Tag: mass surveillance

Brother of Murdered Inmate Alleges FBI Role in OKC Bombing, Waco, and Decades of Domestic Spying, “Justice Will Come From Exposing PATCON”

A newly released book and an upcoming documentary are reviving attention on one of the FBI’s most secretive and controversial domestic spy programs known as “PATCON,” which was unmasked after a 30-year FOIA fight by Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue to prove his brother was murdered while in custody by federal agents in 1995.

Trentadue has uncovered, and is litigating to uncover, a total 2 million pages of documents so far. Two of his seven federal FOIA suits are still ongoing.

Trentadue is still litigating the release of government records from 1995, where his current case involves a request made in 2015 that the FBI sat on for 8 years and refused to respond to, involving records related to federal sting operations involving Timothy McVeigh from before the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Yet his revealations to date has shown not just government lies about the Oklahoma City bombing, but also a domestic spying and criminal operations that extends into the nation’s newsrooms, courtrooms, centers of power, and more.

Despite new attention on the case and a wave of public interest in PATCON caused by the release of Margaret Roberts’ book “Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing” two weeks ago, Trentadue says he does not expect any federal agent or informant to face prosecution for his brother’s killing or for related crimes.

He’s hopeful, rather, that the documented evidence he has uncovered about FBI spying on the political right can be stopped, and that will be the most justice his family will ever find.

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The U.S. Intervenes Against EU Digital Surveillance

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has launched a lobbying campaign against the EU’s Digital Services Act. With this step, Americans have become the last line of defense for the free speech rights of EU citizens.

If, in the past, President Donald Trump often spoke of the European Union as “a tough nut to crack,” he couldn’t have been more accurate. Freedom-loving EU citizens know exactly what he meant. In Brussels, a bizarre mélange of control fetishism, economic dirigisme, and isolation from the outside world has developed — a combination that is no longer tolerable.

Not least, Brussels’s fight against free expression in the digital sphere has revealed the true intentions of the von der Leyen Commission: the recovery of narrative dominance and control over political dissidence — achieved by cold-bloodedly sacrificing citizens’ fundamental freedoms.

U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance already issued multiple warnings in the spring about a European censorship empire. In a speech to the Senate, he denounced European digital legislation as an attack on western liberties. In his address at the Munich Security Conference, he went so far as to suggest cutting ties with the Europeans if they did not reverse their illiberal, dictatorial trajectory.

Criticism Bounces Off

As usual, American criticism fell on deaf ears in Brussels. Although Brussels swallowed the bitter pill of an asymmetrical trade deal with the U.S. two weeks ago, both the hidden protectionism disguised as climate regulation and harmonization standards, as well as the repressive digital laws, remain intact. This is detrimental not only to free speech among Europeans but also for American companies — undoubtedly a key target of the EU censors.

The EU’s discriminatory ambitions through the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the corresponding Digital Markets Act (DMA) primarily target U.S. communication platforms like X, Telegram, and Meta. If these platforms don’t conform to EU rules — granting access to internal communications and aiding Brussels’s surveillance efforts — they face billions in fines.

Much like Britain’s digital ID program, Brussels now masks its shamelessly invasive censorship with claims of youth protection and anti-hate measures. It’s tiresome to hear — but, as always, it’s about “their democracy,” or, to put it more accurately, a massive concrete barrier constructed to shield against the audacious citizen seeking to preserve privacy from an unbounded EU bureaucracy.

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Leaked documents reveal Microsoft provided Israel’s Unit 8200 with tools to spy on Palestinians

  • Microsoft provided its Azure cloud platform to Israel’s Unit 8200, enabling mass surveillance of Palestinian communications.
  • Unit 8200 used Azure data to identify bombing targets in Gaza, leading to civilian casualties.
  • Microsoft claims ignorance but refuses to terminate its contract with Israeli military intelligence.
  • Investigations reveal Microsoft profits from war crimes while publicly promoting ethical AI principles.
  • Critics warn unchecked surveillance turns corporations into silent partners in oppression and human rights violations.

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for being ethical, but a shocking new exposé has exposed just how deep their complicity in war crimes runs. The Big Tech firm has been secretly providing Israel’s elite military intelligence Unit 8200 with its Azure cloud platform since 2021, enabling the storage and analysis of massive troves of Palestinian communications data.

