Tag: mass surveillance

EU’s Plan To Mass Surveil Private Chats Has Leaked

The latest version of the proposed European Parliament (EP) and EU Council regulation to adopt new rules related to combating child sexual abuse has been made available online.

Despite its declared goal, the proposal, which first saw the light of day in May 2022 and is referred to by opponents as “chat control” is in fact a highly divisive draft of legislation that aims to accomplish the stated objective through mass surveillance of citizens’ private communications.

Now, the French site contexte.com has the full text of the newest version of the proposal – yet another controversial undertaking of the current, 6-month Belgian EU presidency. Judging by the leaked document, the key and most contentious components of “chat control” have not been changed.

German EP member (MEP) Patrick Breyer and long-time vocal critic of the proposal said on his blog that the text would be discussed by a law enforcement working party at the Council on Wednesday, with the target date for adoption being sometime in June.

That will happen once any political differences have been smoothed over at the EU’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (“COREPER”).

Commenting on the development, Breyer remarked that the Council’s legal service has also confirmed that the new version “does not change the nature of detection orders.”

“Limiting bulk chat searches to ‘high-risk services’ is meaningless because every communication service is misused also for sharing illegal images and therefore has an imminently high risk of abuse,” the MEP noted of the latest proposal, adding:

“Informing law enforcement only of repeat hits is also meaningless, as falsely flagged beach pictures or consensual sexting rarely involve just a single photo.”

He went on to explain that the upcoming regulation is set up in a way that will result in the end of the privacy of people’s digital communications, since the subject of content searches will be “millions” of chats and photos, including those belonging to persons who have no links to child sexual abuse.

And because the technology proposed to carry out the mass surveillance is unreliable, there are also risks of this content getting leaked.

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Gavin Newsom Applauds Rollout Of AI Surveillance Network In California

If you’re not a criminal then you have nothing to hide, right?  This is the perpetual argument used in favor of state mass surveillance throughout history.  It’s the underlying justification at the birth of every surveillance agency from the Soviet Cheka to the German Stasi and beyond.  Don’t commit crimes and “you have nothing to worry about.”

Of course, this argument requires the public to overlook a simple and universal truth – That which is legal today can be made illegal tomorrow, and the people who make these decisions are often not good people.  With the ability to track and trace the behavior and movements of the citizenry in real time, the temptation to abuse that technology to increase government power is exponential.  That is to say, mass surveillance tends to inspire governments to abuse their authority and treat people like criminals even when they are innocent.

As we witnessed around the world during the pandemic lockdowns, authoritarianism can rear its ugly head without much warning and with incredible speed.  Some western countries (and even a few American states) aggressively sought to make resistance to covid restrictions criminal, to the point that authorities were legislating and even building “camps” designed to lock up covid offenders.  These plans were of course denied by political leaders even as they were putting the pieces in place to implement them. 

All of this was done in the name of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate.  What might they do when a legitimate crisis comes along?

We have seen how far our governments are willing to go to go to secure greater power over the populace; they have proven they’re not trustworthy enough to handle unilateral oversight. With real-time AI based surveillance in place the dangers are far greater.  Across the country there has been a quiet rollout of a new algorithm driven camera network from a company called Flock Safety.  

Flock offers AI integrated cameras with off-grid options (solar) that they say are meant primarily for license plate reading and vehicle identification.  California Governor Gavin Newsom recently applauded the creation of a new 480 camera network from Flock that will ostensibly focus on the Oakland metro area.

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Is IRS using AI to infringe upon our financial privacy?

The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.

The inquiry comes after the same panel has been exploring why the FBI was obtaining Americans’ bank records, including those of Jan. 6 suspects, without using search warrants or subpoenas.

Hageman told Just the News that lawmakers are increasingly concerned that federal law-enforcement agencies are no longer abiding by constitutional protections, including prohibitions against search and seizure without a warrant. 

The congressional inquiry was prompted by a September 2023 announcement that the IRS is using AI to “help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats and improve case selection tools.”

The Treasury Department has since acknowledged it has “implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions’ since late 2022.”

Jordan’s and Hageman’s letter said lawmakers have evidence and reason to believe that the IRS and Department of Justice (DOJ) are actively monitoring millions of Americans’ private transactions, bank accounts, and related financial information—without any legal process—using the AI-powered system.

“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private financial records raises serious doubts about the IRS’s—and the federal government’s—respect for Americans’ fundamental civil liberties,” the letter said.

