Tag: mass surveillance

Americans Likely to Be Tracked for CO2 Emissions Under SEC’s New Climate Rule: Consumers’ Research

Will your CO2 emissions data be collected and reported to the government in the near future? A consumer rights group said that a new rule proposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would lay the groundwork for doing so.

On March 21, the SEC proposed a rule titled “The Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures for Investors” (pdf). The nearly 500-page rule would require SEC registrants—mostly public companies, investment advisers, and broker-dealers—to report certain climate-related information including their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

The GHG emissions are categorized into three scopes. Scope 1 is the registrant’s direct GHG emissions. Scope 2 is its indirect GHG emissions from purchased electricity and other forms of energy. Scope 3 is indirect emissions from upstream and downstream activities in a registrant’s value chain.

“Scope 3 requires these companies to estimate the carbon output of the use of their product by the consumer, which means they’re going to have to go out into the field and talk to consumers,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, America’s oldest consumer protection organization, said in an interview with NTD’s “Fresh Look America” program on July 12.

“Let’s say you bought an internal combustion engine lawnmower. The lawn mower company will need to know how many times you mow your lawn. They’re going to have to go out and ask people that and research that. And so you could see how this starts to lay the groundwork for scoring actual individual people’s activities,” said Hild.

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Biden Administration is sued over DHS social media surveillance allegations

The Oversight Project, run by conservative think tank Heritage, has sued the Biden administration over surveillance of people through social media.

The lawsuit demands the release of documents related to the DHS’ contract with Babel Street, a Virginia-based company that provides surveillance and data mining technologies.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

The DHS has a contract with Babel Street to provide Babel X, a tool that scrapes data from smartphone apps and online sources. According to a report on Heritage’s website, government agencies “can aggregate and search that data by any number of keywords and in many languages.”

Speaking to The Washington Post in 2017, the company’s founder Jeff Chapman said: “There are billions of smartphones on the planet. All you have to do is listen to them.”

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Data-grabbing biometric health monitoring is starting to make its way into cars

“Smart cars” – whether or not connected to the internet – are already harvesting massive amounts of data not only regarding locations and movements of vehicles but also from drivers themselves.

Many are starting to see this as a concerning trend in the way it impacts security both of individuals and countries – a heavily chip-dependent vehicle can be hacked, and even weaponized, some are warning – but development and deployment of these technologies don’t seem to be slowing down.

On the contrary, the industry of biometric sensors used in vehicles is growing and is projected to be worth over $1.1 billion in three years, according to a recent report from Market Research Future.

Korea’s Hyundai is now pioneering biometric-data-based healthcare monitoring with its upcoming biometric sensors system marketed as the first anywhere in the world healthcare-focused cabin controller, “that can integrate and analyze multiple bio-signs.”

It essentially aims to turn your car into a mobile healthcare center that monitors your posture, heart rate, and brain waves. The elaborate and intrusive system’s purpose is said to be to detect drunk and drowsy drivers, while the biometric dataset that will be built with its use will help improve “the smart cabin” and equip it to solve issues like stress and motion sickness – and, even block drunk driving, Korean media are reporting.

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Feds Accessing Location Data from Millions of People Through Private Brokers

Big Brother is tracking your location with the help of private data brokers.

According to a recent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), data brokers harvest location data from mobile apps and then sell it to government agencies including state and local law enforcement, ICE, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

Many of the apps on a mobile device track and record location data. These include navigation apps, social media apps, and weather apps, among many others. According to EFF, once a user gives an app permission to access location data, it typically has “free rein” to share it with just about anybody. Government agencies take advantage of these loose standards to purchase troves of location data relating to millions of individuals from data brokers.

“Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service.”

There is a tangled web of companies buying and selling data in this multi-billion-dollar industry. According to the EFF report, it’s virtually impossible to determine which apps share data. But apparently, a lot of them do. Data broker Venntel, a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, claims to collect location data from over 80,000 apps.

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From Today, All New Vehicles In The EU Will Have Surveillance Black Boxes

From today, all new vehicles sold in the EU will have mandatory black boxes fitted that record technical data and will be accessible by authorities, greasing the skids for surveillance-powered speed-limiting technology.

While for the time being, drivers can opt-out of using the feature, privacy advocates fear the technology will become mandatory once it is properly rolled out.

Back in 2019, the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) announced that July 6 would mark the day when all car manufacturers would be forced to fit new models with a system that keeps track of technical data.

The data recorded will include “the vehicle’s speed, braking, steering wheel angle, its incline on the road, and whether the vehicle’s various safety systems were in operation, starting with seatbelts.”

Although insurance companies won’t have immediate access to the data, it will be available to law enforcement.

Authorities claim the data will be “anonymized,” meaning the information can’t be used to identify the owner of the vehicle, although only the incredibly naive would plausibly believe that.

Such systems are expected to eventually include speed-limiting technology.

