Tag: mass surveillance

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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Government Funds AI Tools For Whole-Of-Internet Surveillance And Censorship

Ifeel scared. Very scared.

Internet-wide surveillance and censorship, enabled by the unimaginably vast computational power of artificial intelligence (AI), is here.

This is not a futuristic dystopia. It’s happening now.

Government agencies are working with universities and nonprofits to use AI tools to surveil and censor content on the Internet.

This is not political or partisan. This is not about any particular opinion or idea.

What’s happening is that a tool powerful enough to surveil everything that’s said and done on the Internet (or large portions of it) is becoming available to the government to monitor all of us, all the time. And, based on that monitoring, the government – and any organization or company the government partners with – can then use the same tool to suppress, silence, and shut down whatever speech it doesn’t like.

But that’s not all. Using the same tool, the government and its public-private, “non-governmental” partners (think, for example: the World Health Organization, or Monsanto) can also shut down any activity that is linked to the Internet. Banking, buying, selling, teaching, learning, entertaining, connecting to each other – if the government-controlled AI does not like what you (or your kids!) say in a tweet or an email, it can shut down all of that for you.

Yes, we’ve seen this on a very local and politicized scale with, for example, the Canadian truckers.

But if we thought this type of activity could not, or would not, happen on a national (or even scarier – global) scale, we need to wake up right now and realize it’s happening, and it might not be stoppable.

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FOIA Documents Reveal Secret 2020 Election Day Meeting With CISA, Dominion, ES&S, ERIC, FBI, Leftist Organizations, State Officials, and Others – Only Recently Discovered

Recently, investigative journalist Yehuda Miller received several FOIA documents that completely reshaped what we were told to believe about the 2020 US presidential election.

We will be publishing several of these explosive documents in the coming days.

The election was billed by the Democrat Party, Joe Biden, the mainstream media, and former CISA Chief Chris Krebs as the most secure election in US history.

But was 2020 really the most secure election in US history?

In the coming days, Yehuda Miller and The Gateway Pundit will release a series of FOIA documents that prove that the statements by Chris Krebs under oath were most certainly false and that he clearly knew these statements were not accurate.

Today, we are releasing information on a secret 2020 Election Day phone call organized by The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

CISA describes itself as the operational lead for federal cybersecurity and the national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience. However, since its founding, CISA has morphed into a much more sinister and politicized organization.

Founded in 2018, CISA was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect “critical infrastructure” and guard against cybersecurity threats. In the years since its creation, however, CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.

By 2020, CISA routinely reported social media posts that allegedly spread “disinformation” to social media platforms. By 2021, CISA had a formal “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) team. In 2022 and 2023, in response to growing public and private criticism of CISA’s unconstitutional behavior, CISA attempted to camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely “informational” role.”

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Government Funds AI Tools for Whole-of-Internet Surveillance and Censorship

Ifeel scared. Very scared.

Internet-wide surveillance and censorship, enabled by the unimaginably vast computational power of artificial intelligence (AI), is here.

This is not a futuristic dystopia. It’s happening now.

Government agencies are working with universities and nonprofits to use AI tools to surveil and censor content on the Internet.

This is not political or partisan. This is not about any particular opinion or idea. 

 What’s happening is that a tool powerful enough to surveil everything that’s said and done on the Internet (or large portions of it) is becoming available to the government to monitor all of us, all the time. And, based on that monitoring, the government – and any organization or company the government partners with – can then use the same tool to suppress, silence, and shut down whatever speech it doesn’t like. 

But that’s not all. Using the same tool, the government and its public-private, “non-governmental” partners (think, for example: the World Health Organization, or Monsanto) can also shut down any activity that is linked to the Internet. Banking, buying, selling, teaching, learning, entertaining, connecting to each other – if the government-controlled AI does not like what you (or your kids!) say in a tweet or an email, it can shut down all of that for you. 

Yes, we’ve seen this on a very local and politicized scale with, for example, the Canadian truckers. 

But if we thought this type of activity could not, or would not, happen on a national (or even scarier – global) scale, we need to wake up right now and realize it’s happening, and it might not be stoppable.

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Chinese Surveillance Giant Complicit in Uyghur Genocide Joins UN ‘Sustainability Initiative’

A Chinese state-owned surveillance giant that provides equipment used in the communist nation’s mass surveillance and detainment of Uyghur Muslims is joining a United Nations “sustainability initiative” aimed at fighting climate change and countering “human rights abuses.”

Hikvision, which sits on a U.S. trade blacklist over its complicity in the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, is now a member of the United Nations Global Compact, the company announced in a Tuesday statement. Launched in 2000, the compact consists of thousands of companies from across the world that pledge to “support U.N. goals” and implement “universal sustainability principles” related to “human rights, labor, the environment, and anti-corruption.” Hikvision said its inclusion in the compact reflects the company’s “continuous efforts to put into practice our understanding of ‘Tech for Good.'” By joining the compact, meanwhile, Hikvision pledged to “make sure” it is “not complicit in human rights abuses.”

Hikvision’s work in its native China, however, tells a different story.