You can read the letter here: 2024-03-20 JDJ HH to IRS re AI surveillance.pdf

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Elon Musk Delivers Satellite Tech To Military To Turn Earth Into A Panopticon Of Surveillance

The U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is reportedly acquiring a constellation of hundreds of intelligence-gathering satellites from SpaceX, with a specific focus on tracking targets down below in support of ground operations. Though details about this project are still very limited, there are clear parallels to what the U.S. Space Force has previously said about a highly classified space-based radar surveillance program, which it first publicly disclosed around the same time SpaceX is said to have gotten its NRO contract. If this program is the one we think it is, it could bring about a revolution in both tactical and strategic space-based sensing.

Starshield, SpaceX’s government-sales-focused business unit, has been working on the new low Earth orbit (LEO) spy satellites under a $1.8 billion contract it received in 2021 from NRO, according to a report from Reuters this past weekend, citing five anonymous sources familiar with the deal. The Wall Street Journal had previously published a story about the existence of the contract in February, but did not name NRO as being involved or provide specific details about the deal’s scope of work.

At the time of writing, neither SpaceX nor its CEO Elon Musk appear to have directly responded to the Reuters article or otherwise commented on the details therein. NRO, a U.S. military organization that serves as America’s main remote sensing intelligence arm, and is so secret that its existence was not publicly acknowledged until 1992, declined to comment on the specifics of any deal with SpaceX, according to Reuters.

“We’ve changed our procurement methods to take advantage of LEO technologies,” Troy Meink, NRO’s Principal Deputy Director, did say, speaking generally, in a speech at the Satellite 2024 conference on Monday, according to SpaceNews. “Our main priority is to meet the requirements with minimum risk.

When the new constellation, or at least an initial segment thereof, might begin collecting intelligence operationally, if it hasn’t already, isn’t clear. SpaceX has been launching relevant prototype satellites since 2020, before its formal contract with NRO, and “a U.S. government database of objects in orbit shows several SpaceX missions having deployed satellites that neither the company nor the government have ever acknowledged,” per Reuters.

As for why SpaceX is the one to deliver this constellation to the Pentagon, it pioneered the capability and is really the only experienced contractor in this area at this time, although that will change in the years to come.

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Google Is A Surveillance Agency — Here’s How You Can De-Google Your Life

In early April 2020, Mercola.com became one of the first websites to purposely block Google from indexing our articles and breaking news blog posts. Most of you are well aware that I’ve had concerns about the surveillance capitalists, spearheaded by Google, for a number of years.

In September 2017 I discussed Google’s partnership with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and how their depression assessment quiz was in fact a drug promotion scam sponsored by the drug manufacturer Eli Lilly. No matter how you answered the questions, you were a candidate for antidepressants.

Since then, Google and other tech companies have only gotten deeper and wider access to people’s personal medical information, and Google’s selling of this data to third parties can have real-world consequences. Higher insurance premiums or denial of employment are but two obvious examples.

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Feds Enforcing Unconstitutional Reporting Law Against Most Businesses

Early this month, a federal judge in Alabama held the Corporate Transparency Act unconstitutional and granted plaintiffs in a lawsuit summary judgment against enforcement of the wide-reaching law, which went into effect this year. For many Americans this raises the questions: “What in hell is the Corporate Transparency Act? Does it affect me?” The quick answer is that it’s a big deal, and if you own an incorporated business, you’ll probably still suffer its intrusive requirements even after the ruling.

“When Congress passed the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, it included a bill called the Corporate Transparency Act (‘CTA’). Although the CTA made up just over 21 pages of the NDAA’s nearly 1,500-page total, the law packs a significant regulatory punch, requiring most entities incorporated under State law to disclose personal stakeholder information to the Treasury Department’s criminal enforcement arm,” Judge Liles C. Burke of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama’s Northeastern Division handily summarized in this month’s ruling.

Large businesses are exempt; the law applies to companies with 20 or fewer employees.

Justifications for the law laid out in early versions of the legislation invoked a laundry list of alleged financial horribles including money laundering and tax evasion. The word terrorism appears, too, of course, because that has been the lazy, default justification for legislation for 20-plus years. Basically, the law is targeted at anything that might involve a modicum of financial privacy.

To that end, the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) set up an online reporting system through which business owners “are required to report information to FinCEN about the individuals who ultimately own or control them.” FinCEN started compiling reports for such “beneficial ownership information” (BOI) on January 1, 2024 with a deadline for compliance of January 1, 2025, or 30 days after creation for companies registered following that date.

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Rep. Massie warns about fed plan to electronically track all U.S. cattle to stymie beef production

Hidden deep within the new omnibus bill is a secret provision to allow the federal government to electronically track all cattle in the United States.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) warned about the hidden provision on X, stating that lobbyists will receive $15 million in taxpayer funds to unleash the electronic tracking grid on the nation’s meat-producing cows and bison.