According to a damning investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian, Microsoft’s technology has been weaponized to surveil millions of daily phone calls from Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, with Unit 8200 sources confirming the data was used to identify bombing targets in densely populated civilian areas. While Microsoft feigns ignorance, claiming its CEO was unaware of the data’s lethal purpose, the tech giant’s actions reveal a disturbing pattern of prioritizing profits over human lives… even as Palestinian civilians pay the ultimate price.

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Germany Turns Its Back on Decades‑Old Privacy Protections with Sweeping Surveillance Bill

For half a century, Germany’s privacy laws were treated like sacred scripture. Politicians swore by them, courts fortified them, and bureaucrats turned them into a national export. Other countries rolled out surveillance programs; Germany rolled out lectures about why that was a terrible idea. It was all rooted in the same ugly history lesson: if you give the state a big enough file on you, sooner or later you’ll end up in it.

That memory ran deep. The Nazi regime used personal records like ammunition, and the East German Stasi built a domestic surveillance industry so bloated it could have applied for EU funding.

Postwar Germany responded by making privacy a central pillar of its democratic identity. The Federal Constitutional Court even invented a “right to informational self‑determination,” which sounded academic but translated roughly to: “The government doesn’t get to rummage through your life just because it’s bored.”

Privacy commissioners became feared watchdogs who could slap down ministries and corporations alike. Every time politicians tried to sneak through a new security law, they’d be met with lawsuits, public outrage, and years of procedural trench warfare. It was tedious, but that was the point; democracy is supposed to make snooping inconvenient.

Now comes the Interior Ministry’s summer special: a bill that would let authorities hack devices without suspicion, track every airline passenger automatically, and scrap independent oversight.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

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DIGITAL ID: The Shocking Plan to Kill Free Speech Forever

The U.S. is on the verge of launching a dystopian online surveillance machine—and disturbingly, Republicans are helping make it law.

The SCREEN Act and KOSA claim to protect kids, but they’re Trojan horses. If passed, every American adult would be forced to verify their ID to access the internet—just like in Australia, where “age checks” morphed into speech policing. In the UK, digital ID is already required for jobs, housing, and healthcare.

This is how they silence dissent: by tying your identity to everything you read, say, or buy online.

The trap is nearly shut. Once it locks in, online freedom vanishes forever.

Will Americans wake up before it’s too late? Watch Maria Zeee expose the full blueprint—and how little time we have left.

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EU Revives Plan to Ban Private Messaging

The European Union is still wrestling with a controversial plan that would turn private messaging services into surveillance tools. For over three years, talks have stalled over whether providers should be forced to scan every user’s messages for possible illegal material and forward anything suspicious to law enforcement.

The European Commission is still pushing for a universal scanning requirement.

In contrast, the European Parliament insists any checks should apply only to unencrypted messages from people already under suspicion. Attempts to strike a deal have repeatedly fallen apart, with Poland the latest presidency to walk away without an agreement.

July brought a change in leadership of the Council of the EU, with Denmark stepping in and putting chat scanning back at the top of the legislative pile. Copenhagen wants this handled as a priority and wasted no time tabling a new draft on its very first day in charge.

Leaked records from a closed door July meeting show the Danish text closely tracks earlier proposals from Belgium and Hungary, with no concessions for encrypted conversations. A softer version from Poland, which would have made scanning voluntary and left encrypted chats alone, has been dropped entirely.

Out of 27 EU countries, 20 spoke during the July debate, each lodging what officials call a “comprehensive audit reservation.” Germany summed up the atmosphere by noting, “the familiar mood was clear.”

Italy, Spain, and Hungary have been in favor of mandatory chat scanning from the start. France could tip the balance since blocking the plan requires four countries representing at least 35 percent of the EU’s population. Paris has moved from tentative support to saying it could “basically support the proposal.”

Others remain cautious or opposed. Belgium, despite earlier enthusiasm, admits encrypted scanning is “a difficult topic nationally.” Estonia reports a “national conflict between security authorities and data protection officers regarding encryption and client-side scanning.” Austria is bound by a parliamentary vote against mandatory scanning or undermining encryption, a stance shared by the Netherlands. Luxembourg and Slovenia say they are still “not yet convinced.”

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Israeli spyware firms are fueling the global surveillance state

Last week another batch of peaceful pro-Palestine protestors were arrested by British police on suspicion of terrorism offenses, including a disabled man in a wheelchair, as the UK continues its descent into authoritarianism on behalf of Israel.