As Reclaim the Net’s Didi Rankovic explains, the most common method of speed limiting technology is Intelligent Speed Assistant (ISA).

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Government Overreach? 9 in 10 Official Websites Use Tracking Cookies Without Consent

Is the government going too far? A new study has discovered that “Big Brother” may be more widespread than anyone thinks. Among the countries that make up the G20, researchers found the vast majority of government websites add third-party tracking cookies without their users’ consent.

The G20 is an international forum which includes 19 countries and the European Union. The forum focuses on solving issues connected to the global economy, climate change mitigation, and the development of sustainable technology. The members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The international team notes that, in some of these countries, nine in 10 official sites add third-party tracker cookies — even if they have strict user privacy laws. To uncover the scale of this problem, the researchers examined 5,500 websites tied to international organizations, governments, and official COVID-19 information sites during the pandemic.

Their study comes at a time when citizens across the globe are providing information through government websites at an unprecedented rate.

“Our results indicate that official governmental, international organizations’ websites and other sites that serve public health information related to COVID-19 are not held to higher standards regarding respecting user privacy than the rest of the web, which is an oxymoron given the push of many of those governments for enforcing GDPR,” notes Nikolaos Laoutaris, a research professor at IMDEA Networks, in a media release.

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3 million+ innocent private chats could be handed over to investigators under new EU plans

A leaked document from the European Commission (EC), the executive branch of the European Union (EU), has revealed that the artificial intelligence (AI) it plans to use to mass surveil private chats for “grooming” content is expected to falsely flag content and forward it to EU investigators 10% of the time.

This proposed mass surveillance of online chats has been dubbed “Chat Control” and is being pushed by the EC as a way to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM). However, in a leaked document that was obtained and published by Netzpolitik, the EC admitted that its proposed surveillance measures would result in a large amount of false flags.

“The accuracy of grooming detection technology is around 90%,” the EC admitted in the document. “This means that 9 out of 10 contents recognized by the system are grooming.”

The leaked document contains the EC’s answers to a series of questions from the German government about the implementation of Chat Control.

Under the current Chat Control plans, private chats, messages, and emails will be automatically scanned by AI for suspicious content. If the AI detects suspicious content, it will be flagged and sent to investigators at a planned EU center. These investigators will view the content, identify false positives, and forward illegal content to EU law enforcement agency Europol and other relevant law enforcement authorities.

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Supreme Court Refuses to Limit Warrantless Surveillance

According to the Supreme Court, the legality of NSA mass surveillance can’t even be legally challenged.

This was the message the Court sent when it refused to take up Jewel v. NSA, allowing an appellate court decision to stand.

The high court’s decision further underscores the futility of depending on federal courts to challenge federal surveillance power. Tenth Amendment Center executive director Micheal Boldin called it “a really bad strategy.”

“We don’t expect it to ever get the job done.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the NSA in 2008 on behalf of Carolyn Jewel and several other AT&T customers in an effort to end dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary people. The EFF based its case on declarations from three NSA whistleblowers, along with other evidence that included documents published by the Washington Post and the Guardian. The evidence showed that the NSA collected communication directly from fiber optic cables. It also revealed a domestic telephone record collection program that the government confirmed in 2013.  Mark Klein worked as an AT&T tech who claimed the communications giant routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White denied the plaintiffs’ challenge saying that it would require “impermissible disclosure of state secret information” The Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the district court opinion, affirming that “state secret privilege” blocked the plaintiff’s efforts to tp prove that their data was intercepted. Unable to prove that, they had no standing to sue.

As EFF put it, the Supreme Court allowed the case to be dismissed because the surveillance program that everybody has known about since Edward Snowden released a trove of documents in 2013 is a “secret.”

 “Yes, you read that right: something we all know is a still officially a “secret” and so cannot be the subject to litigation.”

As the EFF explains, the U.S. government contends that “even if all of the allegations of serious law-breaking and Constitutional violations are true, surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans is exempt from judicial review.”

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Everybody’s Guilty: To The Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise

“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

The burden of proof has been reversed.

No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.

Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.

Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

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Nebraska wants to test body and facial scans that work from a distance

The state of Nebraska is planning to test whole-body and facial recognition technology from far-off sensors. The project, funded by the Department of Defense, aims to test the accuracy of AI in identifying subjects from images and videos captured by stationary towers and drones positioned far from the subjects.

The project is backed by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as part of its Biometric Recognition and Identification at Altitude or Range, aka Briar, program. The first phase, dubbed WatchID, of the three-part program will run for 18 months.

Researchers from the University of Nebraska’s Omaha and Lincoln campuses, University of Maryland College Park, Resonant Sciences, and BlueHalo Co. will participate in WatchID. The program will require 200 volunteers who will stand and walk in circles and straight lines in an open space. Once the first phase is successful, it will be expanded to require 600 volunteers.

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