The company’s cameras are a crucial part of the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance system used to track and detain Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Hikvision—which reports to the Chinese government through its largest shareholder, the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group—entered into government contracts in Xinjiang that contained language referring to the surveillance of “Uyghurs” and “mosques.” Its technology has been used to help detain Uyghurs flagged for traveling abroad, and its cameras are included in the CCP’s mass detention facilities located in Xinjiang. In 2019, Hikvision marketed a camera that can automatically identify Uyghurs.

The revelation reflects China’s growing grip on the United Nations, with the communist nation working in recent years to put its officials in leadership positions and gain a seat on the organization’s influential human rights council panel. Hikvision’s inclusion in the U.N. Global Compact could also create problems for the Biden administration, which has proposed to collaborate with the compact to vet federal contractors.

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The Greatest Trick Big Brother Ever Pulled

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” is a quote generally attributed to Charles Baudelaire – or possibly Keyser Söze depending on who you ask on the internet. Something similar can be said about Big Brother.

When you think about what our emerging surveillance state will look like, you think 1984. You imagine East Germany powered by Google and Amazon. You recall your favorite dystopian sci-fi film – or maybe horror stories of China’s social credit system. Thoughts of a frustrated middle-aged police chief from a mid-sized Midwestern town attempting to procure security cameras with innovative new features probably don’t come to mind. You definitely don’t think of a guy in a lawn chair jotting down the license plate numbers of passing vehicles in a notebook. And that’s partly how the surveillance state is going to emerge as it creeps its way into one small town at a time.

Whether a surveillance state is the end goal is hard to say. The police chief of Pawnee, Indiana probably isn’t plotting the development of his own mini-Oceania. But, 18,000-plus mini-Oceanias operating across multiple platforms with varying degrees of integration, both locally and nationally, is undoubtedly the direction in which we are heading as salespeople peddle shiny new surveillance gadgets to cities big and small, making often unverified but intuitively appealing claims of how their devices will decrease crime or prove to be useful investigative tools.

Facial recognition tends to be the surveillance gadget that receives the most attention these days. You’ve seen it in movies and maybe feel some unease over visions of government agents sitting in a penumbrous room illuminated only by the faint glow of countless monitors with little boxes tracking the faces of every person walking down a busy city street. Likely, by now, you’ve also probably heard of facial recognition being used for relatively petty purposes or leading to incidents in which innocent people were harassed or arrested because a program made a mistake. Maybe you’ve even been following the efforts to ban the technology.

Yet, other surveillance gadgets that aren’t quite as sexy or as prevalent in pop culture manage to remain under the radar of even the most privacy-conscious as they are promoted through law enforcement peer referral programs organized by surveillance gadget companies seeking to have their devices in every town in America.

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Bodycam Maker Axon Is on a Mission to Surveil America with AI

Axon, maker of Tasers and police body cameras, has acquired a surveillance company that allows police to tap into camera networks in schools, retail stores, and other locations in cities and towns across America and apply AI technology to the footage. The move comes as Axon is trying to expand its cameras into retail and healthcare settings.   

Axon acquired Fusus for an undisclosed sum, according to a news release posted on Thursday. The acquisition “expands and deepens” the companies’ so-called real time capabilities. Fusus operates what it calls “real time crime centers (RTCC)” which allow police and other public agencies to analyze a wide array of video sources at a single point and apply AI that detects objects and people. These centers are reminiscent of the Department of Homeland Security’s Fusion Centers—where intelligence from a diverse number of sources is collected and shared among agencies—and have already expanded to over 250 cities and counties. 

“With Fusus, hospitals, schools, retail stores, houses of worship, event venues and residential communities—whole cities and towns—are better protected and, importantly, can contribute to greater safety for everyone,” an Axon blog on the Fusus acquisition states. 

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Victory! Ring Announces It Will No Longer Facilitate Police Requests for Footage from Users

Amazon’s Ring has announced that it will no longer facilitate police’s warrantless requests for footage from Ring users. This is a victory in a long fight, not just against blanket police surveillance, but also against a culture in which private, for-profit companies build special tools to allow law enforcement to more easily access companies’ users and their data—all of which ultimately undermine their customers’ trust.

Years ago, after public outcry and a lot of criticism from EFF and other organizations, Ring ended its practice of allowing police to automatically send requests for footage to a user’s email inbox, opting instead for a system where police had to publicly post requests onto Ring’s Neighbors app. Now, Ring hopefully will altogether be out of the business of platforming casual and warrantless police requests for footage to its users. This is a step in the right direction, but has come after years of cozy relationships with police and irresponsible handling of data (for which they reached a settlement with the FTC). We also helped to push Ring to implement end-to-end encryption. Ring has been forced to make some important concessions—but we still believe the company must do more. Ring can enable their devices to be encrypted end-to-end by default and turn off default audio collection, which reports have shown collect audio from greater distances than initially assumed. We also remain deeply skeptical about law enforcement’s and Ring’s ability to determine what is, or is not, an emergency that requires the company to hand over footage without a warrant or user consent.

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