing the proposals as “neither proportionate nor technically sound.”

It called for “transparent consultation with cybersecurity experts, civil society and technologists before proposing any legislation that could irreversibly damage digital privacy and cybersecurity.”

Last month, O’Callaghan told an audience that Gardaí must have powers to intercept modern communications.

“None of us would like to imagine living in a surveillance State,” he said.

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