As stated directly from the omnibus, the agreement “directs the Department to continue to provide the tags and related infrastructure needed to comply with the Federal Animal Disease Traceability rule (9 CFR 86), including no less than $15,000,000 for electronic identification (EID) tags and related infrastructure needed for stakeholders to comply with the proposed rule, ‘Use of Electronic Identification Eartags as Official Identification in Cattle and Bison’ (88 FR 3320), should that rule be finalized.”

None of this, warned Rep. Massie is legal. And yet, the near-total apathy of the American people these days means these kinds of things are easily passable without so much as a peep from the wider constituency.

“No law authorizes this!” Rep. Massie wrote on X.

“It will be used by the GREEN agenda to limit beef production, and by the corporate meat oligopoly to DOMINATE small ranchers.”

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Amazon’s Ring is the largest civilian surveillance network the US has ever seen

In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously.

Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared.

Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen. An estimated 400,000 Ring devices were sold in December 2019 alone, and that was before the across-the-board boom in online retail sales during the pandemic. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.

Then there’s this: since Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras. These partnerships are growing at an alarming rate.

Data I’ve collected from Ring’s quarterly reported numbers shows that in the past year through the end of April 2021, law enforcement have placed more than 22,000 individual requests to access content captured and recorded on Ring cameras. Ring’s cloud-based infrastructure (supported by Amazon Web Services) makes it convenient for law enforcement agencies to place mass requests for access to recordings without a warrant. Because Ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment. By partnering with Amazon, law enforcement circumvents these constitutional and statutory protections, as noted by the attorney Yesenia Flores. In doing so, Ring blurs the line between police work and civilian surveillance and turns your neighbor’s home security system into an informant. Except, unlike an informant, it’s always watching.

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Report: Federal Government Asked Big Banks to Surveil Purchases of VPNs and Gift Cards, Transfers to Crowdsourcing Sites

In January, the House Judiciary Committee sounded the alarm about the federal government asking banks to surveil transactions related to certain keywords, such as “MAGA” and “Trump,” as part of investigations into January 6, 2021 at the Capitol. But new documents obtained by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have revealed that the surveillance that was initially identified by the House Judiciary Committee in January was much broader than these early reports suggested.

The House Judiciary Committee’s initial letter about this financial surveillance revealed that the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) sent several financial institutions lists of terms that it deemed to be indicators of potential violent extremism and suggested that banks use these search terms to flag suspect transactions. These lists included terms such as MAGA and Trump and also recommended searching for more generic terms, such as terms related to purchases of transportation and terms related to purchases of books (including religious texts) and other media that FinCEN deemed to be “extremist.”

These new documents, which were shared in a report titled “Financial Surveillance in the United States: How Federal Law Enforcement Commandeered Financial Institutions to Spy on Americans,” show that the list of terms FinCEN asked banks and financial institutions to flag was much wider.

In one document, FinCEN brands lawful activities, such as “frequent ATM withdrawals and wire transfers with no apparent economic or business purpose” and “purchases that appear excessive or unusual for hobbyist or other legitimate use,” as potential indicators of violent extremism.

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600-MILLION-CAMERA ‘SKYNET’ BASIS FOR NEW LUNAR SPY SYSTEM AS CHINA PURSUES SURVEILLANCE STATE BEYOND EARTH

With the world’s largest mass surveillance network already under its belt, China is now looking to establish its omnipresence off-world, with plans to extend its sophisticated “Skynet” spy network to the Moon.

The China National Space Administration (CNSA), China’s equivalent to America’s NASA, in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, recently disclosed their intentions to build a massive lunar surveillance network in the Chinese journal Acta Optica Sinica. 

According to Chinese media, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) aims to secure its planned lunar base with an omnipresent optical surveillance system, drawing directly from the extensive experience and technical prowess honed through Skynet, also known as Tianwang.

“The construction and operation of the optical surveillance system for the (International) Lunar Research Station can draw on the successful experience … of China’s Skynet project,” CNSA said in its report. 

Paradoxically named for the highly advanced artificial intelligence (AI) system that becomes self-aware and tries to exterminate humanity through an army of robots and machines in the Terminator movie franchise, “Skynet” refers to an interconnected facial recognition system operated by the Chinese government. 

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) flagship newspaper, the Global Times, reports Skynet’s facial recognition software has a 99.8% accuracy rate and can scan the entire population of China, 1.4 billion people, in under a second. However, these claims cannot be independently verified. 

According to the PRC, the name “Skynet” originates from an ancient Chinese proverb describing the omnipresence of justice and not from the fictional AI killing machine. “There is forever a net in the sky, with [a] large mesh but letting nothing through,” the proverb reads. 

And in fairness, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) also has its own “SKYNET,” a classified program that uses machine learning to extract information on possible terror suspects using GSM cellular data. 

However, the term “Skynet” is often colloquially used to describe the smothering system of mass surveillance used by the Chinese government to monitor its citizens. 

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