If any of these protestors had their phones on them at the time of arrest, the police will most likely have scraped them for data using sophisticated spy tech software. Protestors not arrested will have been caught on mobile cameras that sit atop police vans in the UK, and their faces, perhaps even their voices, will have been captured, analyzed and cross referenced against a police database.

And in a perverse twist, this spyware technology – technology which now underpins the insidious and growing capabilities of the modern surveillance state – will most likely have been made in Israel by Israeli spies.

But it’s not just in the UK.

Spy tech developed by former Israeli spies is being used on an industrial scale by various agencies in western democracies, from police forces to national security agencies to militaries. Some has been declared illegal, some skirts legal boundaries, and much remains hidden.

The scale of usage, and the range of capabilities provided by this Israeli spy tech, is vast. From face and voice recognition software, to interception and wiretap technology, to covert location tracking, to forced data extraction from smartphones and other devices.

The tech, built by software engineers who cut their teeth writing code to enable and enforce Israeli domination over, and apartheid against Palestinians, is being sold to security services, police forces and immigration agencies across the West.

While much of the information in this article isn’t new, it hasn’t been summarized in one place before. The implications for global civil liberties of Israel’s dominance in spy tech have also not been articulated, and past media coverage has sometimes omitted the Israeli link to these companies. This article will outline the primary players, the sellers and the buyers, and also identify recent contracts, previously undocumented, between Israeli spytech and Western buyers.

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UK Gov’t ‘Disinfo’ Unit Shifts From Lockdown Dissenters To Spying On Mass Migration Critics

A shady government outfit in the UK that was previously tasked with identifying and monitoring COVID lockdown dissenters has been repurposed to spy on critics of mass migration and so called ‘asylum’ hotels, the Telegraph reports.

The body, now known as the National Security and Online Information Team (NSOIT) has been lobbying social media companies such as TikTok to take action against users who post what it describes as “concerning narratives” about immigration and ‘two tier policing’.

The unit operates within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and was previously known as the ‘Counter Disinformation Unit’ during the pandemic.

During the COVID lockdowns, the unit was tasked with pressuring social media companies to target and censor those critical of the stay at home orders and those questioning the mass vaccination of children. Discussions opposing vaccine passports were also flagged.

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Technocrat Sweep: US Health Officials, Tech Executives To Launch Data-Sharing Plan

Why would Technocrats care about your health data? When they see the public as a herd of cattle, they naturally move to “manage the herd.” RFK, Jr. earlier bragged that he wants all citizens to don wearable medical devices within four years, to collect mountains of data. This initiative is headed by AMY GLEASON, the Administrator of DOGE.

Amy Gleason worked at the predecessor of DOGE from 2018-2021 during the first Trump administration, where she played a key role on the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s data team managing critical pandemic data. She was named an Obama-era “Champion of Change” for her work in patient advocacy and precision medicine. She has emerged as a key Technocrat with her association with Elon Musk. Court records clearly show that Musk was never in charge of DOGE, but rather Amy Gleason.

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The Rise Of China’s ‘Surveillance Colonialism’ In Africa

African governments are using Chinese artificial intelligence to find, jail, torture, and even kill political opponents and pro-democracy activists, according to several investigations.

Researchers say Beijing is exporting its “surveillance state” model to African countries and rapidly positioning itself to control the critical infrastructure, data, and energy that will power the continent’s AI systems in the future.

This could mean that China will have immense influence over politics and public life in Africa, potentially influencing election outcomes and swaying public opinion in favor of Beijing and its allies, according to the studies.

Some academics say it’s happening already.

One investigation by a nonprofit studying the use of social media and other technology to target dissident groups worldwide concluded that a “largely invisible pattern” is transforming conflicts across Africa.

The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) stated that using technology such as spyware to hunt political activists and employing facial recognition to track protesters represents “a new kind of mercenary force” in Africa, one that’s largely shaped by companies controlled from Beijing.

Adio-Adet Dinika, researcher and affiliate fellow at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Science in Germany, headed DAIR’s Data Workers Inquiry project. It investigated incidents in countries including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe.

Dinika’s research revealed the existence of “digital sweatshops” in African cities and towns, including in Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; and Gulu, Uganda, where workers are paid as little as $1.50 per hour to teach AI systems to recognize faces, moderate content, and analyze behavior patterns.

The Chinese regime is perpetrating what Dinika called “digital colonialism at its most insidious.”

“I call this surveillance colonialism, the process by which foreign powers extract data and labor from African populations to build AI systems that ultimately police, repress, and destabilise those very populations,” he wrote.

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